Can kids predict the future? In 1966, the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World asked a group of 13-year-olds to share their predictions about what life in the year 2000 would be like. As you might expect, it was fascinating. Two decades later, the showrunners did the same thing again. Only this time, they asked the young teens of 1986 what they thought life in 2020 would be like. How did Gen X’s answers about the future differ from those of their Baby Boomer predecessors? The 1966 cohort’s predictions dealt with space travel, robots, and computers. They were concerned about overpopulation and nuclear war. “That was before the manned moon landings, the microprocessor, strategic arms limitation talks, or test-tube babies,” the feather-haired host shared. “So have the hopes and fears of today’s 13-year-olds changed as they look forward to the year 2020?” The kids from 1986 offered their predictions: “Perhaps brain waves to convert into radio waves, sent to someone else, convert back into brain waves. And it’d be like, what would you call it, like a telepathy thing.” Kids who listened to music on cassette tapes had no concept of the Internet. Photo credit: Canva “Well, instead of a channel tunnel, you could have something like a space tunnel, where you could go [from] one planet to the other, like bypasses.” “Obviously, nuclear war worries me, but I don’t think that’ll happen unless they’ve got computers that press the button for them. Because no, I don’t think any human being is capable of actually pressing some button that releases all nuclear arms cuz it just means destruction of the world.” “I don’t think they’ll be living on Mars yet, but I think they’ll still be living around here.” “I think they may, unless they have another planet to go to, just there’ll be loads of tower blocks. Or people will be restricted to a certain amount of kids.” “Probably be computers running the country.” Predicting the future is hard work. In 1983, most people viewed the home computer as a passing fad. Two @MIT professors debated the future of PCs.Michael Dertouzos tried to convince us that the home computer is here to stay, 1983 pic.twitter.com/HieMxHBsYx— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) May 8, 2024 “But when it comes to wars and things like that, nuclear bombs, and then they’re designing these different gases that can kill people within seconds and things like that. I think that aspect of technology should be wiped out completely.” It’s interesting how similar many of the issues were between 1966 and 1986. Some of the worries these kids had are still major concerns 40 years later. But how accurate were their predictions of what 2020 would hold? The kid talking about not living on Mars yet was right. One could make an argument that computers do run the country, but not necessarily in the way a 13-year-old in 1986 would have imagined. They had no concept of the Internet at that point, which made imagining the reality of 2020 impossible. But the threat of nuclear war and questions about whether a person would ever actually “push the button”? That still feels relevant. “Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse.” — Carl Sagan— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) March 8, 2026 However, it’s 2026, and there’s nary a space tunnel in sight, so that one was a bust. It’s wild to remember how we assumed things like flying cars and easy space travel would be common in adulthood. (And yet somehow Google Maps still feels like a miracle every time we use it.) It feels like we’re farther from actual telepathy than we imagined in the ’80s, but who knows? With advancements in nanotechnology and the Wild West of AI, even the near future feels entirely unpredictable. In 1985, wild-haired scientist “Doc” asked a philosophical question in Back to the Future: “Since when can weathermen predict the weather, much less the future?” Thankfully, we’ve drastically improved our ability to predict the weather since then. Predicting the future, however, remains as impossible as it has always been. The post Gen X teens in 1986 predicted what life would be like today. Here’s what they got right. appeared first on Upworthy.