Looking Back To The Future

I grew up in the "Back to the Future" era. I was promised flying cars and hoverboards and holographic billboards -- all by 2015. You know the line: "Where we're going, we don't need roads." Cue dramatic music and roll credits! I'm a sucker for it all.

As 2009 comes to a close, with five years left before we catch up with Robert Zemeckis's vision of 2015, I wondered: How close are we? Well, flying cars are probably out of the question. I can only imagine what their carbon emissions would be, never mind fuel efficiency. Plus, I'm not too keen on the idea of getting in a fender bender a mile up and possibly plummeting to my death when the flying mechanism fails. It would be neat to zoom around the sky, sure, but I think we can safely rule that out. Hoverboards probably aren't happening, either, which may be for the best; everyone knows hoverboards don't work on water anyway. Maybe the "Back to the Future" future was just way off.

Then I came across a link to AT&T's 1993 set of ads known as the "You Will" campaign, which is remarkably on target for predicting our technological advances. If you don't remember the spots, take a look here.

Pretty close, huh? They got a few details wrong (Fax? Phonebooth? What the heck are those?), but they're remarkably on-the-money for almost everything else:

"Borrowed a book from thousands of miles away" -- Amazon Kindle.
"Crossed the country without stopping for directions" -- how did we live without GPS?
"Paid a toll without slowing down" -- ah, the magic of E-ZPass.

I'd love to see AT&T revisit this concept. Where will we be 15 to 20 years from now? What gadgets will have fallen the way of the fax machine?

What do you predict?