Found a 1984 article saying we'd all have flying cars by now, my town can't even fix a pothole

Was digging through old boxes at my dad's place in Columbus last weekend and found a Popular Mechanics from 1984. The big feature talked about how by 2025 we'd all be commuting in personal flying vehicles and cities would have sky lanes. Meanwhile I'm sitting in traffic for 40 minutes just to get across town because the highway exit ramp has been closed since March. The same magazine predicted we'd have robot butlers doing our laundry by now. My smart speaker can barely understand my request to set a 12 minute timer without messing up. It got me thinking about how we laugh at these old predictions but honestly we're still waiting on some pretty basic stuff they thought would be solved. Anyone else ever find a vintage tech prediction that makes you wonder what we're even doing with all this progress?

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shane_ross4d agoOG Member

The pothole thing really gets me, cause we can put a rover on Mars but my street has had the same crater for two years now. Maybe the real prediction should've been that robots would fix the roads while we just point at them and complain.