The thing I love about these old illustrations that predict the future from long ago in the past is not what they get right but what they get wrong.<p>They focus on a singular aspect of future technology but due to the limitations of their imagination aren&#x27;t able to predict other entirely new revolutionary technologies and so default to their current ways of interacting with the new tech.<p>So for example, they predict the cross-continent visible and audio interaction but use the large unwieldy gramophone style microphone to capture the speech being unable to imagine capturing audio from a tiny electronic device.<p>In other examples I&#x27;ve seen [1], you see a farmer with his auto-farming machinery but he&#x27;s using enormous levers to interact with it. And then there&#x27;s the frequent use cast iron to build some of this &quot;future tech&quot; when of course, not much is made from cast iron these days.<p>It makes me wonder what things we literally can&#x27;t imagine about the future now. Or how different technologies that we can imagine could come together to produce entirely new things.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;publicdomainreview.org&#x2F;collections&#x2F;france-in-the-year-2000-1899-1910&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;publicdomainreview.org&#x2F;collections&#x2F;france-in-the-year...</a>