Predicting the future in 1999: Tech predictions 25 years on

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. And before becoming one of the world’s best-known tech billionaires, Jeff Bezos predicted that computer chips would be in everything from dinner plates to clothing and even medicine packaging by the early 2000s – with those systems using the data they gather to tell users how healthy their food is, or whether two types of medicine should or should not be mixed. Giving an interview to 60 Minutes Australia in 1999, the Amazon founder also suggested computers would eventually become powerful enough to take on tasks for humans, and that we would reach a stage that when speaking on the phone, people would not be able to tell if they were communicating with another person or a computer, perhaps predicting the rise of artificial intelligence which has begun in the 2020s. Another common prediction from the turn of the century was that “computer glasses” would be common by the early 2000s as electronic devices continued to shrink in size. Away from gadgets, senior figures at Wired in 1999 accurately predicted another aspect of the tech sector of the 21st century – that regular lawsuits over issues such as intellectual property, patents and competition issues would become common.