1 Young Adam: So, no flying cars by 2009. Is there at least a colony on Mars?
2 Jamie: Um... no. There's a slight prob...
3 Young Adam: What sort of slacker future space-age civilisation is this?! Not even a Martian colony yet!!
4 Jamie: The Martians won't let us.
4 Young Adam: The who with the what now?

The future is bound to be surprising.

People back in the last few decades of the 20th century were predicting flying cars, and video phones, and moonbases, and voice-controlled computers that actually worked. But nobody predicted mobile phones, or the World Wide Web, or digital photography, or iPods.

Fifteen years from now, you'll be doing or using or taking for granted something technological or scientific that nobody on Earth today currently has any idea about. Come back here in 2024 and check. I bet I'm right.

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2023-04-01 Rerun commentary: Wow. Well, it's 2023 now as this strip reruns, so we're almost there.

Let's see. What didn't exist in 2009? Some of these things might have been anticipated by a few people, or the companies working on them, but probably most of the world had no idea they were coming.

• iPads. Yeah, the original annotation only mentioned iPods, because iPads didn't exist yet.
• Selfie sticks.
• Smart speakers: Amazon Echo/Alexa and Google Home/Assistant.
• Instagram. That's right, Instagram. It didn't exist in 2009.
• TikTok.
• Smart lighting: Philips Hue and similar systems.
• Zoom.
• Smart watches: Apple Watch
• Slack.
• CRISPR gene editing.
• Smart doorbells: Ring, Nest Hello.
• Cronuts!
• AI-generated art: DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion.
• AI-chatbots: ChatGPT.