PEOPLE
I
n 1899, French artist Jean-Marc Côté was among a team of illustrators commissioned to create a series of drawings to commemorate the 1900 world’s fair in Paris. The series,
originally printed as inserts for cigar boxes (and
then later reprinted, but never sold, as postcards – science fiction author Isaac Asimov reportedly owned the only surviving set) took the artists’ best guess at how technology would change our lives by the advent of the 21st century. The subject matter of En L'An 2000 is, for 58
the most part, spectacularly off the mark. Firefighters battle flames while flying through the air on bat wings, deep sea divers ride giant seahorses through the ocean and students have the contents of history books transferred directly into their brains via psychic helmets. Endearingly hopeful and bizarre, Côté and his fellow artists’ work does betray just how hard it is to predict where the next wave of technological developments will take us. In 1995, renowned astronomer and author Clifford Stoll wrote in an article for Newsweek that “the truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.” He also vociferously argued that there OCTOBER 2019