What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

Yes. It was called a communicator in fiction of the day. Did they get the exact details right, or every use case (e.g. replacing flashlights and music players)? No. Some of them used holograms from watches or big old handsets with a screen instead of a keypad but still big ear cups. But a portable device that could be used for voice calls, video calls, information lookup, note taking, certainly existed in fiction prior to the 90s.

It's very obvious with modern scifi where controls are usually holographic projections with cyan grids and twirly animations. After a while these designs become lazy tropes - like villains who wear chunky black leather.

Compare with something like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which is far more adventurous about possible futures.

The background problem is that the 20th century was set up for an explosion of invention by the late 19th, with Maxwell/Heaviside leading the charge and eventually leading to game changer developments like relativity and quantum theory. In math Boolean algebra fell out almost by accident from attempts to find a theory of computability which eventually led to modern computing.

These were all bedrock insights which completely changed what was possible in the physical world.

Where's the modern equivalent? There isn't one. Insights at that level more or less stopped happening after the discovery of DNA and the creation of Shannon's Information Theory.

Quantum Gravity might be the next game changer, but it also might not, and in any case it's an unknown distance away. The rest is detail work, not ground breaking transformation.

Thinking about today, where the topic of the day is distributed trustless computing and so on, it's easy to imagine now the cat's out of the bag that in 100 years, old institutions like banks, notaries, record-keeping (Hansards etc) could be obsolete, knowledge becomes distributed and every human commands one or more nodes in a constant system of cross-referencing - clients and servers cease to be relevant as a concept, information is just a pool you dip into as needed (with helpful AI assistants to bring things to your attention and/or demand your attention). It could be so pervasive it wouldn't garner a second's thought in the mind of a 2122 individual. Information is just there, always, forever, and always cross-checked for correctness. Duh. (not saying this is even an ideal future, or likely, but it's a trend that's easily extrapolated)

But if that did come to pass, how does that change the fabric of society in 2122? Does the relationship between society and the products it demands and produces change significantly? Does the status-quo stay more or less the same between the workers and the organisers? Do we find a way to deal with cultural differences globally or adopt the "metaverse" and slowly fragment into virtual islands of relative ideological same-ness? These are much harder things to predict, just how in 1922 the idea of not having servants at home to do the bidding of the family matriarch seemed so far-fetched that even an imagined hundred years of progress couldn't fully erase the notion; what concepts do we see as being so firmly entrenched in our culture(s) today that no upheaval of technology could convince us they'd also be on the way out, if not obsolete, in 100 years.

I love seeing these old predictions as much for what they got right as for what they missed. I showed my 12 year old daughter this article and we had a light-hearted conversation about it but she said something that struck me; "society probably won't even be here in 100 years" - I hope that isn't true, it's not something I've directly taught her to believe, but we're surrounded on all fronts by media filled with dire predictions of humanity's collapse and self-destruction on a daily basis, so I'm going to have to work to instil some hope. I am heartened slightly as historically it seems we're really bad at predicting how society as a whole will change long-term, so I do hope we're wrong on the old boiled frogs / status-quo inertia analogies, and that our species makes some giant leaps in terms of collective environmental and social responsibility in the next 100 years.

Nothing really profound I know just a dad pondering his kids futures, fingers crossed we figure some things out.