Spiegel Stuff: Archive Extra: The Promise and Peril of the Future

Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Archive Extra: The Promise and Peril of the Future

The Future of Private Aviation, in 1929
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As we bid adieu to another decade and the next unfurls before us, we're taking a moment to revisit narratives devoted to the future—or, at least, our idea of the future as it was in the past. Here you'll find stories from our archive delighting in the promise of a crop of bright young stars and a modern monarchy, and panic over the rise of artificial intelligence and the possibility of a meltdown at the stroke of midnight on the new millennium. (We can all take pleasure in knowing the latter did not come to pass—ah, the benefits of hindsight). So, a toast to the 2010s, best wishes for the next decade, and please enjoy these unlocked stories, just for you.

The Y2K Nightmare

Will the millennium arrive in darkness and chaos as billions of lines of computer code containing two-digit year dates shut down hospitals, banks, police and fire departments, airlines, utilities, the Pentagon, and the White House? The nightmare scenarios are only too possible, Robert Sam Anson discovered in 1999, as he traced the birth of the Y2K "bug," the folly, greed, and denial that muffled two decades of warnings from technology experts, and the ominous results of Y2K tests that laid bare the dimensions of ticking global time bomb.

Teen Engines: Riding With the Kid Culture

Whoa! Forget the keys to the car. These kids have the keys to the pop kingdom. In 2003 James Wolcott and photographer Mark Seliger hung out with kid culture's new power brokers.

Elon Musk's Future Shock

Elon Musk is famous for his futuristic gambles (from Tesla cars and cost-efficient rockets to his dream of settling on Mars), but Silicon Valley's latest gold rush—artificial intelligence—scares him. The tech titan's billion-dollar mission to put controls on A.I. pits him against much of the industry. How realistic are Musk's fears? In 2017 Maureen Dowd dove deep into a raging debate.

Charlotte's World

Following his daughter's birth, Prince William moved his family far from the spotlight, to Anmer Hall, in remote Norfolk, where he and Kate worked hard to create a cocoon of normalcy for two-year-old George and the baby princess, Charlotte. In 2016 Katie Nicholl reported on their well-hidden idyll (with its school runs, playdates, and hectic mealtimes), the controversy over William's decision to put his family first, and the momentous changes taking place at Buckingham Palace.

The Future of the Past

"The sense of history is one of the greatest and most significant of modern inventions. Never have men been so acutely conscious of time as they are at present," Aldous Huxley wrote in 1927.

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