In 1976, Logan’s Run imagined a future where humanity had solved many of its problems by eliminating one of life’s most fundamental uncertainties: aging. In the domed city of 2274, citizens live in apparent comfort and pleasure, but everyone must die, or be “renewed”, at the age of 30. What begins as a utopian vision of technology, leisure, and abundance gradually reveals itself as a warning about a society that sacrifices freedom, individuality, and human life in the pursuit of youth and perfection.

What it got right

• A society obsessed with youth, beauty, and entertainment feels remarkably contemporary.
• The film anticipated concerns about surveillance and the loss of privacy within highly managed environments.
• Its vision of an enclosed, highly engineered urban environment resonates with current thinking about planned cities and controlled living spaces.
• It recognized that technology alone doesn't determine whether a future is good, the social system built around that technology matters just as much.

What it missed

• The film's technology is often physically large and centralized, with lots of blinking lights, while real computing became dramatically smaller, more personal, and eventually nearly invisible.
• Rather than extending human life through medicine and biotechnology, the society of Logan’s Run solves aging through forced population control.
• Its vision of the future assumes that people would willingly accept such a rigid system. In reality, individual resistance, competing values, and cultural change have proven much harder to engineer away.

Join Ian, Greg, and McKay as they explore Logan’s Run, a future that promised eternal youth and happiness, and asked whether a society without freedom or old age was really a future worth living in.

Before World's Fairs celebrated everything from the power of electricity to the future of the automobile, there was the Great Exhibition of 1851. Held inside London's breathtaking Crystal Palace, it was the first event to gather the world's greatest inventions, industrial achievements, and artistic works under one roof. More than six million people, roughly one-third of Britain's population, walked through its glass halls to witness steam engines, precision machinery, scientific instruments, and technologies that promised to reshape civilization. More than an exhibition, it introduced the revolutionary idea that progress itself could be put on display, inspiring generations to believe the future would always be brighter than the present.

What They Got Right

• Technology became a public spectacle. The Great Exhibition established the model for showcasing innovation to the masses, paving the way for World's Fairs, CES, and modern technology launches.
• Industrialization transformed everyday life. Steam power, precision manufacturing, and mechanization fundamentally reshaped transportation, communication, commerce, and domestic life over the following century.
• Innovation became global. By bringing together exhibitors from dozens of nations, the Exhibition helped establish the idea that scientific and technological progress is an international endeavor powered by competition and collaboration between countries.

What They Missed

• Progress has consequences. The Exhibition celebrated industrial growth while overlooking pollution, resource consumption, and the environmental costs that would accompany rapid industrialization.
• Empire shaped the narrative. While presented as a celebration of global achievement, the Exhibition reflected Britain's industrial and imperial dominance, often portraying colonial resources and cultures through a Victorian lens.
• The next revolution wasn't mechanical. The Exhibition perfectly captured the Industrial Revolution but could not foresee the digital, electronic, and information revolutions that would define the following century.

The Great Exhibition's greatest legacy was transforming innovation from something hidden inside workshops and factories into something the public could experience firsthand, creating a tradition of technological optimism. Every modern showcase of tomorrow's technology owes something to the vision first unveiled beneath the soaring glass of the Crystal Palace in 1851.

Join McKay, Ian, and Greg as they explore the exhibition that invented the World's Fair and forever changed how humanity imagines the future.

Across more than six decades, 007 has been surrounded by technologies that once seemed like fantasy: miniature cameras, jet packs, underwater vehicles, and increasingly sophisticated forms of surveillance. But Bond's real contribution to futurism may be less about predicting individual gadgets and more about tapping into our fears of future technology.

From Ian Fleming's postwar novels to the modern films, Bond's world also reflects a changing Britain and the decline of empire, the rise of America, and an increasingly dangerous and interconnected world. The films transformed those anxieties into spectacular entertainment, creating a fantasy in which the world's biggest problems could still be reduced to a single villain, a daring plan, and one man capable of stopping it.

What He Got Right

• Biometrics and personalized security. Fingerprint recognition, palm-print authentication, and other forms of biometric identification became staples of the Bond universe before becoming commonplace in consumer technology
• The threats would keep changing. Nuclear weapons gave way to terrorism, environmental manipulation, information warfare, corporate power, and surveillance. Bond repeatedly reinvented its villains to reflect the fears of its era.
• Technology would become an extension of power. From nuclear weapons to satellites, hacking, surveillance, and artificial intelligence, Bond consistently recognized that whoever controls new technology can potentially control the world.

What He Missed

• The invisible revolution. Bond's future is dominated by spectacular physical objects like cars, aircraft, weapons, and gadgets. The real technological revolution happened largely invisibly through software like cloud computing, networks, and data.
• The world became more interconnected and harder to divide into good and evil. Real geopolitical conflicts rarely offer Bond's clean distinction between hero and villain.
• Technology's unintended consequences. Bond usually treats technology as something that gives the hero an advantage. Today's relationship with technology is much messier: the same systems that provide convenience can enable surveillance, manipulation, addiction, and loss of privacy.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Bond's future is that the technology changes, but fears always remains. In the 1960s, the fear was nuclear war. In the 1980s, it was Cold War escalation and unchecked power. And in the 21st century, Bond increasingly confronts terrorism, cyberwarfare, surveillance, and the erosion of trust. The villains evolve because our anxieties evolve.

Join McKay, Ian (named after Ian Fleming!!!), and Greg as they explore the villains, technologies, and the geopolitical anxieties of James Bond, and ask whether 007 has really been predicting the near future, or simply bringing our fears to life.