PAST: Hieroglyphics
PRESENT: Emojis
FUTURE: Complicated eye blinking

PAST: Renaissance-court painters
PRESENT: Plastic surgeons
FUTURE: CRISPR

PAST: Yerosha, the monkey cosmonaut
PRESENT: The Britney Spears conservatorship
FUTURE: President Barron Trump

PAST: Seeing Eye dogs
PRESENT: Emotional-support animals
FUTURE: CatGPT

PAST: Religion’s propensity for creating zealots
PRESENT: Politics’ ability to kill a buzz
FUTURE: A.I.’s tendency to give us twelve fingers

PAST: Being on the cover of Time
PRESENT: Getting a million views on TikTok
FUTURE: Launching a seamlessly integrated omni-channel experience across multiple consumer touchpoints

PAST: Putting aluminum foil on your TV antenna to improve reception
PRESENT: Buying office furniture built to two-thirds scale so you’ll seem larger
FUTURE: Wearing one high-heeled shoe to compensate for Earth’s axial tilt

PAST: Clara Bow
PRESENT: Kim Kardashian
FUTURE: Timothée Chalamet III

PAST: Ventriloquism on the radio
PRESENT: A government run by people who want to dismantle the government
FUTURE: The parking lot at seed banks

PAST: Crop rotation
PRESENT: Botox
FUTURE: Climate redesign

PAST: Owning a rifle
PRESENT: Implementing blockchain integration
FUTURE: Changing your passwords hourly

PAST: Staying for coffee after church
PRESENT: Hitting Reply All
FUTURE: Setting your space vehicle’s G.P.S. to “roam”

PAST: “Self-made”
PRESENT: “Agentic”
FUTURE: (Offline)

PAST: Replacing the corn cobs in your outhouse with toilet paper
PRESENT: Geo-tracking your children
FUTURE: 3-D printing a new pancreas at home

PAST: Yoking your oxen
PRESENT: Monetizing your hobby
FUTURE: Mining the energy of our host star

PAST: Bodysculpting
PRESENT: Looksmaxxing
FUTURE: Vibeplundering

PAST: The Hegelian dialectic
PRESENT: Liposuction
FUTURE: Self-repairing concrete

PAST: Hangover naps
PRESENT: Unplugging your computer and then plugging it back in
FUTURE: Rent-a-Stem-Cell

PAST: The development of language
PRESENT: The harnessing of electricity
FUTURE: The ascendancy of smart toilets

PAST: The release of “Cabaret” heightens the sibling rivalry between Liza Minnelli and Lorna Luft
PRESENT: Trump calls NATO a “paper tiger”
FUTURE: The sun’s luminosity disrupts the carbonate-silicate cycle

PAST: Failing to acknowledge your boss’s milestone birthday
PRESENT: Forgetting to Venmo colleagues for your share of the karaoke party
FUTURE: Leaving your pickaxe in the lithium mine

PAST: Superstitions
PRESENT: Superbillionaires
FUTURE: Superclusters

PAST: Being
PRESENT: Seeming
FUTURE: Simulating

PAST: Free will
PRESENT: Salad bars
FUTURE: Personalized plotlines in movies

PAST: God
PRESENT: Oprah
FUTURE: A.I. predictive text ♦