5 tech predictions the mainstream media got horribly wrong

The mainstream media is full of confident-sounding predictions about the future of technology that turn out to be completely and utterly wrong. 

For every correct prediction — like that 3D TVs will fail to catch on — there’s a million others suggesting everything from personal computers, to the internet, mobile phones and tablets are just a fad. 

Pundits predicting the end of crypto as some type of tulip bubble mania crawl out of the woodwork every time the price dips, and Bitcoin has been declared dead, dying, or useless more than 386 times since 2010.

The New York Times just did it again in a recent opinion piece from Ryan Cummings, a staff economist for Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, which called crypto “useless” outside of crimes and scams.

In case you’re so down on your portfolio you are starting to believe the naysayers, here are five times the mainstream media — mostly the New York Times — was hopelessly wrong about technology. 

The Internet? Bah! — Newsweek, 1995

In the mid-90s, when tech CEOs started to gush about how the internet could change the world, one American scientist and astronomer got his prediction of it very, very wrong.

“The Internet? Bah!” was the headline on a 700-word essay essentially poking fun at proponents of the internet, calling them “hucksters” and describing them as a “trendy and oversold community.” 

It was published on Feb. 27, 1995 by Newsweek by an actual computer expert. Stoll had been a system administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and helped capture famed German hacker Markus Hess who was selling secrets to Russia’s KGB. 

“Baloney,” wrote Stoll. “Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in 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.”

Ironically, in Stoll’s attempt to mock the internet, he actually painted a pretty accurate picture of what it looks like today. 

“There’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete,” wrote Stoll, not realizing he had just predicted the future. 

“Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.”

The global e-commerce market was valued at $25.4 trillion in 2024 and is expected to reach $73.5 trillion by 2030, according to Research and Markets. That’s more than twice the US gross domestic product last year. 

The publication poked fun at its own article about 22 years later, calling it a “laughably inaccurate internet essay.”

“I’m sorry this mean scientist man picked on you when you were just a baby,” wrote Newsweek’s digital strategy editor, Joanna Brenner. “Too bad you didn’t invent Netflix just a little bit sooner; we probably could have avoided this whole thing.”

Another famous internet skeptic was Bitcoin-hating Nobel Prize winning Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman who said in 1998:

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’ becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

Hilariously, the article was in a magazine called Red Herring and titled “Why most economists’ predictions are wrong.”

The internet will collapse next year — InfoWorld, 1995

Don’t be too hard on Krugman as the inventor of Metcalfe’s Law, Robert Metcalfe, famously predicted the Internet would go “spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” 

The column was published on InfoWorld on Dec. 1, 1995, theorizing that there wasn’t going to be enough infrastructure to support the Internet.  It’s similar to anxieties about AI data centers and power generation today. 

Netscape just went public months before, and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates in May of that year threw his whole company into the “Internet Tidal Wave.” It was also the year that Amazon and eBay launched, and it is regarded as the first year of the “Dot.com bubble.” 

Metcalfe gave several reasons for the predicted collapse: massive traffic overloads, security vulnerabilities, inadequate infrastructure and flawed “flat-rate” business model that would make it impossible to fund the necessary expansion of capacity.

He also didn’t see Americans taking up the new-fangled tech within the next year. 

“Even if, as Nielsen just reported, 37 million North Americans tried the internet in the last three months, we’ll discover in 1996 the vast majority surged for several hours and then went back to watching TV.” 

“After the third major corporation stuffs its Web pages full of dazzling product literature and gets no hits, the Internet’s collapse will begin to accelerate,” he added. 

In follow-up commentary, Metcalfe reportedly promised to eat his words if he was wrong. 

And he definitely was wrong. Pew Research showed that in 1995, about 14% of the American general public said they went online either from work, school, or home. By September 1996, that number climbed to 22%. The internet did not explode either. 

To his credit, Metcalfe fulfilled his promise about eating his words. 

During the sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, Metcalfe reportedly put a printed copy of his column in a blender with some water and drank the pulpy mass on stage.

That’s now two really bad takes on the internet, a rather modern invention. But what if we go back in history? As we find out, bad tech calls have been around a really long time. They get even crazier the further we go back in history. 

10 million years for a working airplane — The New York Times, 1903

In 1903, a writer for The New York Times tried to predict when the first manned planes would take flight. He was off by around 10 million years. 

The Langley Aerodrome (Wikimedia Commons)

In one of the most famous bad calls in history, “Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly” was printed on page six of the New York Times on Oct. 9, 1903.

The article came after Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley — a competitor to the Wright Brothers — took his first shot at a manned tandem-wing “Aerodrome.” 

The aerodrome launched off a houseboat via catapult and basically hit the water “like a handful of mortar,” according to one account, spurring the New York Times writer to state confidently:

“The proverbial proneness of the unexpected to happen, especially in the case of flying machines, has been demonstrated too often since the days of Icarus to leave room for surprise that gravity was too much for the Langley mechanism.”  

He theorized that slight variables in construction and materials used were probably too wide for the level of precision that aviation requires, and suggested birds had taken a thousand years to evolve to fly and mankind would take longer. 

“It might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years.”

Two months later the Wright brothers successfully flew their first airplane, which took flight four times on the morning of Dec. 17, 1903. 

The first flight lasted 12 seconds and traveled 120 feet, while the fourth and final flight lasted 59 seconds and traveled 852 feet.

This wasn’t the first or last time The New York Times missed the mark. Decades later, the NYT said television probably won’t take off in the US.

Americans don’t have time for television — The New York Times, 1939

On March 19, 1939, the New York Times radio editor Orrin Dunlap Junior explained confidently why television would never become a popular broadcast medium.

The article “ACT I, SCENE I; Telecasts to Homes Begin on April 30– World’s Fair Will Be the Stage” was written about six weeks before the first publicly accessible television broadcast in the US of the 1939 New York World’s Fairgrounds. 

But Dunlap claimed television had a pretty big problem. The average American family won’t bother to sit in front of it for long. 

Dunlap argued that while radio can “flow on like a brook” where people can listen and go about their household duties, television is more of a “Niagara, a spectacle for the eye.”

“THE problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.” 

“Therefore, the showmen are convinced that for this reason, if for no other, television will never be a serious competitor of broadcasting.”

Of course, television did in fact take off, surpassing radio as the most popular broadcast medium around the 1950s. By the 1960s, close to 90% of households had a TV. 

You could always refer to the chorus of The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star if you need more convincing. 

Apple will “probably never” come out with an iPhone —The New York Times, 2006

Not trying to pick on the New York Times, but our last story comes from David Pogue, who was writing a technology column for the NYT in 2006. 

Written on Sept. 27, 2006, Pogue was confident that Apple would “probably never” come out with a phone like the iPhone. 

It came in the year Apple introduced the first MacBook Pro and it had just introduced its all-new video iPod, featuring a 2.5-inch colour screen that could play TV shows or Hollywood shows “right in the palm of your hand.” 

But rumors were rife that Apple would soon launch its very first “iPod phone” — or even an iPod equipped with a touchscreen as big as its front face. To be fair, The New York Times was actually the first major publication to cover the rumor back in 2002, including the “iPhone” name. 

But Pogue didn’t think it was going to happen, given the power that carriers like Verizon have in deciding what phones to stock and sell. In the US, mobile carriers heavily subsidize the costs of a phone through lock-in contracts. Their support can make or break a phone. 

“The problem is that when you build a cellphone, the carriers (Verizon, Cingular, etc.) have veto power over EVERY move you make. You have to fight, wheedle, cajole, beg, demo, refine, lather, rinse, repeat…all in hopes that the carriers will accept your design–and stock your phone.”

“I cannot imagine Apple giving veto power to ANYONE over its software design. It just ain’t gonna happen.”

The writer later added in an update that there was a new rumor that Apple had signed a deal with Cingular (a carrier) for early 2007, while there are error messages hidden in the latest iTunes update that contained references to “mobile phone.” 

Those new rumors turned out to be true. Apple announced in January 2007 that it had chosen Cingular as the exclusive US carrier for its newly announced iPhone. 

The iPhone began sales in the US in June 2007 in a 4GB model for $499 and an 8GB model for $599.

A little over five years later, Pogue reflected on his lapse in judgment.

“Yeah, Okay. I’ll admit it. My prediction was wrong — but my thinking was right,” he wrote. “I knew that Steve Jobs would never tolerate the micromanagement that the carriers (Verizon, AT&T and so on) then exercised on every aspect of every phone they carried.”

“What I didn’t realize, of course, is that Jobs planned an end-run — a deal that Cingular ultimately accepted, which ran like this: ‘You let us design our phone without your input, and I’ll give you a five-year exclusive.’ And the rest is history.”

Why is it so hard to predict the future of tech? 

Dr. Roey Tzezana, a futures studies researcher at the Blavatnik Center at Tel Aviv University, theorizes that people often get tech predictions wrong because they overestimate how technology will be used and underestimate social and political forces. 

For example, in 1964, as the space race was in full gear, researchers predicted that humans would land on Mars by 1980.

“The main reason we haven’t sent humans to Mars yet is that there was no need. Huge operations in the field of space – such as the landing on the moon – were carried out mainly because of the ‘space race.’”

But after the US won the race, “it was no longer in anyone’s interest to reach Mars,” he said, despite noting that we probably already have the tech to do it.  

Pogue says the best solution is to stop making predictions about things that won’t happen, can’t be done or will never work. 

“Everybody who takes a stab at these kinds of predictions inevitably winds up looking like an idiot,” Pogue wrote in an article for Scientific American. 

“It’s much safer to predict things that will happen. If you’re right, you’ll look like a genius,” said Pogue. 

Jules Verne, for example, predicted electric submarines, TV news, video calling, and skywriting long before people swapped out horses for cars. 

“The first rule of making tech predictions is this: make predictions about things that will come to pass, not about things that won’t,” said Pogue. 

If the prediction hasn’t come true, you could always just say it hasn’t happened “yet.” 

“In the end, it’s a blessing we can’t predict the future of tech — because it means we’ll keep trying. If we don’t know if something will succeed or fail, we’ll keep innovating.”