For many of us in public speaking, whenever we are in need of a quote filled with wit or cleverness, we need to look no further than the famed baseball legend Yogi Berra. When asked later in his career by the sports press about the prospects of the upcoming New York Yankee season, Yogi responded, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” Berra was simply suggesting that his current view of the near future was not what it was in comparison to earlier in his career.

Although Yogi meant this as a less desirable prediction of the future, I would like to put a positive spin on his remark as it pertains to our new year and propose "Welcome to the future none of us ever dreamed of.”

Each generation based on how they perceive technological advancements try to gauge what lies ahead. I grew up in the 1960s and 70s and vividly remember watching the first Lunar Landing on July 20, 1969. I remember building a plastic model replica of the Super-sonic Transport Concorde aircraft with my dad. Moreover, because we had recently landed on the moon and probably because we watched way too many reruns of Lost in Space, The Jetsons and Star Trek, our view of the future included moon bases, flying cars and personal robots that would serve our every need. Fifty years ago, we dreamed of big things with a widespread vision of the future, focusing on the physical machines that would propel us to fly higher and move faster.

Predictions of the future are often off the mark, as visions of what lies ahead are confined based on the technological advancements we are aware of at the particular point in time. The predictions of creative visionaries are typically limited simply by the brain’s capacity to dream with no such constraints while
the actual future evolves. 

We were wrong about the future, as the world has not advanced in the manner that many thought it would. Looking back 50 years ago, the dreams of scientific progress did not include the great advancements the world enjoys today, such as information access, streaming entertainment, global social connection, instant money transfer and palm-sized communication devices. The great news is that the world is far more efficient and connected than we ever dreamed of. Granted, we can’t beam each other up to the mother ship or physically move at warp speed, but more importantly, our live images of us can, and so can the data we wish to transmit. Our bodies may not speed through the air in George Jetson’s flying sedan, but our thoughts, pictures and ideas can now travel around the world at the speed of light. Instead of moving people through space, we have found far more value and effectiveness by moving data around on Earth. As in many areas of life, we did not get what we wanted; rather we got what we needed. In the decade of the 2020s, we may lament the lack of flying cars but greatly laud having the world’s encyclopedia via a Google search literally in the palm of our hand. Simply put, the world is far more advanced, efficient and connected than we could have ever dreamed possible. Because of this massive transition in how we access information, we believe like the legendary football coach George Allen that, “The Future is Now!”