In the mid-1990s, as the internet was still largely a specialist tool and genetic engineering remained more promise than practice, a small group of professional futurists set out to map the world three decades ahead with unusual accuracy. This was extracted from government work they did the defense department insights that were shared with them and the connections they formed in academia. Rather than offering vague speculation or single-point predictions, they gathered and stress-tested hundreds of forecasts across science, technology, and engineering, then distilled them into a disciplined set of high-probability assumptions. The result was one of the most ambitious exercises in applied foresight of its era.

That foundational work crystallized in 1994 with Joseph F. Coates’s concise report, The Highly Probable Future: 83 Assumptions ab ...