How the Future Started Arriving All at Once. I grew up on the future. Not the real one — the scheduled one. The kind that lived in magazines and predictions, where every breakthrough came with a timestamp. Flying cars? "Someday." Artificial intelligence? "A few decades out." Even when something revolutionary was announced, you still had to wait for it to arrive. That was the unspoken agreement: you'd see the future first… and then, eventually, you'd live in it. But somewhere