For those of us who were around in 1998, most likely recall society's fascination with predicting the future. At the time, much of the focus was on the turn of the millennium and if our bank cards would work after midnight in the year 2000. We were also just getting a grasp on the fact that we could listen to music on our personal computer and not just our radio or CD player (cell phones weren't quite there yet).
But Gallup and USA Today were also thinking ahead, even farther ahead, to the year 2025, and they polled a group of Americans, who managed to pull away long enough from checking email via dial-up AOL and watching 'Friends' (hey, aren't we still watching that today?) to share their predictions for the year 2025.
In the autumn of 1998, at the tail end of a decade defined by booming tech optimism and good 'ol landlines, pollsters asked 1,055 Americans to imagine life in the year 2025. The results — now preserved in the polling archives of the Roper Center at Cornell University — offer a striking mix of prescience, pessimism and plain wrong turns about what the next quarter-century might bring.
The poll, conducted Sept. 30–Oct. 1, 1998, asked respondents whether a range of social, medical, technological and geopolitical changes would have occurred by 2025. Below are some key observations:
- Social predictions that came true: 74% thought gay marriage would be commonplace by 2025; 69% expected a Black U.S. president. Both later occurred (same‑sex marriage legalized nationwide in 2015; Barack Obama elected in 2008).
- Medical optimism that hasn’t fully materialized: 60% predicted a cure for AIDS, and 59% predicted a cure for cancer by 2025. Advances have improved treatment and survival, but universal “cures” remain elusive.
- Demographic optimism: 61% thought people would routinely live to 100 — progress in longevity has occurred, but centenarian life is not yet routine for most.
- Pandemic foresight: 75% foresaw the emergence of a “deadly new disease” — a prediction that resonates after the COVID‑19 pandemic.
- Retail and tech shifts: 56% expected most stores would be replaced by Internet shopping — e‑commerce growth transformed retail in ways that broadly match that prediction. (Too bad they didn't ask about the future of Blockbuster and how they pictured we'd watch movies at home, but DVD-by-mail service Netflix was virtually brand new at that time.)
- Missed milestones: 66% predicted the U.S. would elect a woman president by 2025 — that milestone has not been reached.
- Skepticism about more speculative futures: only 29% thought space travel would be common for ordinary Americans by 2025; just 25% expected contact with alien life. (Does Katy Perry qualify as an 'ordinary' American?)
- Concerns about society and rights: nearly 80% predicted declines in personal privacy; 57% believed personal freedom would shrink.
- Mixed outlooks: respondents expected worsening crime, environmental quality and moral values, while also expressing optimism about some race‑relations improvements and medical access.
Why it still matters: Retrospective polling like this does more than provoke nostalgia. It shows how collective hopes, fears and assumptions shape public debate and policy priorities. Some 1998 forecasts nudged public attention toward expanding civil rights and emerging public‑health threats; others underscore how optimism about scientific “cures” can outpace the realities of research and development.
As the Roper Center archives make clear, the past’s predictions are a useful mirror for thinking about what future generations may one day read about our present day - lets hope it's for more than just viral memes.
Sources: Gallup/USA Today poll (Sept. 30–Oct. 1, 1998); polling archives of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Cornell University.
