Footage shows unbelievably accurate description of life in the 2000s provided by kids in the 1960s

In a world that is changing faster than ever before, it has become increasingly hard for young people to make plans for the future. While most of us prefer to live in the moment and think about the coming week, month, or year at the most, it seems older generations had better clarity about life even when they were kids. This is clear from a video of some bright students from the 1960s, who had conflicting predictions about life in the 21st century, which eventually turned out to be accurate.

BBC Archives shared a six-minute-long video on YouTube in 2021 that raked up over a million views. The caption of the video mentioned that the youngsters speaking in the segment were students from Marlborough College, Roedean, and Chippenham schools. They were describing what life would possibly be like for people in the year 2000 and expressed concerns about a possible nuclear armageddon, overpopulation, automation, battery farming, job scarcity, and mass unemployment among other things. As of 2024, most of these less-than-optimistic predictions have become a reality and part of our regular lives.

The footage was part of a program called "Tomorrow's World" that first went on air on December 28, 1966. The first boy who spoke in the video pictured a dystopian world crowded with robots, where space travel would become accessible to regular folks. A girl expected people to have micro meals in the form of capsules, whereas another boy feared that the atomic bombs would be dropping all around us reaching the depths of the planet to form a huge crater. 

But two minutes into the clip, a boy paints an accurate picture of modern society and predicts that "people will be regarded more as statistics than as actual people." "I don't think it's going to be so nice. I think, sort of, all machines everywhere, everyone doing everything for you. You know, you'll get all bored and I don't think it will be so nice," another girl offers her opinion. "First of all, these computers are taking over now. (Due to) computers and automation and in the year 2000, there won't be enough jobs to go around and the only jobs there will be, it will be for people with high IQ and those who work computers and such things," another young girl envisioned.

A part of the footage was also reposted on X by @historyinmemes, where the online community expressed their amazement at how these kids from more than decades ago could predict a near-accurate scenario of the 2000s era. @gypsy_lovell commented, "The level of maturity and discipline in speaking is very telling. Internet and social media have destroyed many people's ability to speak eloquently and think so rationally. We have failed our children as a society." @AmdredLambda shared, "Kids overwhelmed by finance education often are robbed from coexisting in their world, deprived from sharing their dreams." 

@MIAfinsheat wondered, "Where do you guys imagine we will be in 2062? My guess is the work week will go from 40+ hours a week to 20. Automation will take over. Brick-and-mortar stores will be nearly gone. And everything will be online." @mackcarter doubted, "Call me paranoid but I don’t believe this is real archival footage. And I may be alone, for now, but we’re about to approach a point where everyone doubts nearly every video they see, looking for inconsistencies that the AI got wrong."