Children interviewed in the year 1966 made eerily accurate predictions about what life in the 2000s would look like.

The BBC sat down with a group of schoolchildren to ask what they thought the world would be like at the turn of the century. 

The kids issued warnings about many problems society actually faces today, from climate change to overpopulation to a technological revolution. 

During the 1960s, a surge of technological advancements — such as computers and spaceflight — led to both optimism about the future and fears that automation would cause job displacement and other negative impacts on society. 

Today, technology is more a part of our lives than ever before. One recent study found that it has replaced more US jobs than it has created, particularly since the 1980s. 

Many of the children predicted this would happen. One girl said: ‘First of all, computers are taking over now, computers and automation. And in the year 2000, there just won’t be enough jobs to go around.

‘The only jobs there will be will be for people with high IQs who can work computers and such things. Other people are just not going to have jobs, there’s just not going to be jobs for them to have.’

Now in the age of AI, many of those fears from the 1960s have returned. The question of whether this technology could displace human workers is currently one of society’s most hotly-debated topics. 

The 1960s were also shaped by the proliferation of atomic weapons, which seemed to weigh heavily on these children as the subject came up repeatedly in their interviews.

‘Oh, I think all these atomic bombs will be dropping around the place,’ one boy said.

‘There’s just nothing you can do to stop it. The more people who get bombs, the more — somebody is gonna use it someday,’ a girl warned.

Some even expressed fears of a nuclear apocalypse. 

‘Some madman will get the atomic bomb and just blow the world into oblivion,’ one boy said. 

Today, the risk of nuclear war is rising as geopolitical relations become increasingly strained, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Concerns about nuclear weapons — such as the modernization and expansion of arsenals, emerging new capabilities and the loss of arms control agreements — continued or were amplified in 2024, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. 

‘The outgoing Biden administration showed little willingness or capacity to pursue new efforts in these areas, and it remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will seize the initiative,’ the Bulletin states.

‘At this time, it is difficult to anticipate when and how these negative trends may be slowed and, ultimately, reversed.’

But the children predicted other potentially catastrophic challenges as well, such as environmental destruction and sea level rise.

‘I think they will set aside parts of the country solely for recreation, and have large blocks of built-up areas, and I think these are going to be very ugly indeed, probably,’ one boy suggested. 

Indeed, as urbanization and industrialization eat away at wilderness, protected areas like natural parks and wildlife preserves are some of the only untouched places that remain. 

Another predicted: ‘All the Sputniks and everything that are going up sort of interferes with the weather, and I think the sea may rise and cover some of England, and there will be just islands left.’

The proliferation of satellites like the inaugural Sputnik is not a cause of sea level rise, but this child managed to foresee one of the most serious climate change impacts long before the concept of human-driven global warming was widely understood. 

Despite all the very real threats to humanity’s safety and wellbeing the kids pointed to, they still thought the global population would continue to grow unchecked.

‘People wouldn’t be able to live in ordinary houses, because that would take up too much room,’ one girl said. 

‘They’d have to be in [apartments], piled up on one another like that. And the houses would be rather small, and everything would be very cramped,’ she predicted.

‘The population will have gone up so much that everyone will be living in big domes in the Sahara or undersea,’ another suggested.

While humanity has not started building underwater cities or enormous domes in the desert, finding space to fit everyone is becoming increasingly challenging. 

According to the United Nations, the global population is expected to keep growing for the next 50 to 60 years, peaking at approximately 10.3 billion by the mid-2080.

But once it reaches this peak, it is expected to gradually decline to around 10.2 billion by the turn of the century.