2025 Has Arrived! Where's My Flying Car?

A (Nostalgic and Critical) Journey Through Science Fiction Predictions

From Minority Report to Generative AI: What Hollywood Got Right, Got Terribly Wrong, and Never Even Imagined About Our Present

I remember it like it was yesterday: the end of 1999 was approaching with its hysterical countdown toward the year 2000, and I, newly arrived at Disney, watched the world divide between the excitement of the new millennium and the collective panic called "Y2K Bug." It was my debut in a "real job," and the mixture of corporate magic with emergency protocols created a surreal scenario: flashlights scattered through corridors, printed sheets with action plans in case systems collapsed, and daily briefings that sounded more like science fiction plots than administrative measures.

But the future was truly in the air—and it wasn't just paranoia. At Epcot Center, a purplish-blue robot named SMRT-1 entertained visitors by trying (with its charmingly technological limitations) to understand voice commands. That, for me, was already a glimpse of tomorrow: an interactive robot, right there, talking to us through a telephone. It was 1999, and everything seemed possible. The general bet was that by 2025 we would be flying over cities in personal cars and living with butler robots—preferably sarcastic ones.

Cut to the present. April 2025. No car floating in the garage, no robot serving me coffee while commenting on the columnist of the week with sharp irony. Did science fiction from the 90s and 2000s get it terribly wrong? Or did it get more right than we like to admit?

In this article, I invite you on a time journey—not to the future, but to the past that imagined our now. Let's revisit some cinematic predictions from 1995 to 2005 and contrast them with the reality we've built. Nostalgia guaranteed. Criticism too. And, perhaps, a surprise or two along the way.

Ready? Fasten your seatbelt (not the aerial safety one, unfortunately), and let's explore together what Hollywood imagined... and what actually happened.

The Detectives of the Future and Sentimental Robots

Hits, Misses, and the Silences of Science Fiction

Between 1995 and 2005, cinema experienced a true futuristic outbreak. The turn of the millennium brought an avalanche of films trying to imagine what the world would be like a few decades from now—many of them aiming directly at something between 2020 and 2050. And we, of course, believed it all. After all, if Spielberg showed an interface of floating holograms controlled with gestures, who were we to doubt?

Let's take a peek at what some of these movies predicted—and what actually happened.

Minority Report (2002): The World Without Crimes (or Almost)

In the universe of Minority Report, set in 2054, the police use "Pre-Cogs"—seers connected to an algorithmic system—to arrest criminals before the crime even happens. The scenario is completed by autonomous cars, gestural interfaces that look like technological ballet choreographies, and advertising so personalized that you feel stalked by a billboard.

Cut to 2025: the Pre-Cogs haven't arrived yet (fortunately, it must be said), but predictive AI is already among us—and with very real effects. Algorithms already try to predict risk areas for crime in various cities around the world, with results that are at least... questionable. Algorithmic surveillance has become almost omnipresent, whether in cameras with facial recognition or in ads that know exactly what you thought about buying—even before you verbalize it.

Gestural interfaces and transparent screens? They exist, but they're still in the territory of prototypes and "look how cool" YouTube videos. They haven't become standard.

Verdict: Spielberg got the climate of digital paranoia and the distorted use of technology for social control right, but ignored (or avoided) the ethical debates that are central today. And, of course, no algorithm predicts the future with 100% certainty. For now, human unpredictability remains undefeated.

A.I. – Artificial Intelligence (2001): The Robot Who Wanted to Love

Here, Spielberg and Kubrick introduce us to David, a robot boy designed to love unconditionally. A melancholic tale about consciousness, abandonment, and the search for affection—which poetically raises the question: can a machine feel?

And now in 2025... we have social robots like Sophia and Ameca, plus chatbots that fake empathy like few others. There are users who have already "fallen in love" with artificial intelligences, and we're not talking about fiction. But feeling, for real? Not yet. What we have is a sophisticated performance of emotional language—convincing, yes, but still a simulation.

Verdict: the film captured the human desire for emotional connection with machines—and anticipated the ethical dilemmas this would bring. But it overestimated our ability to build machines that actually feel. For now, we continue with unilateral love: it's us who feel for them.

Bicentennial Man (1999): A Robot's Journey in Search of Humanity

Inspired by Asimov, Andrew is a robot who, over two centuries, develops emotions, creativity, and, finally, the desire to become human—in body, mind, and law. The story is a long meditation on identity, mortality, and belonging.

Twenty-five years later, the central questions of the film are more alive than ever. We still don't have robots with fully biological bodies, but we already (seriously) discuss whether AIs deserve rights, whether they can be held accountable, or whether an algorithm can have legal personhood. The question "what makes us human?" is no longer rhetorical and has become the agenda of conferences, forums, and, well... articles like this one.

Verdict: a film that seemed too sentimental to be taken seriously... and that today sounds almost prophetic. Technology hasn't yet reached Andrew, but the questions he raised are knocking at our door.

The Matrix (1999): Is Reality a Software?

Okay, The Matrix didn't stipulate an exact date, but its influence on the imagination about the future is undeniable. The idea that all reality would be a simulation created by machines to keep humans subjugated became a mandatory reference—even a meme.

And in 2025? We still haven't discovered if we live in a simulation (or maybe we can't get out of it?). But we live immersed in a digital world that challenges reality on all fronts: deepfakes, metaverses, AI creating images of things that never existed. The boundary between the real and the artificial is increasingly blurred. And debates about the power of machines, the control of algorithms, and the limits of consciousness are more alive than ever.

Verdict: although it wasn't a literal prediction, The Matrix understood—with frightening precision—the philosophical anxieties of the 21st century. It's more than a movie: it's almost a postmodern oracle.

What the Screenwriters Didn't See Coming (Or Saw and Ignored)

If it's fun to see what the movies got right (or almost), it's even more revealing to observe what they completely missed. Sometimes, the most surprising future isn't in the big technological innovations, but in the small transformations that turned the world upside down without making Hollywood-level noise.

Smartphones and Social Networks: The Supercomputer in Your Pocket

It's almost comical: most futuristic films imagined holographic big screens, gestural panels, entire rooms full of screens... but almost no one predicted that the true center of modern life would be a glass rectangle that fits in the palm of your hand. Nobody thought that, instead of talking to a robot in the middle of the room, we would spend the day sliding our finger on a five-inch screen.

Worse: almost no one anticipated the social, psychological, and political impact of social networks. Not even Minority Report, with all its surveillance paranoia, imagined that it would be us ourselves offering personal data, location, and even intimate thoughts... voluntarily... in exchange for likes.

Remote Work: Future with Headphones

If the movies showed offices with brutalist architecture and ergonomic chairs that floated, the idea of working in pajamas, from the living room, with a child jumping in the background of Zoom, seemed too distant—or perhaps unworthy of good fiction. But here we are, in 2025, living the era of remote, hybrid, or dematerialized work, where geography has lost part of its power. Nobody caught this detail with the precision it deserved.

Generative AI and Creativity: The Revolution Nobody Saw Coming

And here is, perhaps, the most glaring blind spot of fiction from that period. The films were obsessed with robots that walk, talk, and dominate. But almost no one predicted that the great leap would come not from metallic bodies, but from words, images, creativity. The AI of 2025 doesn't just calculate: it writes, draws, composes, programs.

Who would have imagined that a machine would be capable of creating a visual work of art from a description, composing a sad song in the style of Radiohead, or writing an entire book?

Science fiction predicted the brute force of machines. But it completely ignored the power of language. And that's where the revolution really happened: not in destruction, but in creation.

Conclusion: The Future Has Arrived, But It Came Sideways

Revisiting the futuristic predictions of the 90s and 2000s is like rereading a letter written to our "future self": there's naivety, exaggeration, good intentions—and some surprising hits. It's fascinating to realize how the screenwriters of that time projected for 2025 a world full of visible technological spectacles: flying cars, humanoid robots, holograms everywhere. But what really transformed us was much quieter—and, perhaps because of that, more radical.

We don't live surrounded by conscious androids or cross the skies in anti-gravitational vehicles. But we carry, in our pockets, super-machines capable of simulating empathy, generating impossible images, and reorganizing our perception of reality in real time. Technology is no longer a futuristic promise of "someday" and has become an intimate, almost invisible—and incredibly influential—presence.

The science fiction of that decade was brilliant in raising ethical questions, imagining moral dilemmas, and instigating debates that have now become real. It predicted the effects of algorithmic surveillance, questioned what it means to be human, anticipated the digital anxiety that now permeates our relationships with technology. But it also left aside the more discreet—and perhaps deeper—revolutions.

The future, as always, didn't arrive with fanfare. It infiltrated stealthily into everyday gestures, recommendation algorithms, machine-completed phrases, filters that beautify our selfies. It doesn't wait for us at a space station—it's already here, disguised as a virtual assistant, an app, a synthetic voice that wishes you good morning.

And yes, I'm still waiting for my flying car.

But, thinking about it, maybe it did come—it just swapped wheels for language and engines for neural networks. And, instead of taking me to the skies, it decided to take me inside myself. To my doubts, my choices, my texts.

Perhaps the future was never about flying. Perhaps it was always about understanding.

Leandro Waldvogel is an expert in storytelling, artificial intelligence and creativity. He holds a law degree from the Rio Branco Institute and UCLA. He worked for almost two decades in the creative area at Disney and was a diplomat at the Itamaraty. Today, he is a consultant and creator of the Story-Intelligence project, where he investigates the intersections between human narratives and algorithmic systems. A speaker and author, he researches how AIs are transforming the way we think, create and relate to the world. https://www.story-intelligence.com