Three developments once dismissed as impossible now sit so deeply inside modern life that we use or expect them without a second thought. Experts were certain they would fail, but history proved them spectacularly wrong. Each success also brought unexpected costs, reminding us that progress often solves one problem while quietly creating another.

We are magnificent at knowing so much. Give us a soapbox, a microphone, a touch of arrogance, and we will explain what we cannot possibly know. We will even put it in print, broadcast it on television, post it on social media, and not look back.

If those predictions turn out wrong, then no problem. We rarely apologise, and history doesn’t stop to care to ask for one anyway.

The failed forecast is quietly placed in a cupboard while everyone rushes outside to admire the next successful new thing. We prefer the new thing. The new thing is shiny. It’s useful, profitable and exciting. Old words can’t compete with new, shiny things.

That old certainty might mature into a funny quotation for future generations to use, usually presented without the embarrassed silence that should follow it.

Still, the pattern ought to bother us. Just as we think we understand the world, we demonstrate that we barely understand ourselves.

Not in a million years (or until next Tuesday)

On 7 October 1903, Samuel Langley’s full-sized Aerodrome failed during a launch over the Potomac River. Langley was no backyard dreamer. He was Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, an accomplished scientist and the recipient of 50000 dollars from the United States War Department. His aircraft had a powerful engine and a launching system that helped it fly.

It helped toss it right into the river!

Two days later, the New York Times published an unsigned editorial titled Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly. It mocked the failure and reasoned that a successful flying machine might require one to ten million years of development. Most forecasters ask for a decade. The NY Times was generous. It had good authority to do so.

Only sixty-nine days passed when Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved controlled powered flight. Their first flight at Kitty Hawk lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. It wasn’t a glamorous-looking craft, but it flew, which was awkward for the NYT’s million-year estimate just two months earlier.

The mistake was enormous, but retractions were nonexistent.

We confuse the failure of one method with proof that the objective is impossible. Then someone else takes a closer look at the smaller things in the equation and then changes the method.

Humans are especially good at breaking things down and rebuilding them. We turn rocks into powder, then into steel, crude oil into aviation fuel and a beach experiment into an industry that moves millions through the sky. We can cross oceans in hours. Families meet, freight moves and organs can be flown to patients who need them.

The phone that had no absolutely chance

When Apple announced the iPhone in 2007, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer laughed at its prospects. The price was absurd. It had no physical keyboard. Business users would surely prefer the familiar buttons of their BlackBerrys and Windows phones. A few months later, Ballmer told USA Today, “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

It was a wonderfully definite prediction destined to be proved wrong. History enjoys digesting those the most.

Ballmer was not an idiot. His reasoning made sense when judged against the mobile-phone market as it existed. Microsoft licensed its software to numerous manufacturers, allowing it to appear on a wide range of comparatively inexpensive devices. Apple wanted customers to spend about $500 on one peculiar touchscreen phone made by Apple alone.

The mistake was assuming that the existing market would remain static.

It didn’t.

Apple sold its millionth iPhone barely ten weeks after its June 2007 release. By 2016, it had sold a billion. The iPhone did not merely compete with other phones; it helped change what the word phone meant. The device in our pocket became a camera, map, newspaper, bank, shop, office, television, library, dating service and occasionally—when absolutely unavoidable—a telephone.

Once again, the experts understood the present perfectly. It was the future that refused to cooperate.

The iPhone and the smartphones that followed have undoubtedly made life easier. We can contact family across the world, navigate unfamiliar cities, photograph anything, access emergency information and conduct business from almost anywhere. Entire industries and social movements can now form around something recorded by a stranger standing nearby.

Our phones know everything. The longer we stare at them, the better they get to know us. The suspicion that our smart devices may be listening too much persists because the advertising aimed at us can feel unnervingly precise.

An ice cream advertisement pops up after you simply say the words “ice cream”. You’ve never seen an ice cream ad on the phone before, and there it is, right now. Somehow, it knows. It knows.

That doesn’t mean microphone intrusion is imaginary either. Like other connected hardware, a device’s microphone can be hacked. We took an object designed for conversation and put it where we converse. It’s not a complicated formula, but now we’re concerned about privacy.

Nevermind. Forget that. Move on.

Ballmer was wrong. He did not anticipate how willingly we accepted the iPhone.

The woman who ran faster than men

In February 1966, Bobbi Gibb (female) asked to enter the Boston Marathon. Race director Will Cloney refused. Women, he told her, were not physiologically capable of running a marathon.

Gibb ignored him.

On 19 April she hid near the start, joined the field after the runners set off and completed the course in 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. She finished 126th overall, ahead of roughly two-thirds of the field. The physiological impossibility became possible in just over three hours.

Women were officially admitted to Boston in 1972. The women’s marathon entered the Olympic programme in 1984. What had been described as a limit of the female body became an ordinary sporting event we don’t think about anymore. No upgrade to the female body was required. The rule changed, and suddenly the incapacity vanished with it.

Feminism contains many versions of this story. Women were considered unsuited to many professions until war changed that belief. The wars accelerated women’s liberation because necessity gave society a brief holiday from its principles. Once women had demonstrated competence in factories, offices, hospitals and services, sending everyone back to the old arrangement became harder to justify.

The gains are real: education, income, legal identity, bodily autonomy and the ability to leave harmful relationships. Yet asking about feminism’s wider effect on society does not require us to pretend every consequence has been tidy. A family structure built partly on female economic dependence could not remain untouched once women gained choices outside it.

We changed women’s opportunities fast and women learned to say no to predatory males. (Our trouble with accepting the word no suggests autonomy is easier to praise than to respect.) Reclaiming firm boundaries may be one unfinished part of that change.

Progress forgets what it cost (and continues to cost)

These three stories prove that we can be spectacularly wrong about ourselves and the future. We say what we like, do what we like and rarely apologise when our predictions collapse. We simply move forward and avoid looking back.

That may be wise because looking back reveals the bill.

Air travel connected the world while also dirtying it. Climate-change policymakers now travel millions of kilometres in fuel-burning transport to tell one another that the planet must be cleaned up—or we’ll all die. The message’s delivery is wonderfully ironic.

Smartphones improved communication, but is anyone listening? We stare into screens while ignoring the person beside us. If information does not come through the phone, it is irrelevant. If an experience isn’t photographed and uploaded, it isn’t worth happening in the first place.

Women’s rights corrected injustices. But have we pushed personal freedom so far that family stability has become expendable? Divorce, single parenting and blended families were once shamed; now they are normal. That does not automatically make them wrong—but does making them common make them right for humanity’s future?

Every advancement solved a problem while creating others. We call it progress because that sounds better than apologising for being wrong and admitting that we have no idea where we will take us.

Then again, I could be wrong in everything I say. And I’ll try and apologise for that now.

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)