Reading optimistic future predictions is a lot of fun. And it's also fun to read those from the past because they help to point out eternal human motivations as well as trends of the time. Here are a series of postcards created by some artists at the end of the 19th century that imagined the year 2000 in France: https://www.google.com/search?q=Jean-Marc+Côté&source=lnms&t...

For context, the industrial revolutions, both the first and second, were by this point old news, so the notion of creating a machine to accomplish a task was familiar. There isn't much in these postcards to delight cynics and pessimists, though, since World War I, when people turned these machines on each other, had not yet happened.