What toys from the past can tell us about how we predict the future advertisement advertisement If there’s one thing we know for certain about the future, it’s that we don’t know what will happen. But we can—and do—try to make predictions: about how climate change will affect our planet, what will happen to the economy, which jobs will be in demand and which ones will be obsolete. advertisement advertisement What if those predictions actually ended up affecting how the future unfolds, like self-fulfilling prophecies? It’s a question plaguing futurists, and now a project is trying to illustrate the problem by showing how things created in the past have colored the present. The simplest examples—items that truly shape the minds of our next generations—come in the form of children’s toys.