Surprisal box No. 02

The future arrives. We still go to the opera.

Albert Robida's Paris in the year 2000: people in evening dress leave the opera and climb into flying cabs and airships shaped like fish. An aerial restaurant floats at lower left and the Eiffel Tower stands in the distance. — Albert Robida, La Sortie de l’opéra en l’an 2000 (Leaving the opera in the year 2000), about 1902. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the late nineteenth-century, Albert Robida imagined the journey home from the opera in the year 2000. We’re still waiting for the flying cars, whatever Elon Musk would have us believe. More revealing is what Robida assumed would stay the same: a hundred years later, we’d still be heading home from the opera.

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