Moving Forward

When you consider how rapidly technology is advancing, it’s hard to visualize what the world may look like in the year 2525, a time in the future popularized by Denny Zager and Rick Evans’ 1969 No. 1 hit song “In the Year 2525.” Evans wrote the song in 1964, the same year that the first commercial desktop personal computer, called the Programma 101, was launched at the New York World’s Fair by Olivetti. The song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks in early July 1969, which was the same month that the first man walked on the moon, and a year after Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was released at the box office. It’s unclear whether the space race and dawning of the personal computer age were inspiration for the song’s dark outlook on the dangers of technology or if its popularity among listeners was a direct reflection of the shared angst felt over a future overtaken and dominated by technological innovation. But, as the duo chronicled each century from 2525 to 9595, in the year 5555 the lyrics predict automation taking over human tasks, leaving humans with “arms hanging limp at your sides. … Some machine is doing that for you.”