People can’t believe how accurate children from 1966’s predictions for how life in 2000 would be are

A group of schoolchildren turned out to be pretty on the money about a lot of things when asked to predict what the year 2000 would be like in 1966.

While Back to the Future Part II made it abundantly clear that abusing knowledge of the future for your own profit was a very bad thing, knowing what's coming around the corner could be very useful.

Think of the year 2000, some people were declaring it 'the end of history' and reckoned that after generations of struggle and hardship we'd basically cracked the formula to life and it was going to be peace and prosperity from here on out.

That turned out to be a load of s**t, as 25 years on we live in a world which feels like it has strayed away from both peace and prosperity despite the steady rate of technological progress.

A fascination with the future will always be on our minds, it's where we're all headed, and some of the best predictors were a bunch of British kids who appeared on the classic TV show Tomorrow's World in 1966.

Some of their predictions make the likes of the 'Living Nostradamus' and Baba Vanga look like bloviating frauds, as the 60s kids managed to get quite a few things very close to right.

One of the most accurate predictions came from a boy who said: “Sheep and cows and livestock, they will be kept in batteries, they won’t be allowed to graze on pastures, they’ll be kept in buildings all together.”

That pretty much turned out to be true – though the ‘factory farm’ had first emerged in the 1960s as modern technology allowed thousands of chickens to be reared on one farm, Farmers’ Weekly reports.

It was already a thing by the time these children were making predictions, but the kids were all right about the intensity of farming increasing.

The battery farm has become much more common with a 26 percent increase in mega farms – one that houses at least 40,000 birds, 2,000 pigs or 750 breeding sows – from 2011 to 2017, the Guardian reports.

One Reddit user wrote of the kid’s prediction: “The one about animals being shoved in a building and artificially raised… too real, and sad.”

One Reddit user commented: “60s capitalists eagerly scribbling notes as children tell them how to destroy the world.”

Quite a lot of the kids were predicting catastrophic nuclear wars. It hasn't happened... yet (BBC)

Another of the children said of the year 2000: “I don’t think it’s going to be so nice, all machines everywhere, everyone doing everything for you, you’ll get all bored, I don’t think it will be so nice.”

While it’s true technology has now seeped into our everyday lives more than ever, the little girl clearly did not envision the birth of Netflix if she thinks we’ll be bored all the time.

Machines doing everything for you would be pretty great, but if AI is going to take all the work it seems like they're scraping the work of creatives to churn out crap while humans are still stuck with the tougher jobs.

Another kid said: “People wouldn’t be able to live in ordinary houses, because that would take up too much room, they’d have to be in flats, piled on top of one another.

“The houses would be rather small and everything would be very cramped.”

If only she'd thought to warn people about all the flats that'd be snapped up by buy-to-let landlords (BBC)

Turns out she was pretty accurate, with Which finding the average UK home is now 20 percent smaller than in the 1970s, so we certainly are more cramped.

However, as of 2018, only 20 percent of UK households live in flats.

Homes built in the UK are among the smallest in Europe, so we are all living in some very cramped conditions where there's not enough room to swing a cat, should you wish to do that.

Another prediction that raised eyebrows concerned the rise of automation and what people would do without the jobs taken.

One eloquent schoolboy noted: “I don’t think there is going to be atomic warfare, but I think there is going to be all this automation, people are going to be out of work and a great population, and I think something has to be done about it.

“If I wasn’t a biologist, that’s what I’d like to do, to do something about the population problem, try and temper it somehow, I don’t know how.”

On that front birth rates are dropping all around the world, which is set to cause something of a demographic crisis as there won't be enough people working to sustain older generations through the illness and infirmity of age.

Perhaps robots hurrying up and making things could help cover this gap, or perhaps we'll all be wiped out in nuclear fire before the end of 2025.

Additional words by Simon Fearn