When trains began to shuttle people across the coutryside, many insisted they would never replace horses.
Less than a century later, people repeated that same prediction about cars, telephones, radio, television, and computers.
Each had their own host of detractors.
Even some experts insisted they wouldn't catch on.
Of course, we can't predict exactly what the future will look like or what new inventions will populate it.
But time and time again, we've also failed to predict that the technologies of the present will change the future.
And recent research has revealed a similar pattern in our individual lives: we're unable to predict change in ourselves.
Three psychologists documented our inability to predict personal change in a 2013 paper called, "The End of History Illusion." Named after political scientist Francis Fukuyama's prediction that liberal democracy was the final form of government, or as he called it,"the end of history," their work highlights the way we see ourselves as finished products at any given moment.
The researchers recruited over 7,000 participants ages 18 to 68.
They asked half of these participants to report their current personality traits, values, and preferences, along with what each of those metrics had been ten years before.
