There was a wonderful moment in Micro Men, BBC Four’s peerless drama about Sir Clive Sinclair and the invention of the home computer. After some initial success flogging personal calculators, Sir Clive’s protégé, Chris Curry, hits upon a daredevil plan. Why not give computers the same make-’em-cheap and stack-’em-high treatment? The ginger genius was scathing. Was Curry an abject fool? Didn’t he know that the microcomputer was a ridiculous fad? All they were good for was playing moronic games. The future lay in . . . the C5 electric car.

At this point, if you were anything like me, you snorted a superior snort. Sinclair was being an idiot. Because it was obvious to anyone with a brain, surely, that computing was going to go gangbusters and the C5 was going right down the executive toilet that it so closely resembled. Couldn’t Sir Clive see the monstrous mistake he was making?

No, of course he couldn’t, and to be really honest, none of us could either. It may be painful to admit it now, but the uncomfortable truth is that at the time, computers were all washed up and the C5 looked kind of cool. The news bulletins were full of Sinclair’s futuristic chariot, often with Sir Clive at the helm, or to be more accurate, the stern, since the C5 was a vehicle steered from somewhere beneath the pilot’s buttocks. Did we laugh sarcastic knowing laughs and barrack him for his monomaniacal defiance of the turning tide of popular culture? No we did not; we saved that sort of derision for the home computer wannabe Alan (now Lord) Sugar. Instead we nodded sagely, and tut-tutted in wonder; plucky Sir Clive had done it again. Electric cars, we thought. Why didn’t we see that coming?

Because the truth is, for all our achievements in art, science, and technology, the human race has always been spectacularly bad at predicting the future. Literature is littered with shockingly wide-of-the-mark utopias, dystopias, shiny suits, flying saucers and whole meals contained in a single pill. As a child of the Seventies, I was taught that as an adult in a world run by machines my main challenge would be how to spend my endless hours of leisure time. We baby-boomers would share jobs, and play endless games of badminton in the umpteen new sports centres the Government was so busy building. I used to dream of what life would be like in 2000, when I would be 34, unimaginably grown-up and probably flying to work on a jetpack while talking to my robot wife on my watch. Well now I’m 43, paying £80 a month for a gym I never so much as set foot in and so busy answering an avalanche of e-mails and text messages, it’s difficult finding time to have a dump.

The science of predicting the future was once called futurology, but in a masterstroke of irony that word has gone out of date. And it’s never been any good. Take the mobile phone; no one saw that coming, not even the people who make mobile phones. You couldn’t get any self-respecting man near a telephone 30 years ago, let alone get him to make a call. Now every bloke you see is Facebooking style tips on his iPhone. And what about the whole 3G fiasco? Every network on the planet invests billions of dollars upgrading for video and no one bites. Who would have that we’d go bonkers for Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D and run a mile at the thought of actually being able to see one another’s faces?

The sorry fact is that we have no knowledge of the future because we have no knowledge of ourselves. Mind you, there is one area where we seem to have consistently got it right; the environment. It’s hard to feel proud about it, but way back in the Sixties we did manage to predict with astonishing accuracy just how badly we were messing up the planet, and we continue to forecast with chilling accuracy every hundredth of a degree increase in world temperature while, of course, doing pretty much nothing about it. Pump too much more CO2 into the atmosphere and maybe, finally, we will all have to stop burning fossilised algae by the megatonne and start driving electric cars instead. And then, of course, the keen poker player Sir Clive will calmly splay his unbeatable Texas-hold-’em flush on the fresh green baize, roll back his head, and have one last, deep, witheringly sarcastic laugh.

Halfway through a PhD in physics at the University of Cambridge, Ben Miller scrapped science for comedy. Perrier Award nominee in 1996, this comedian, actor and writer is star of small and big screens.

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