Someone on Twitter asked ChatGPT: “In two hundred years, what will historians say we got wrong?”

ChatGPT gave a smooth answer about climate denial, short-term thinking, and eroding trust in institutions. It sounded smart. But it was actually revealing something else entirely—what worries people right now, dressed up as future wisdom.

Here’s the thing: We can’t know what historians in 2225 will care about. And asking the question tells us more about 2025 than it does about 2225.

The Pattern We Keep Missing

Let’s work backwards through time in 50-year jumps:

1975: People thought space exploration and nuclear power would define everything. The moon landing had just happened. Nuclear plants were the future. But those weren’t the real story at all.

1925: Radio seemed revolutionary. Assembly lines were changing manufacturing. Some people worried about airplanes and chemical weapons. They had no idea that the real story was political chaos brewing toward World War II.

1875: After the Civil War, people noticed that wars had become industrialized. Railroads and telegraphs were everywhere. But they couldn’t see how those technologies were quietly rewiring how empires and economies worked—changes that would matter far more than the battles.

1825: The Industrial Revolution was brand new. We don’t know exactly what they thought mattered most. But we can be pretty sure they missed the biggest consequences of what was happening around them.

Notice the pattern? Every generation thinks it knows what’s important. Every generation is partly right, mostly wrong, and completely blind to things that become obvious later.

History Isn’t Archaeology

Here’s what we usually get wrong about history: We think historians dig up the truth about the past, like archaeologists uncovering fossils.

But that’s not how it works.

History is more like a story a society tells about itself. When historians in 2225 write about 2025, they won’t just have different answers than we do—they’ll have completely different questions.

They might ask: “When did AI become a political force?” or “How did climate migration reshape society?” or “Why did humans resist automation for so long?”

None of those questions map onto our current debates. They’ll be:

• Explaining how they got to where they are
• Making sense of their present
• Answering questions that matter to them

The “objective truth” of 2025 is hard enough for us to see while we’re living in it. By 2225, it will be completely filtered through what those future historians need to understand about their own time.

History isn’t a photograph of the past. It’s a mirror that shows the present.

The Anxiety Trap

So when someone asks “what will future historians say we got wrong?”—what are they really doing?

They’re laundering their current worries as future certainties.

Think about the big panics over the last 50 years:

• 1970s: “The population bomb will destroy us!” (It didn’t)
• 1980s: “Japan will economically dominate America!” (It didn’t)
• 2000s: “We’ve hit peak oil!” (We haven’t)
• 2010s: “AI will cause mass unemployment!” (Hasn’t happened yet)
• 2020s: “Fertility rates are collapsing!” (Maybe? Too soon to tell)

Each generation identifies The Crisis. Each is convinced this time we’ve found the real problem. We miss the meta-pattern: apocalyptic thinking itself is the recurring trap.

When someone says “history will judge us harshly for ignoring climate change” or “history will judge us for AI recklessness”—they’re not making predictions. They’re expressing what worries them right now and borrowing fake authority from an imaginary future.

And here’s another twist: Future historians can only study what survives. Most of what we do—our private messages, our daily tools, our internal debates—might simply disappear. Their picture of us could be shaped more by what accidentally survived than by what actually mattered.

What We Can’t See

The really tricky part? The thing future historians identify as our biggest blind spot will probably be something we don’t even consider a candidate for blindness.

Every era has background assumptions that seem so obvious they’re invisible—like water to a fish. You can’t question what you don’t notice. Then later, those invisible assumptions become the main story:

• The 1800s thought they were shaped by political ideals and debates about democracy. Turns out they were shaped by energy—coal and steam power quietly rewrote everything.
• The mid-1900s thought they were shaped by the moral struggle of World War II. Turns out they were shaped by logistics and supply chains that made modern economies possible.
• The late 1900s thought they were shaped by Cold War politics and the battle between capitalism and communism. Turns out they were shaped by software changing how we think and communicate.

What are our invisible assumptions?

Maybe it’s how we think about attention and information. Maybe it’s how AI and humans are adapting to each other. Maybe it’s something about genetics or microbiomes or climate migration that we’re treating as a side issue.

These are just guesses—stabs in the dark that probably prove the point. Because here’s the thing: We don’t know. We can’t know. If we could see it, it wouldn’t be our blind spot.

The Real Lesson

The honest answer to “what will historians 200 years from now say we got wrong?” is simple:

We have no idea.

The exercise doesn’t reveal the future. It reveals the present. It shows what we’re anxious about right now, what we think is important, what we’re afraid we’re missing.

History doesn’t judge the past—it judges itself. It tells future generations what they need to believe about where they came from.

That’s not useless. Understanding our own anxieties matters. But let’s not pretend we’re forecasting when we’re really just diagnosing ourselves.

And maybe that’s more useful anyway. Instead of borrowing fake authority from imaginary future historians, we could ask:

• What are we certain about that might be wrong?
• What seems too obvious to question?
• What problems are we not even looking for?

Those questions don’t give us the comfort of imaginary future judgment. But they might actually help us see more clearly right now.

Because that’s all we’ve got—right now. The future historians? They’re too busy dealing with their own moment, telling their own stories, asking their own questions.

They don’t have time to judge us. They’re just trying to make sense of themselves.