We predicted the future: Space Welders, 2017 vs 2026🔗

For two years, every week, Mike and Steve sat down to argue about where technology was heading. The show wrapped in 2017. It's now 2026. So: how did they do?

We went back through the archive and graded the big calls.

Virtual reality: over-hyped ⭐⭐🔗

No topic dominated the early episodes like VR. Oculus, the consumer Rift, Valve's Lighthouse tracking, Mozilla shipping a VR browser, "AR is the new VR" the week of E3. The show caught the exact peak of the hype.

The hindsight: the boom they were watching cooled hard. VR never became the next smartphone. The interesting twist is the one they only half-saw coming, mid-show, in the E3 episode: AR, not VR, was the more durable bet, and it took until the 2020s to matter.

Artificial intelligence: under-called ⭐⭐⭐⭐🔗

This is the fascinating one. The show ran before the modern AI wave. They talked about "gamifying big data analysis," automated stock-trading algorithms, and an episode literally titled The Naked Data Scientist back when data science was "the sexy profession."

They were right that machine learning would eat the world. What nobody in 2017 priced in, them included, was how fast and how general it would get. The OpenAI "unsupervised sentiment neuron" they flagged as a curiosity was an early ancestor of the models that now write show notes for this very archive. (Hi.)

Self-driving cars: right to be skeptical ⭐⭐⭐⭐🔗

Google's autonomous cars hitting public roads, the Lighthouse-style sensor arms race: the show covered the optimism but kept a healthy eyebrow raised. Nine years on, that skepticism aged well. Robotaxis exist in 2026, but the "next year" full autonomy that was perpetually promised in 2017 is still arriving in slices, city by city.

The Internet of Things: called the bubble ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐🔗

Samsung, Citrix and everyone else piling into IoT; Steve Wozniak warning of an "Internet of Things bubble." The show repeatedly poked at the hype. Verdict: the smart home did arrive, but the indiscriminate "put a chip in everything" gold rush deflated almost exactly as warned. Best call on the board.

Space: the optimists won ⭐⭐⭐⭐🔗

Plenty of rockets, plenty of NASA. The standout is the TRAPPIST-1 episode, seven Earth-like planets, the hosts cheerfully claiming real estate. The space optimism of the show has mostly been vindicated: launch cadence in 2026 would have looked like science fiction in 2017. Mars, of course, is still "a few years out." It always is.

Crypto: the blind spot ⭐⭐🔗

The "Google Tax" and GST on overseas purchases got more airtime than Bitcoin. Understandable in 2015, but it's the one tidal wave the show mostly stood next to without noticing.

Final grade🔗

Strong on skepticism, strongest where they refused to believe the hype (IoT, self-driving). Weakest on the thing that was hardest to see: that a quiet research curiosity would become the defining technology of the decade.

Not bad for two guys and a microphone. Browse the full archive and grade them yourself.