Back in 2015, there was a lot excitement surrounding and attention paid to the date in Back to the Future Part II of October 21, 2015 and how that future was portrayed in the film. There were flying cars, hoverboards (that really hover), self-lacing shoes among so many other innovations.

I don’t think it will get nearly the attention, but the future of 2016 was portrayed in a music video from 1983.  Many might not remember that Rick Springfield’s “Human Touch” video takes place in the year 2016.  Apparently, in the video, Rick Springfield froze himself back in the 80s and is reanimated in 2016.  He seems to have a conversation with a computer named Sally (which is amazingly close to Siri) which informs him he is in the year 2016. He seems to debate whether he can love a computer, decides he needs the touch of a human instead, performs a dance number and then determines that 2016 is so bad he would rather get frozen again.

Rick Springfield released “Human Touch” in 1983 as the second single off of his Living in Oz album. It did not have quite the success of some of his previous singles, but did reach #18 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was his last single to achieve significant pop success.  The lyrics (which Springfield wrote himself) are very prophetic for 1983 and could be interpreted to be specifically about computers becoming more prominent in the making of music or just taking over our daily lives.  And that was 33 years ago!  Here are a portion of the lyrics for Rick Springfield’s “Human Touch”:

Everybody’s talking to computers
They’re all dancing to a drum machine
I know I’m living on the outside
Scared of getting caught between
I’m so cool and calculated alone in the modern world

But Sally has a hard time holding back
The alley to her heart is a beaten track
She’s got the love monkey riding on her back
You want love I got it, come on girl

We all need the human touch
We all need the human touch
I need it, the human touch
We all need the human touch
We all need it, and I need it too

You can see how 2016 was envisioned 33 years ago in 1983.  Here is the music video for “Human Touch” by Rick Springfield…

What do you think?  The sentiment is quite prophetic, but the specifics not so much. Other than the Siri-like computer, I don’t think they got much else right especially the clothing. Most people imagined we would dress so much differently in the future for some reason. Lots of typical cheesiness like you would expect from the early-80s, but the part that gets me the most is that after getting a glimpse of 2016, Rick decides to re-freeze himself. Maybe that was the most accurate prediction of them all?

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