The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.
Alan Kay in 1984 in his paper Inventing the Future which appears in The AI Business: The Commercial Uses of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Patrick Henry Winston and Karen Prendergast.. As quoted by Eugene Wallingford in a post entitled ALAN KAY'S TALKS AT OOPSLA on November 06, 2004 9:03 PM at the website of the Computer Science section of the University of Northern Iowa.