Science fiction author William Gibson has long been predicting the future, and he’s been writing long enough to know that many of the things he has predicted have eventually come true in contemporary society. Now he has a new prediction: future generations will look at the present day as a joke. He spoke to Mother Jones:

If could have any information from our future, I would want to know not what they’re doing but what they think about us. Because what we think about Victorians is nothing like what the Victorians thought about themselves. It would be a nightmare for them. Everything they thought they were, we think is a joke. And everything that we think was cool about them, they weren’t even aware of.