We'd have come up with the answers
But the most prescient contributor to “Toward the Year 2018” [published in 1968] was the M.I.T. political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool, whose research interests included social networks and computer simulation. […]
“By 2018 the researcher sitting at his console will be able to compile a cross-tabulation of consumer purchases (from store records) by people of low IQ (from school records) who have an unemployed member of the family (from social security records). That is, he will have the technological capability to do this. Will he have the legal right?” Pool declined to answer that question. “This is not the place to speculate how society will achieve a balance between its desire for knowledge and its desire for privacy,” he insisted. […]
And that was the problem with 1968. People went ahead and built those things without worrying much about the consequences, because they figured that, by 2018, we'd have come up with all the answers.