Future Terms From THE YEAR 2000!!!

Y2K was to be the year of doom and/or a new era. Recently unearthed Wall Street Journal Article reveals NEW terms: meme, cobot, searchjack, girlcott & more for use (?) IN THE 2000s

Today I was doing research for a customer piece on cobots, or collaborative robots meant to work alongside humans, often in industrial settings. These devices, according to the beautifully basic northwestern.edu¹ piece shown below, were originally conceived of in 1996 as “programmable constraint machines.”

Invention of cobots per Northwestern article

However, thanks to a contest that made then-postdoc Brent Gillespie $50 richer, these devices were renamed cobots. In THE YEAR 2000, the Wall Street Journal published a list of future terms that we were going to use in THE YEAR 2000 and beyond. Most were wildly, and hilariously, inaccurate, though some are quite prescient. Among these, “cobot” seems to have survived the initial hype and/or was resurrected and redirected for marketing purposes.²

As it turns out, the WSJ article has a lot more awesome tidbits which you can check yourself. Or see my thoughts on this piece from my vantage point in the closing days of 2026:

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Predicted terms for THE YEAR 2000

First, the terms: anacronym, cellie, cobot, cred, DINS, dirt road, EGD, embedded ubiquitous computing, emergent, 404, Frankenfood, girlcott, homepreneur, hourglass mode, identity theft, infowar, keyboard plaque, keypal, memes, mobile server, mouse potato, open, optical computer, optionaire, Outernet, pagejack, percussive maintenance, permalancer, plug-and-play hire, POTS, -scape, searchjack, -sphere, smartsize, smartway, splurgent, time suck, tribal marketing, Turing Test, unified messaging system, uninstall, venture catalyst, venture philanthropy, vertical portal (or vortal), voice-jail system, voice novel

So that’s what that word memes

Terms actually in use today: cobot, identity theft, memes, time suck, Turing Test. Also cred (maybe) - was in active use a while in the early 2000s, but I’m not going to count it as of today.

47 words of future past, 5 of which are in use today. So a success rate of 10.6%; roughly on par with other futurists if you’ve perused any outdated forward-looking works.³

In-Use Terms Commentary

Below are the WSJ definitions of the five terms deemed (by me) as in-use today, followed by my thoughts. Feel free to agree/disagree/add your own words in the comments!

• meme: noun, plural. Building blocks of culture, similar to genes but passed on by imitation, not heredity. Examples include tunes, ideas, catch phrases, ways of building arches, belief in life after death. Some scientists think memes even affect biology -- that increases in human cranium size were driven by cultural forces such as the creation of language.
  
  -JC: I’m honestly still not quite sure what a meme is.⁴ This apparently became a thing in around 2006 or so, which seemed to mean an image with text superimposed. But it also seems like more than that. So this is probably a good enough description… though increasing cranium size seems like a stretch.

• cobot: noun. A collaborative robot designed to help workers on the job instead of replacing them. For example, in an auto plant, a cobot might help a human being guide a bulky dashboard panel into a car.
  
  -JC: Slightly different than our current understanding of cobots, but pretty close. Almost like some marketer read that very article and said, “yep, we can use that one.”

• identity theft: noun. Stealing of human credentials, such as a Social Security number. Many people fear that if they shop on the Internet they will fall prey to identity thieves.
  
  -JC: Again, I feel like this is something heavily promoted by marketers to help sell a product, i.e. identity theft protection services. Unlike how cobot highlights helpfulness, identity theft highlights negative actions in the world from which you need protection (Which I think itself is a marketing concept that wasn’t covered in Clemson’s Mechanical engineering curriculum).
  
  Sort of like in any number of gangster movies where you “just might” get a brick through your window from some… unnamed bad people in the neighborhood if you don’t buy protection.

  

  Is this how memes work?

  On a related note, ever try to uninstall antivirus protection services? Seems to me they were a sort of virus themselves.

• time suck: noun. Slang for something that wastes time. Usage: “I spent three hours sitting in traffic this morning -- what a time suck!” Predecessor idiom: time sink.
  
  -JC: one might say that our entire modern economy is built on time sucks.⁵ I’ve yet to use Tic Tok to any great extent, but I did sit by someone on a plan who just kept scrolling through videos after apparently buying the airline’s in-flight Wi-Fi service. Not that video games that I played quite a bit in the past… and occasionally now are really any better.

• Turning Test: noun. A test proposed 50 years ago by British mathematician Alan Turing as a yardstick for artificial intelligence. One part of the test checks to see whether a human interlocutor engaged in casual keyboard conversation can distinguish between the responses of a person and those from the computer.
  
  -JC: In our age of AI advancements, this term seems to have been common in technical discussions a few years ago, but the test was supposedly passed in 2014, perhaps making it largely irrelevant now. Interestingly enough, The Imitation Game movie, about Alan Turing, came out in 2014, which likely gave the term a bit of a boost at the time.

JC commentary:

It’s kind of disappointing that voice-jail system hasn’t become a common term, though maybe I have heard it thrown around here or there. Look for the voice jail concept, if not the term itself, to become even more insidious as AI takes over operator jobs once held by humans.

Or maybe AI can wait on the phone for your… OR they could even call you back rather than making you listen to hold music. I heard AI is in operation at Wendy’s⁶, drive-throughs, and perhaps a other fast food establishments.

Presumably the image was deemed inappropriate for the Internet

DINS does not stand for Deutsches Institut für Normung, sorry to my 11 subscribers in Germany. POTS, however, does stand for Plain Old Telephone service. This term might be familiar to phone phreaks of old, but seems rather dated now. Who uses landline phones outside of work anymore?

Other notable terms:

A short list, i.e. not a time suck. Do read the rest of the WSJ piece for more info:

• Real concept, different term: embedded ubiquitous computing, mobile server, homepreneur

• Especially ridiculous/notable: DINS, girlcott, keyboard plaque, keypal, optical computer, pagejack, uninstall

What new words for THE YEAR 2026?

If history is any judge, whatever I would write here would be wildly inaccurate. In fact, I’m impressed with how on-target one or two terms seem to be from the Y2K list. I suspect we will see signifiant terminology pop up referring to AI, its impact on our lives, and how annoying it is generally. Please let me know your thoughts on upcoming Y2.25K terminology in the comments!

Of course, if AGI is realized in the next few years, I’d like to note that I was making a lighthearted joke here, and not demeaning any capabilities of our new robot overlords. I come in peace. Actually, I was here first... Given the history of humanity when interacting existing cultures, and sci-fi related to intelligent robotics, we may all be in for a wild ride.

Hope this article has given me some further cred, going into THE YEAR 2026⁷ and that whatever connection sent it your way isn’t a dirt road. -JC

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly-ish about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness. -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

1. I’m not even kidding about it being “beautifully basic.” That almost lends something credibility these days.

It seems like 90% of the sites you find when you search are riddled with ads and written purely with search algorithms in mind and/or exclusively with AI. To be fair, I’ve written my share of articles that probably fell into the search-optimized category, but I tried to make them informative without just putting in extra words for words sake. This style of writing work has largely dried up for me, and I expect most of what comes out now is exclusively AI drivel.

2. And a good term it is! I actually got in touch with Brent Gillespie, who is now a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and was nice enough to email me back to confirm that he was indeed the originator of the term. In his mind, the term was obvious. Still, someone has to think of it first, and — among the right company, i.e. engineers — that’s a pretty cool thing to be able to lay claim to.

FWIW, I had a professor for dynamics (one of the harder mechanical engineering classes) who could draw a perfect circle on a blackboard freehand. It’s not quite as prestigious as inventing a technical term, but we all still thought that was pretty neat.

3. My grandmother had a copy of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book, Future Shock. I read quite a bit of it, but my impression was that it was way off-base even 15 years ago or whenever I picked it up. Seems like there was something about feeding disembodied dog heads with a nutrient solution… though I might be getting that very mixed up with something else.

If you’re looking for an offbeat, tech-adjacent title, may I recommend: The World’s Worst Weapons (From Exploding Guns to Malfunctioning Missiles). It’s kind of silly, but I thoroughly enjoyed it after picking it up at Barnes and Noble on a whim years ago.

Like an airboat. For the land. With a machine gun.

4. I went to a hacking, i.e. mostly ethical electronics experimentation, conference years ago to present my ClearCrawler strandbeest, which was a great experience. One of my fellow presenters, who I believe flew in from India, wore a Hank Williams Jr. t-shirt — that some in the USA would find offensive — during his presentation, which I found out he purchased Stateside because he needed to wear something dark.

As he was younger than me, I thought it was a joke that I didn’t quite understand. IIRC, after the presentation someone in the green room asked him why he wore it. He was quite taken aback by his apparent faux pas, repeating that he “didn’t want to be a me-me.” I found myself thinking that the term is “meme,” but perhaps the term is actually “me-me.” I didn’t correct him, but apparently I was right.

So I’m slightly more with-it than I suspected I was at the time. So take that whoever chooses to question my cred, to use a predicted Y2K term.

5. Reading Tech Adjacent is the antonym of “time suck.”

6.

7. THE YEAR 2026 doesn’t quite have the same ring as THE YEAR 2000.