The best way to predict the future is to invent it

The exact sentence appears in print under Alan Kay's own name in his 1989 Stanford Engineering article "Predicting the Future," where he recounts telling anxious Xerox executives at PARC, "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" — and he used the identical line in his own 1983 article in the EDUCOM Bulletin. Kay has consistently said he coined it in a fit of passion at a 1971 PARC meeting between researchers and Xerox planners, a claim he repeated in a 1998 email and one corroborated by the trade press (InfoWorld reported the PARC maxim in 1982) and by eyewitness Bonnie MacBird, later his wife, who heard him say it. The frequently mentioned "predecessors" do not undercut this: Dennis Gabor's 1963 Inventing the Future wrote that "the future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented," and versions credited to Peter Drucker or Ilya Prigogine use "create it" — genuinely different formulations, not rival claims to this exact wording. In short, both the anecdote and the precise sentence trace directly to Kay, making this a verified attribution rather than the folkloric aphorism it is sometimes assumed to be.