Wired on Friday: Last week I popped into the future, courtesy of Silicon Valley's Institute for the Future, which is full of smart researchers who show guests their 10-year forecasts, writes Danny O'Brien

The institute displayed a wry set of possibilities coming down the pike in the next 10 years and asked businesses and commentators for their opinions of the future, both near and far. Forecasting undoubtedly says as much about its contemporary setting than any future, and it is intriguing to mull on what the institute tells us about Silicon Valleys' view of the world.

To a European eye, the institute seems like it is out of another century. It is a non-profit research institute, funded and supported by corporations, which have exclusive access to many of its predictions. Such set-ups generally enjoy a high reputation and reasonable income in the American corporate landscape: SRI International (where the mouse was invented), the Rand Corporation and the MIT Media Lab all echo this structure.

The institute was founded in the 1960s and, along with its sister institutions, its style of prediction sometimes smells more of the mid-20th than the mid-21st century. By turns bubbling and optimistic, or dire and foreboding, they are like mini-Twilight Zone dramas.

Nothing is off limits - but sometimes it feels that corporate sponsorship means an unconscious downplaying of a modern suspicion of their motives. Few of the 10-year forecasts end up like most 3am dinner party predictions, with doom and global warming for everyone, or what webwriter Joshua Ellis calls "the grim meathook future". No one here is going to sketch out a post-apocalyptic scenario to the assembled vice-presidents and senior executives where they are are killed and eaten by their own janitorial staff.

But then, the institute has been predicting the future since 1968, and the world has fitted their plots rather better than the Club of Rome contemporaries who said we'd be out of ozone and knee-deep in population overflow by now.

The institute predicted the move to digital, the power of the PC and the growth of the network, which are all forces at work today and many led by Silicon Valley companies. Many Silicon Valley companies have prospered because the world has fitted those predictions - or has been made to fit it.

But what of the future? The wealth of data and possibilities the institute throws at you can be overwhelming. At the institute, as in the valley as a whole, there's a healthy - or unhealthy, depending on how you look at it - relationship with the medical system.

The conversation at my dinner table at the institute was about dealing with America's ageing workforce (the larger corporations' representatives look very worried about their retirees, whose support will be bankrolled by generous mid-20th century benefits packages).

The healthcare industry is one which Silicon Valley has been repeatedly bumping into over the last decade. Dotcommers like AOL's Steve Case and Netscape's Jim Barksdale have explored ways to inject some efficiency into the artery's of the sclerotic health system in the US.

Because corporations bear so much of the burden of insuring the US population, they're seeking to fix its problems in a private sector way with better and bigger markets, more and better data-sharing and mining for insurance companies, funding innovative start-ups creating tools for doctors and hospitals to manage their loads.

Again, to a European eye much of this approach seems alien and piecemeal. Faced with equally pressing problems in our own health systems, we can't imagine that anything but large government investment, and equally large IT infrastructure improvements will help. Corporate data-sharing smacks of ghoulish privacy violations - start-ups for hospitals has the smell of profiteering from misfortune.

One can imagine some of the small-scale experiments of US corporations crossing the Atlantic. The low-cost superstore company Wal-Mart is saving on health costs for its staff by opening up basic healthcare centres and pharmacies within its stores.

The institute receives funding to plan a "Health Horizons" forecast of healthcare opportunities in the next three to 10 years. Their focus has moved to a more anthropological than business-oriented approach - and for good reason. The people of the US, growing more and more distrusting of corporate health insurance and even doctors, are taking more control of their medical treatment.

One of the driving engines of this has been the internet. Patients go to the web first and consult their doctor on what they've learnt. They self-diagnose and, through orders from overseas pharmaceutical companies, self-medicate.

In one of the more far-off futures that the institute imagines, surgery and treatment have become expressions of individual choice, where humans decide to change their bodies and even their genders not for reasons of health, but expression. Like so much of valley futurism, there's something peculiarly local about its enthusiasm. It surely looks like a strange and distant future, until you step outside and overhear your average Californian tattooed Starbucks barrista talking about his gym regime.

Sick people googling for their symptomatology - and being met by companies waiting for your search - is a great test of whether your are optimistic or pessimistic about the future. Is it desperation meeting exploitation or personal autonomy meeting a potential business opportunity? For the thinkers in Silicon Valley, it's edging towards the latter.

And perhaps they're right? We talk of a healthy cynicism scepticism - but what if what is really healthy is to look forward and plan a future that you want, not a future that you fear. Or at least, put a brave face on the inevitable.

Danny O'Brien is activism co-ordinator with the Electronic Frontier Foundation