I really do hope that you will listen to your dear friend Banquo. You should definitely be wary of those tricky witches. They are bad news. As they said in the beginning of the play, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" (I.i.12). These ugly witches bring tidings of what seems to be great news, but take caution, because what may seem fair could easily turn foul.
If the witches never told Macbeth that he will one day be king, would he still have become king? Ahh, destiny, fate, and influence, what strange things art thou. My personal opinion is that predicting the future is impossible. The future is undecided and unforeseeable. I imagine that the witches saw a web of different possibilities in their little glass balls (do olden day witches use those?), picked the one most favourable to them (which would probably be the one filled with the most chaos and destruction), and manipulated people into choosing that path. Poor Macbeth would have never seen it coming.
The witches are the puppeteers of the play. They influence each move of every character with their riddles full of contradiction. After all, they are the ones who set Macbeth on this collision course for disaster. The first two predictions the witches made weren't really predictions at all. They had already happened. Macbeth just wasn't aware that they had. By telling Macbeth two pieces of information that is sure to come true, the witches make him think that the future is set in stone. This (and Lady Macbeth) solidifies his resolve to kill the king. I believe that Macbeth always had choices. Each choice he would have set him on a slightly different path. His future was not predetermined and it would have been entirely possible to avoid the horrible things that are to happen later in the story. I think that throughout the play, the witches will continue telling fortunes and manipulating people to make bad choices. Mistakes will pile upon mistakes and soon we'll have a snowball of mistakes rolling down a steep mountain of regret.
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