We read the columns every year, watch the TV shows (I am getting a laugh out of 2057, right now), watch Sci-Fi movies, listen to Bill Gates. The reality is that our guesses about the future are, not just way off, but comically way off.
Why do we still bother?
Because it’s entertaining?
2057 was disappointingly dumb. Well at least there still isn’t universal healthcare in 2057 
Astrology and psychics are pretty big too. I think the key is that it isn’t what you say, but how boldly you proclaim it with a little mystical flair.
Futurists as a whole have a laughable track record even within a 10 year period or less but somebody needs to say something to fill the articles and TV shows. It would be a little boring if not honest if everyone just threw their hands up and admitted that we are all quacks at it.
Jules Verne had a pretty good sense of what would be feasible, based on the nascent technology of his day. What bugs me more is when the Star Trek people try to claim credit for cellphones and floppy disks because some of the original-series props were vaguely similar.
That is perhaps the worst piece of non-fiction writing I have ever seen in my life and I am dead serious.
The post, or the article?
Yeah, I recorded them and watched them earlier this evening. Really, really bad. Maybe 10 minutes worth of programing in the 3 hours I watched. Well, I actually FF’ed thru a lot of it. Glad I taped it instead of watching live.
Nothing against very short term forecasting (call it trendspotting). Someone needs to be preparing the next generation of stuff, after all. And with long development cycles of new technologies, there is always room for whishful thinking of what it could be used for.
My problem is with those “in the future, we will be doing the same stuff we do today but with a lot of 3D graphics and silver overcoats while we ride our flying cars”
Most of the technology reviewers I read, have given up entirely on trying to predict future trends. You can only get it wrong so many times and still expect your audience to continue believing in you.
The reality is that, although most new technologies appear as a solution to an existing problem, they are quickly adopted by a different set of users for a completely novel use. Predicting those uses is borderline impossible and that is what makes long term futurology the fruitless task it is.
Don’t get me wrong, I love watching shows about flying cars (which have been 10 years away for the past 50 years) and smart clothes and all. But the stories and acting that went along with them was so stupid. Not to mention the ridiculous Star Trek-esq future world where even your lowly call center rep is model attractive and sits in a mission control center surrounded by holo-monitors and space-doors.
And I have how everything has to be “futurized”. “Wow…how did we ever get by without coffee cybermugs and web-toilets?”
And how well will the soldier of the future’s 200 lbs of nano-cyber inviso suit work in the deserts of sub-Saharan Africa?
Yes, futurology was widely predicted to disappear by 2005. But the people who predicted this were wrong.
Current futurologists swear that futurology will be dead by 2025. Right after we perfect cold fusion
Heh - my wife and I got a laugh from that as well.
Does “futurology” include prediction of social/cultural changes as well as technological progress?
I’m trying to envision how anyone back in the '40s could have predicted the African-American civil rights movement, the '60s counterculture, the New Left, the sexual revolution, the feminist revolution, etc. Or how anyone in the '60s could have predicted the conservative backlash against all those things.
What I remember most from the 60s was that they predicted how everything at home would be done by robots so that Mrs. Housewife wouldn’t have anything to do. But they all missed on the fact that social changes would take so many women out of their house and off to the workplace.
By the way, I don’t remember much about the book because I read it so long ago, but the big thing back then was Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. Anyone here who read it recently could tell us where Toffler was right, and where he erred?
It’s been ages since I read it, but I remember his big thesis was that in the future things would be geared to much narrower audiences, and choice for the individual would widen. Sure enough, we have cable TV instead of three networks, and the Internet instead of just Ma Bell to communicate with each other. So, overall, I’d say Toffler was right.
Not sure if it was society which did this - I think it was ‘the war’, which was beyond society’s control. If you look at the reason behind any of the wars no reasonable, sane, educated ‘average person’ would have supported any of them. On top of that comes the kick in the teeth when you return home and see that your social stability had been blown away - you’re wife isn’t going to just sit at home and cook for you anymore, and there’s no jobs for you anyway as the people who engineered the war have blown all the cash.
Toffler was living through a backlash against a war too, and through the pinnacle of the realisation of the American dream (space travel etc), it was also being shown to be an enforced dream (altamont) which the average person didn’t want either. I think Hunter Thompson covered this period better than Toffler ever could in Hells Angels and others.
Just like some of you are saying that Futurology is dead and that we can’t predict the future…how can we predict the success or failure of Futurology in the near future? Maybe in the “near” future, Futurology might become better and more successful in predicting the “far” future.
If Futurology is a dying art because its becoming worse at predicting (someone mentioned it was predicted to end in 2025), then doesn’t that invalidate the predictions about the end of Futurology? How can we predict when Futurology is going to end when our current studies and results of Futurology are “comically way off”?
Not to mention the hungover guy tripping over the robot and falling out the 3rd story window. I guess material science in the future doesn’t include shatterproof glass.
As an avid S.F. fan when younger I recall that the date the "future "started was 2000.
The futuristic things/events we have today in my eyes (though some are now quite old)are…
The Channel Tunnel
The moon landings,artificial satellites ,space station ,probes to other planets ,Hubble telescope.
Mobile phones
P.C.s , the internet ,cash machines and computer supervised activities
Microwave ovens
Nuclear power stations,powered ships/subs(not for it myself but in my youth they were the “Future”)
Biometrics
Genetic engineering
Multi channel T.V.
Lasers
Don’t forget these. After waking up on January 1, 2000, only to find that I did not have a flying car parked in my driveway and that the likelyhood of commecial moon flights via Pan Am within a year were still astonishingly low, I was thrilled to see this invention announced in 2001. I remember thinking that for the first time, I honestly felt like I was living in the future. Around the same time, webcams became really popular, proving that those long-awaited video-phones weren’t as stupid an idea as they seemed. (But people don’t want to get dressed in order to answer the phone, people said! :smack: 
)
BTW, I turned 30 in January. I have no idea when doctors recommend getting that first colonoscopy, but I’m more and more glad to be living in the future with every birthday! :eek:
