I recently started a Cafe Society thread: “Predictive failures of science fiction” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=262572 – about how successful SF writers have or have not been in predictiing the future. But, as one poster pointed out, you could make a case that that isn’t there job anyway: “All science fiction is about the present.”
Well and good. But there is also a new breed of non-literary “futurists” who purport to be able to make educated guesses about what is to come. I first became aware of them around 1990, when futurist Marvin Cetron gave a lecture at my law school. Another futurist is Owen Davies. And they have an organization called the World Futurist Society (http://www.wfs.org/), which publishes The Futurist magazine.
After ten years or so, is it possible to make any assessment of how successful the futurist enterprise has been? Are they any good at making predictions about new technologies and new social conditions and their effects, or are they just wasting their time?
Predictions of the Future are older than that. Do you have a list of their predictions, or do they even do that? Every so often you dig up a set of predictions from 1950, or the NY World’s Fair, or something, and they are pretty funny.
In 1978 my advisor ran a conference on the problems of the '80s for computers. It resulted in an entire proceedings and a special issue of Computer on it. I did a column on this a few years ago. People basically predicted what they knew. There were a bunch of IBMers, who predicted more of the mainframe. But Adam Osborne and Portia Isaacson were also involved, and they got the PC just about right.
So, why do the Futurists believe they can do better than anyone else?
Some SF writers were pretty accurate…Jules verne got just about everything right. However, H.G.Welles (his contemporary) got everything wrong! The fascinating thing: academics and intellectuals get together from time to time, and try to project the future…and most of the time they are DEAD WRONG! Take the vaunted “CLUB OF ROME”. This was a group of academics, from the best institutions of europe. They predicted ( :smack: back in the 1970’s) that:
-by 2000 AD, the western world would be bankrupt
-oil and raw material supplies would be exhausted
-there would be massive unemployment and chaos in the world
Thank God, none of this nonsense came true! :smack:
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
Some SF writers were pretty accurate…Jules verne got just about everything right. However, H.G.Welles (his contemporary) got everything wrong! /QUOTE]
Much as I love Verne, he wasn’t that good. For instance, we did not go to the moon shot from a giant cannon. Submarines were around before he wrote about them, so he can’t be credited with that. Wells got the tank right.I’d claim he was more right about going to the moon, because he knew Verne’s method was bunk, and it was better to invent something than to show something obviously wrong. In today’s terms, it’s better to invent a warp drive for interstellar travel than to show a spaceship going faster than light by just accelerating a long time.
The Club of Rome is another indication that futurist predictions are more about the present than the future. Back then a lot of people agreed. Almost every damn story in the Ejler Jakobssen Galaxy and If of the early '70s was set in an earth dying of pollution just about today. Damn depressing stuff.
I’m not sure. I think it’s because they have made “futurism” as such, in all its aspects, the core of their intellectual project.
I’ve perused issues of The Futurist on the newsstand. From what I can see, the group’s world-view resonates with the technophile aspects of Libertarianism – in addition to new technologies, they’re always talking about new social institutions, and methods of solving social problems, which will spontaneously emerge, or be invented by parties outside of government.
If the Club of Rome erred by being too pessimistic, it may be that the World Futurist Society errs by being too optimistic.