# Why were futurists so wrong about life today? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 5, 2014, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079 "2014-06-05T01:02:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/41 "2014-06-06T02:47:30Z")
> [@installLSC](#): > > How widely believed were the futurists? Were they legitimately believed to be predictors of the future? Or were their era’s version of sensationalist blogs, fun to read but not taken seriously? Sorry to do this again, but the answer is yes and no. Unquestionably, a lot of the articles in the popular science magazines and Sunday newspaper features were the era’s equivalent of clickbait. It was the job of those editors to be rah-rah about technology and boost every conceivable advance or something that could someday maybe even soon be an advance. (Flying cars? Old hat. How about flying tanks, man. [No joke](http://blog.modernmechanix.com/flying-tanks-that-shed-their-wings/#more).) But there were also lots and lots of serious books and articles by serious scientists trying to predict the future world and prepare people for it. They worried about the lack of food for the growing population and lauded the strides made in artificial food production. They worried about machines taking peoples’ jobs and lauded the easier life technology would provide. They worried that speed would kill people and lauded faster travel. IOW, they were exactly like us. You can turn anywhere and find pundits’ dystopian and utopian predictions and warnings about the future, today and any day during the 20th century and for most of the 19th. You have to plan for the future even though it’s totally unpredictable. That’s the great paradox. Nobody’s can do it and yet the public demands that they not be caught by surprise. So you portend. ---
**Author:** ![Ornery\_Bob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/da6949/32.png) [@Ornery\_Bob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ornery_Bob)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/42 "2014-06-06T03:00:36Z")
I’m a “futurist”… but at my job we call them sales forecasts, not predictions. My track record is pretty good and I’m rarely off by more than 20%. But then again, I’m working with a large amount data focusing on a very small part of the future. Some futures are easier to predict than others. ---
**Author:** ![ralfy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ralfy/32/600_2.png) [@ralfy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralfy)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/43 "2014-06-06T03:36:28Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Right, this is why raw materials are so much more expensive nowadays, and finished goods are even more expensive. > > Except in real life we have the opposite of that. Yes, some things are more expensive than they were back in 1954. Lots of commodities and finished goods are much, much cheaper. And I’m not just talking about things like consumer electronics, which barely existed as a market in 1954. I’m talking about things like pots and pans and scissors and chairs. The reason steel mills all over the United States closed down is not that steel was too expensive, it was that steel was so cheap and abundant that there was no way to make a profit producing and selling it. > > Of course the reason futurists can’t predict the future is because the future is produced by billions of people all acting independently. Even a really smart futurist can’t predict the output of millions of engineers and businessmen and writers and social activists. > > And so futurists take present trends and draw a line tangent to the existing curve, and call it good. A futurist can’t predict inherently unpredictable things. If a futurist in the 1970s knew the computer industry so intimately that they could predict the computing revolution and the internet, they’d be the next captain of industry, not some guy writing for Omni at ten cents a word. Most human beings today earn only around $3 or so daily, and only a fraction earns $10 or more daily. For most, pots, pans, scissors, and chairs are generally not cheap. More ironic, several of them are the ones who manufacture the same pots, pans, scissors, and chairs, which is one of the reasons why for the middle class these products are so cheap. The other reason is cheap oil. And yet oil production per capita peaked way back in 1979 (see the chart in the link): > **[Peak oil? What peak oil?](https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2013/07/peak-oil-what-peak-oil.html)** > > A blog about collapse as caused by depletion of mineral resources and climate change If so, why didn’t the global economy experience a permanent decline? It’s probably because much of energy and resource consumption was limited to a few, i.e., a small global middle class. The problem is that that global middle class started growing, leading to increased consumption of oil and other resources (see the first chart in the link, showing consumption for the rest of the world vs. that of the U.S., EU, and Japan): > **[Peak Oil Demand is Already a Huge Problem](https://ourfiniteworld.com/2013/04/11/peak-oil-demand-is-already-a-huge-problem/)** > > We in the United States, the Euro-zone, and Japan are already past peak oil demand. Oil demand has to do with how much oil we can afford. Many of the developed nations are not able to outbid the de… likely driven by a growing global middle class (see the expected numbers and percentages in first graphic of the link): > **[The rise of the global middle class](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-22956470)** > > Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty but can the middle class continue to grow? which partly supports my argument. I leave it to forum members to see connections between increased consumption coupled with lack of resources and environmental damage, global warming, and wars. ---
**Author:** ![ralfy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ralfy/32/600_2.png) [@ralfy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralfy)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 3:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/44 "2014-06-06T03:40:07Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > The problem is that the trend _did_ continue. People don’t understand exponential growth. Yes, those fifty years saw more change than all of the years before them… but the same can be said of any fifty year period in history. But futurists extrapolated out linearly, assuming the same rate of technological growth, instead of an exponentially-increasing rate, and so their predictions fell ludicrously short of the actuality. That reminds me of Albert Bartlett’s lecture on exponential growth: The point is that such growth was made possible through significant consumption of resources and energy, in turn leading to multiple problems involving environmental damage, overpopulation, etc. ---
**Author:** ![ralfy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ralfy/32/600_2.png) [@ralfy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralfy)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/45 "2014-06-06T03:44:42Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > Good point. From the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, there were a series of watershed innovations in transportation technology, each of which changed people’s lives in a major way. Railroads in the mid-1800’s, then automobiles, large oceangoing liners, automobiles, aircraft, and then space travel at the end. _It seemed as if the future would introduce even more wondrous new forms of travel._ However, what happened was that after Apollo (roughly), the progress of progress changed. Instead of concentrating on making new kinds of transportation, a large amount of effort went in to making small and gradual, but inexorable, changes to existing technology. Cars got more reliable, planes got faster, etc. > > E.g. cruise ships of today aren’t fundamentally different from the RMS Titanic. They may be a little bigger, stronger, safer, more luxurious, more fuel efficient, and more connected (e.g. satellite Internet access vs. one or two morse code terminals) but they are still based on the same idea and you can trace the history though small innovations. We should probably look at this issue in light not only of innovations but how many benefited from them or suffered because of them. For example, infant mortality rates plunged, life expectancy rates rose, and other benefits were made possible thanks to the use of oil for manufacturing and mechanized agriculture. And yet most people worldwide still earn only a few dollars a day and lack one or more basic needs, environmental damage has been significant, human population ballooned, wars have remained significant (coupled with incredible increases in arms production and damaging effects), and we now face the threat of a resource crunch, the long-term effects of global warming, and more conflict due to high food and oil prices, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/46 "2014-06-06T03:46:11Z")
> [@ralfy](#): > > And yet oil production per capita peaked way back in 1979 (see the chart in the link): > > [Cassandra's Legacy: Peak oil? What peak oil?](http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2013/07/peak-oil-what-peak-oil.html) > > If so, why didn’t the global economy experience a permanent decline? It’s probably because much of energy and resource consumption was limited to a few, i.e., a small global middle class. Or because you’re completely wrong about the importance of oil no matter how many threads you perpetuate that myth. ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 3:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/47 "2014-06-06T03:52:49Z")
Would this count? [27 Mind-Blowing Things Accurately Predicted by Movies](http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_570_27-mind-blowing-things-accurately-predicted-by-movies/) Granted, Cracked is a humor site, but they’re pretty spot on here. ---
**Author:** ![ralfy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ralfy/32/600_2.png) [@ralfy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralfy)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/48 "2014-06-06T03:57:10Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Or because you’re completely wrong about the importance of oil no matter how many threads you perpetuate that myth. From what I gathered, oil is a very important component, especially for delivery via cargo ships, the use of petrochemicals, etc. About the peak, the chart uses data from different sources. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/49 "2014-06-06T04:00:30Z")
> [@Guinastasia](#): > > Would this count? [27 Mind-Blowing Things Accurately Predicted by Movies](http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_570_27-mind-blowing-things-accurately-predicted-by-movies/) > > Granted, Cracked is a humor site, but they’re pretty spot on here. Perfect example of postdiction. They rummaged around in the megazillions of bytes of past and found some things that match up to actuality. (And some “predictions” of things that were already happening.) If you were given the entire past and any resemblance at all to the present as your bar, wouldn’t you \*expect \*to find lots and lots of matches? It would only be interesting if you didn’t. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 4:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/50 "2014-06-06T04:39:02Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > The volume of people flying and the low cost has basically destroyed the greyhound bus business, for example. Although certain factors do keep some bus operations booming. The diminishing utility of short-haul flying since 9/11 is one, and hub-and-spoke airline routing is another. Finally, alternative bus lines like Mega and Bolt were doing well, last I heard. They dispense with big-city bus terminals and their unsavory reputations, but then curbside boarding/deboarding doesn’t appeal to everyone. While the actual movement from point A to point B is cheaper, it seems like accommodations have gone through the roof. Or is that a mistaken impression, and it’s really just a matter of general inflation? It can’t just be a weak dollar, because even just traveling domestically hotels seem to be a lot more expensive in any destination locale. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 6:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/51 "2014-06-06T06:42:12Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > (IIRC, Asimov had a story in the 50’s about a society so dependent on pocket calculators they’d forgotten basic math by hand). [The Feeling of Power](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power). ---
**Author:** ![Cheesesteak](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cheesesteak/32/3694_2.png) [@Cheesesteak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cheesesteak)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 9:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/52 "2014-06-06T09:40:31Z")
> [@SmartAlecCat](#): > > Considering the breadth of questions I can type into my browser’s search box and get an almost immediate answer, I’d say people of 50 years ago would be pretty impressed… But it’s still not AI, you can’t have a conversation with it like it’s the HAL9000. It doesn’t take long to realize that it’s just sorting information and giving you links to pages that match the terms in your question. You could probably even rearrange the words of your question and get most of the same answers, there is no actual understanding behind it. Have you seen the latest in [Robotic Innovation](http://asimo.honda.com/)? It can run as fast as a preschooler, walk up a flight of stairs, and even hold a tray of snacks without spilling it. We can send a robot to Mars, teleconference the 4 corners of the Earth, and pull any information you want, instantly to your phone, yet humanoid robots are still less capable than a kindergartner. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 10:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/53 "2014-06-06T10:05:10Z")
> [@Cheesesteak](#): > > … We can send a robot to Mars, teleconference the 4 corners of the Earth, and pull any information you want, instantly to your phone, yet humanoid robots are still less capable than a kindergartner. Good thing. It’s the only reason 3/4ths of employed humanity still has their (shitty low paid) job. ---
**Author:** ![Chief\_Pedant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@Chief\_Pedant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chief_Pedant)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 10:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/54 "2014-06-06T10:45:03Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > Are you under the impression that the oceans will rise because of predicted future trends? 'Cause no. They’re going to rise based on _present_ trends. You might as well say that we can’t predict what a Treasury bill will pay in 10 years because futurists are often wrong. I guess I was under the impression the longer term significant rise is a predicted future trend, depending on how accurate AGW models turn out to be, and to what extend current trend directions remain the same, in the same directions, or change either directions or slope. We’ve had an 8" rise in a hundred and fifty years thought mostly due to thermal expansion. Over the longer past term (thousands of years), a [huge rise](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise#mediaviewer/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png). Over the near past term (three decades), a more rapid rate of rise (but not much in absolute terms against the scale of thousands of years). But yeah; I’m under the impression that the ocean will rise x amount in the future because of future predicted trends, based on various mathematical modelings which use parameterizations and assumptions that are as good as we can make them, including how much the net land ice will change depending on precipitation patterns based on predicted amounts of atmospheric warming and other variables. Are you under the impression this future rise has already happened, and is not a prediction subject to the same sort of thing that has caused us to predict inaccurately in the past or something? ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 1:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/55 "2014-06-06T13:37:48Z")
It’s not a prediction based on _stimuli_ which aren’t already happening. We don’t have to start doing anything _new_ for sea level rise to occur. ---
**Author:** ![Pixel\_Dent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/bc8723/32.png) [@Pixel\_Dent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pixel_Dent)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/56 "2014-06-06T13:51:34Z")
> [@Earth001](#): > > Often in articles I would see people make predictions about what life would be like in the year 2000. And most of their attempts to predict what life would be like in the future were so very wrong. I would like to know why were people so optimistic back then about what they thought the future life around the year 2000 was going to be like? Why did their predictions fail to become a reality? What things do we have today that would be futuristic to someone from the 50s or 40s? I’d suggest that the point of those articles wasn’t to be right, but to sell magazines. Compare it to bloggers who troll for page views today. ---
**Author:** ![Chimera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Chimera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chimera)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2014, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/57 "2014-06-06T14:15:46Z")
From the “Futurists” I’ve seen in the past, the big problem I had with any of them was their lack of knowledge about really basic stuff that would completely flumox their ideas. Back in the 90’s I worked in an office where someone at The Futurist magazine lying around all the time. The worst offender (that I still remember today) was predicting that by the year 2000 (a mere 12-15 years from the prediction - the magazine being from the 80’s), all heavy manufacturing would take place in orbit. Now on the face of it, that’s completely preposterous. There’s so much wrong with it that it can’t be taken seriously, even as a prediction for 500 years from now. And yet, it was the cover story of the magazine. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2014, 9:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/58 "2014-06-07T09:33:47Z")
As a bit of a ‘futurist’ myself, it seems that one problem in the past has been the unphysical extrapolation of trends. We can’t extrapolate from jet planes and moon rockets to faster-than-light-travel because faster-than-light travel is physically impossible no matter what we do. We can’t extrapolate from checkout lasers and experimental laser weapons mounted on ships to hand-held laser pistols, because nothing has the energy density to store enough energy for useful beam strength. Similarly the personal jet pack is a non-starter unless you only want to fly for a matter of a few seconds. Similarly we could not have had human-level AI in 2001 ready for the launch of the _Discovery_ for many reasons, one of which is that computer complexity wont reach human levels of complexity for several decades yet. Unless, of course, you count the Internet as a network, and very few futurists predicted the Internet. Arthur Clarke wrote a story back in the 60’s in which the telephone network spontaneously achieved sentience, and that didn’t include YouTube; so maybe we should start to get worried. ---
**Author:** ![Chief\_Pedant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@Chief\_Pedant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chief_Pedant)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2014, 10:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/59 "2014-06-07T10:54:54Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > It’s not a prediction based on _stimuli_ which aren’t already happening. We don’t have to start doing anything _new_ for sea level rise to occur. Well, that’s certainly the prediction, isn’t it? Do nothing and sea levels will rise X amount over X period of time. But it’s not fact until it occurs, and it may be wrong for the same reason futurists have often been wrong. Today’s assessments and trends are not extrapolatable into absolutes because any number of unknown variables are unknown; current analysis is often wrong; and the future hasn’t showed up. The reason to worry about ocean level rise is that we think it might happen. But the fact that scientific reasoning underpins ACC modeling doesn’t mean a sea level rise prediction somehow becomes fact in the same way that we can know a comet will strike us if we know every trajectory parameter. Indeed, one of the reasons futurists are so often wrong is because their predicted future seems so obviously unavoidable. But what they have done is fail to consider the softness of their variables. ---
**Author:** ![JEngelman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e79b87/32.png) [@JEngelman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JEngelman)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2014, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079/60 "2014-06-07T16:26:57Z")
> [@ralfy](#): > > I think it was because the global population increased to such an extent that resource availability could not meet growing middle class demands. Environmental damage, global warming, and wars made matters more complicated. On the other hand in his book An Essay on the Principle of Population, which was published in 1798, Robert Malthus overestimated the problems that would come from over population. He underestimated the growing practice of birth control and abortion, while under estimating the ability of modern industry to produce more wealth per man hour. In his book The Population Bomb, which was published in 1968, Paul R. Ehrlic made the same mistakes. Unfortunately, some people have concluded from these mistakes that human population growth is not a problem, and that people should be encouraged to have more children. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-futurists-so-wrong-about-life-today/690079.md?page=4)