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.)
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.
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.
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):
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):
likely driven by a growing global middle class (see the expected numbers and percentages in first graphic of the link):
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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? 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
