Rating the futurists
Gavin sends us "An article that I wrote for Wired (and Playboy) a few years back that never ran in either magazine. I just put it up on my website and it seems right up BB's alley:
A rundown of futurism, going through nine sets of predictions on what the world would be like by the year 2000, from Megatrends (1988) to Glimpses of the Future (1888--and an amazing amount of correct material!), including best/worst predictions (my favorite: two astronauts will have a gunfight in outer space over a woman) and accuracy rates for each futurist."
Most of the futurists I read focused on the rise and fall of governments, and especially, the progress of technology and the sciences. The future of art and literature got short shrift, as did sex and religion. At first, I thought this was because too many of the predictors considered their readership to be drawn from the business community. But that didn’t wash: an accurate prediction of fashion trends, or societal attitudes towards sex, would be immensely valuable to any savvy investor or corporate type. Would-be prophets avoid arts and entertainment because they seem too difficult to pin down, too trend-driven. Science provides the illusion that progress occurs in an orderly fashion: Mendel’s pea-plants to the discovery of DNA to the Human Genome Project to a cure for cancer, all in a tidy line.Welcome to the Future (Thanks, Gavin!)
the latest
latest episodes
Be interesting to rate the cyberpunks and the growth of "5 minutes in the future" Scifi from the likes of Stross and Macleod.
And of course the Eco-Doomsayers like The Club of Rome and James Lovelock.
two astronauts will have a gunfight in outer space over a woman
Haven't you seen Firefly? They have swordfights over women!
I was hoping for a discussion of Futurism; instead I get a bunch of reviews of books written by futurologists.
My favourite inaccurate future is the one in the 1936 film "Things To Come"- WWII did not last thirty years; we dif not all choose to abandon the surface, and live in perspex boxes in might reach the moon by 2036- I'm not sure that a 'space gun' is the way to do it.
"An astronaut will drive across the country in a diaper in a fight over a man."
Which would you have sooner believed?
I love love LOVE reading antiquated or otherwise obsolete futurist books. I always buy them when I see them at thrift stores, yard sales etc. It's a really cheap hobby... Sadly, I don't seem to have any of the books mentioned in the article (except Future Shock and possibly Megatrends). More to look for, I guess!
Great essay. I was really intrigued by that David Goodman Croly chap.
#3: Lol, yeah that was also what I half-expected. Neologisms and their usage again...
#4: That sprang to mind, too. I guess it would only have been fair for him to have considered that to be a semi-accurate prediction...
...Cory brings up a Holy Grail of mine, a TV show I would actually like to produce while Unca Walter Cronkite is still alive to narrate it: In The 21st Century needs to be revisited, with each episode of the 1967 Sunday evening series taken apart from an actual 21st Century viewpoint, just to see what they got right and what they got wrong. The big problem is that, IIRC, Union Carbide owns the show and not See-BS, which is one of the reasons the show's never been remastered and/or release on DVD or VHS. About half the episodes were donated to school systems - the one on Robotics was the only one we had for some reason - with UC commercials intact on 16mm film, but when I did a survey of school systems in Texas about five years ago, all of those copies had long since been tossed. Ironically, most of the 1950s and 1960s Civil Defense films - and yes, including "Red Nightmare" and "Duck and Cover" - were still in many libraries and even filmchained to VHS. Go figure.
"Teledildonics"?
His own predictions seem to be fairly accurate, except for:
Waaaa? That seems rather outlandish. Everyone knows the future of television is reality TV.
Om: please tell me that show was the one which ended every episode with some hippies (?) playing music in a park! Or something. Been trying to remember the name of that series for ages and have even scoured YouTube for it a few times. If it is the one I recall, it was screened here as cheap filler programming in early 1970s afternoons so it was usually the first thing I saw when I got home from school. I remember lots of the footage you'd expect: women with very 1960s false eyelashes wearing silver and/or plastic outfits à la Barbarella. And robots. And Syd Mead-styled automobiles.
I love 2001: A Space Odyssey but it's always amused me that one of the few things which Clarke and Kubrick got right (at least for the year) was widescreen television.
The article (originally written in 2000) cites vitamin fortified alcohol as bad prediction.
According to wiki "sparks" was introduced in 2002
Should have updated article before posting.
About that "astronauts having gunfight in space over woman", the closest real story I can come up with (sorry, HistoryMan68) is the Lisa Nowak story, which did involve astronauts in a love triangle of sorts, but no outer space gunfight.
It did involve a diaper, though.
I’ve been reading sf forever, and I find it very odd that every futurist and sf author missed the Personal Computer. I’m not talking about a tricorder, but what we’ve had now for the last 30 years. If our best futurists can miss seeing the evolution of the PC, I have little hope of a future that looks anything but unpredictable.
BEANOLINI:
My favourite inaccurate future is the one in the 1936 film "Things To Come"- WWII did not last thirty years....
But it did last 30 years, from 1914 to 1945 (with time out to re-arm and repopulate). WWII was just WWI.5. The War of Decaying Empires.
The vitamin fortified alcohol prediction did include the word "all"
and what was the other one i saw in there.. a bottle of hard liquor costing $125. well not just any bottle but there's lots of them out there. a 30 year scotch will cost more.
"Science provides the illusion that progress occurs in an orderly fashion: Mendel’s pea-plants to the discovery of DNA to the Human Genome Project to a cure for cancer, all in a tidy line."
Exactly. I used to apply this same failed logic to humans, I called it the People-Magazine-Ladder-to-Success because in every People Magazine profile, they would string the events of your life together so it looked like your destiny train was rushing towards your sitcom fame at every moment of your life.
I am going to grade the authors predictions by likelihood.
1. We’ll have electric cars, a male birth control pill, videophones, and home holography systems.(100%, this will happen)
2. Rising oceans will make most coastal cities unlivable. (30% we've got Gore working to prevent that one)
3. Humans will walk on Mars, and on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.(20%, %90 for mars alone)
4. The human lifespan will double, at least.(50% it will grow, but i don't see 200 year olds happening anytime soon)
5. The American two-party system will collapse; political parties will have explicit corporate alliances.(0%, the 2 party system hasn't faltered in nearly 200 years, the parties in power have split or changed, but it will always be 2)
6. Nuclear weapons will be used in a Sino-Soviet conflict.(10%, nukes are far too dangerous to use politically, and impractical in the mideast, as winds will carry the fallout into neighboring counties, some of wich will be allies)
7. We will bioengineer animals with the ability of human speech. They will have their own sitcoms.(0%, will never happen)
8. South Africa will emerge as a major world power.(75%, already on the rise)
9. Teledildonics will be more popular than flesh-on-flesh sex.(10%, just unlikely)
10. Humanity will not exterminate itself.(100% guaranteed)
Beanolini - But that movie did predict helicopters, right? And it did at least predict something very close to WWII. and most importantly, it kicks ass!
Maddy - "the People-Magazine-Ladder-to-Success". I'm totally stealing that!
My only comment on the article, besides immensely enjoying it, is that I thought he was a little harsh on the "Worst predictions" like quadraphonic FM or "The housing shortage will be alleviated by new technology". Those aren't so far-fetched from a distant perspective, right?
If anyones ever read the Dune series by Frank Herbert, you will definitly notice changes that are not simply technilogical.
#11 posted by nehpetsE , September 9, 2008 8:45 AM
The title of the article with that prediction was - Richard Rhodes, "80 Ways the Eighties Will Change Your Life"
It didn't happen in the '80's.
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1. We’ll have electric cars [certainly], a male birth control pill [doubt it'll be a pill, more likely something like the remote control valve thing featured on bb a while ago], videophones [been around for ever, no one really cares, why would they start now?], and home holography systems [maybe, more likely something not predicted in every sci-fi film of the last 40 years].
2. Rising oceans will make most coastal cities unliveable [i'm sure lots will find ways to combat this, but yes the sea levels will force drastic changes].
3. Humans will walk on Mars, and on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. [100 years? for sure!]
4. The human lifespan will double, at least. [for some of us certainly, I don't know if the average lifespan will double though]
5. The American two-party system will collapse; political parties will have explicit corporate alliances. [next 10 years? no, next 100 almost certainly]
6. Nuclear weapons will be used in a Sino-Soviet conflict. [good possibility of it, if the soviets and the us don't do it first]
7. We will bioengineer animals with the ability of human speech. They will have their own sitcoms. [i certainly hope so!!]
8. South Africa will emerge as a major world power. [certainly, their power will grow with more internet access very fast]
9. Teledildonics will be more popular than flesh-on-flesh sex. [yep, face to face relationships will be come less and less common when you can screw each other on different sides of the globe/different planets?]
10. Humanity will not exterminate itself. [not completely at least]
#14, Buddy66:
Well, maybe I should have said WWII did not last until the 1970s, as the film predicted. I should also have posted a generally coherent comment without typos.
#18, Gnosis:
Indeed, it does 'kick ass'. Yes, some of the predictions are good; but the bad ones are really egregiously and entertainingly bad.