Image: Scientific American
For a thousand years people consulted the Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece in an attempt to know what the future held [see “Questioning the Delphic Oracle,” by John R. Hale Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, Jeffrey P. Chanton and Henry A. Spiller; Scientific American, August 2003]. The Oracle was a priestess in a cave who became disoriented by volcanic fumes and babbled incoherently. These days we don’t believe any of that nonsense. Instead we can see the future because we consult thinkers and scientists and journalists and, well, all sorts of clever people. On second thoughts, perhaps the Oracle at Delphi was more reliable. Here is a small sampling of articles on prediction, all from the archives of Scientific American.
As far back as 1879 we realized the impossibility of prediction:
We can readily imagine a being, possessing sufficient knowledge and ability, to calculate the orbits of every person now living. Such a being must know all that is to be known in regard to our mental and physical organisms, and the circumstances under which we are and will he placed. Having thus the initial stage and being able to trace succeeding events as logical sequences of the present, such a being could predict exactly what each of us will decide to do, under the present and all succeeding circumstances--could predict how far we will be physically and mentally able to carry our resolutions into effect. But how awful must be the mind which could perform such a task!
[Scientific American Supplement, March 22, 1879]
Some predictions were more...“concrete”:
Thomas A. Edison holds interesting opinions with regard to the methods and materials that will be used in the future for building purposes:
Q. Is it your opinion that cement is to be the building material of the future?
A. Yes, that and steel. That is to say, cement combined with steel.
Q. Will you cite some examples of present building materials, which, in your opinion, will be displaced by cement?
A. My impression is that the time will come when every contractor will have standard forms of houses, twenty or thirty varieties. The forms will be made of wood, and a contractor using one of the standard shapes will simply go out and "pour" a house. There will probably be hundreds of designs.
[Scientific American Supplement, June 29, 1901]
Some predictions sound impressive as a headline. This one sounds good until you come to the fact that it’s just for figuring out tides around the country for the upcoming year. It’s very useful. Just not quite the imagination-grabbing prediction we salivate over:
A Great Brass Brain
A Unique Engine, on the Accuracy of Which Depend Millions of Dollars and Thousands of Lives
You can be very sure that the machine which prophesies is an accurate if complicated machine. That it is a wonderful machine may be imagined. It has over 15,000 parts, but so carefully is it made that lost motion is reduced practically to zero. Unlike the human brain, this one of brass cannot make a mistake.
[Scientific American, March 7, 1914]
Some writers say “the heck with prediction!” Let the future take care of itself:
I believe that the centuries of human history which are available show that each successive generation has become better able to force its dictates upon nature rather than to be subservient to the unrestricted action of natural forces. In other words, subsequent generations will be better able to care for themselves than the present generation and there is no need to waste good time and effort in trying to solve their problems for them with a smaller stock of knowledge and a narrower vision.
[Scientific American, July 24, 1915]
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Add CommentAs a wise man once said "Making predictions is really hard especially if they are about the future."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy prediction, based uon my research, is that educators in the future will pay more attention to "wrong"answers than to "right" answers. Tests do not measure "knowledge" but question interpretation skills.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey can tell teachers their students' thinking skills, once the optional answers are included into the interpretation of test result.
No longer using invalid feedback procedures, teacher will have their students think their way into knowledge and the speed of learning will more than double.
The depth of understanding will increase to the point where we will begin to solve our socioeconomic disparities. The imbalances in our political scene, that is currently skewed towards people with money enough to buy decisions from people in positions of political power, will be rectified to the point where our elected representative will represent us instead of representing the money interests that paid for their campaigns.
Predicting the future of technology is very tricky. Arthur C. Clark in 1963 very accurately predicted the IPad (He called it the "News Pad") in "2001" but thought we would have lunar colonies by the late 1990's. We have voice writers and video telephones but no flying cars. We have household robots to vacuum our rugs and wax our floors but they look nothing like those depicted in the 50's. We have a world government (sort of) in the UN but it is doing a terrible job of unifying humanity. We have pocket telephones that can contact the entire world but our spacecraft are still powered by chemical propulsion and not atomic energy. We have explored the entire solar system with the exception of Pluto (and a probe is on the way there now) but only by smart machines not people. We landed on the moon years before most SciFi writers predicted it and then gave up and never returned.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo predicting the future of technology is a mixed bag of both over and under estimating the rate of progress. But right or wrong or somewhere in between it remains a lot of fun.
One of the difficulties of predicting future technology is knowing what will be profitable rather than knowing what is possible. That is what determines which technologies succeed and which fail. For example. the problem with the idea of multitasking robots taking care of our homes for us was that in the near term it was cheaper to make robots that specialized in simple tasks, e.g. washing machines, dish washers, vacuum cleaners. Even if we could build a machine that was able to multitask it would likely still use other specialized machines to accomplish each task. When you consider that marketing companies can't tell you how well a new technology will perform tomorrow let alone a dozen or so years from now it seems doubtful that we will ever be able to predict the future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, in talking about the future, so many actual facets seem rarely, if not never, to be discussed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe role of self seeking forces controlling the money which, currently, seems the engine of the "progress" that most if not all "futurists" talked about. Monopolizing development so only what benefits them, what they manufacture, gets manufactured. Arranging that alternative forms of propulsion, construction, dealing with ailments, and so on, are denied to exist or their existence withheld from the public, so only the powerful can benefit, and the public end up paying huge amounts for bargain basement.
The gullibility of a plurality if not the majority, to believe what self seeking criminals tell them to believe. The viciousness of a group of individuals who used to be called "contrary", then "difficult", then "clinical" toward belief in things they are instructed by "science" not to believe exist.
Compare today with the view of today from, say, 1960.
People, incidentally respectably dressed, traveling to the local rocket field by airborne conveyance or streamlined car. There, getting tickets to shuttles to the other side of the planet, one of the space stations or the moon. Once airborne, possibly settling down to a game of chess with the ship computer or reading a science article on prospects for time travel or travel to the stars. Intermittently listening to broadcasts from the One World Government about, say, successes in converting parts of the Sahara into lush farmland.
As opposed to today, people in t-shirts and sweatpants driving squashed bug shaped cars, deliberately non aerodynamically designed to increase gas consumption with rear windows too small to see through, forcing purchase of expensive closed circuit rear view television. When they get to their location, stumbling forward, thumbing message after message into their iPads, or playing interminable video games, anything to avoid the horror of "being alone with their thoughts". Their exposure to "science" consisting of insistent articles that everything that can be discovered already has been discovered, that there is no such thing as faster than light or time travel, and, from now on, it's just a matter of making smaller and smaller versions of what we have, with the "news" consisting only of commercials disguised as "articles" promoting the newest petrochemical waste masquerading as "medicine".
Cinder Earth
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