Sometimes predictions are a little self-serving. This one from the president of the Detroit Aircraft Corporation, which went belly-up the following year:

Speed

The whole American business structure is based upon speed. Small inventories require fast deliveries, the many recent mergers have placed a great premium-on the time of business executives, the necessity for frequent changes in the design of products requires many consultations with high salaried consulting specialists, and present conditions require frequent personal contacts between salesmen and the home office. A survey recently conducted by the Detroit Aircraft Corporation Showed that approximately 180 companies now own one or more planes. At least 20 of these own two or more ships, and it is believed that this list will be increased to many hundred by the end of 1930.

[Scientific American, June 1930]

Predictions suffer from the mood of the times they were made. This gloomy outlook comes from a Scientific American issue published during the depths of the Great Depression in 1933:

For awhile, a year or two ago, it was the fashion to utter dire and gloomy predictions as to the future of civilization. Having, like the Roman Empire at its peak, become softened by a period of hitherto unbelievable prosperity and luxury, we were doomed never to recover from the ill effects of the capitalistic scheme of things, from our mechanization program, and our own stupid short-sightedness; it was the end of everything, and only plans, plans, and more plans would save us. Nowadays, the fashion has waned among the populace in general but has become more intensified in certain quarters. It now appears that, unlike the Roman Empire, we are to have no long period of decline, but, instead, are to fall plop! into oblivion. Statistics, graphs, intricate mathematics prove it! In one year, two years, three years, the number of unemployed in this country will number 20,000,000, or even 25,000,000.

[Scientific American, March 1933]

This prediction makes much of our ability to adjust to the environment (more recent articles seem to focus on our talent for making a mess of things):

The species Homo sapiens has about 50,000 years to its credit. If the average applies, we may expect nearly or quite a half million years more of existence for our kind and then either oblivion as we reach the end of a blind alley or progressive development into some type of descendant better adjusted than we to the total environmental factors of the time. But does the average apply? Must man exit from the scene through either of the doors, that which closed behind the dinosaurs and titanotheres or that which opened before the three-toed horses and notharctines ? Most creatures have gained security by specializing in adjustment of structure and habit to particular environmental conditions, whereas man is a specialist in adjustability of structures and habits to a variety of environments. No other vertebrate can live as can he on Antarctic ice cap, in Amazonian jungle, beneath the surface of the sea, or high in the air.

[Scientific American, April 1940]

Some technologies seem quite promising. The future for this one looked bright until 1977, when five people were killed on the rooftop heliport of the Pan Am building:

Mr. Igor Sikorsky has demonstrated the abilities of the helicopter to make vertical landings in enclosed areas, to fly backward and forward and sideways, to hover, and to deposit packages on and receive them from an inaccessible place while hovering near the spot. Predictions for the post-war decade were recently made by Mr. Sikorsky, based upon the two principal objectives for travel by air: High speed, and the ability to reach any spot on the surface of the earth or sea even though surrounded by obstacles.

[Scientific American, May 1943]

6 Comments

1. 1. profchuck 07:58 PM 12/19/12

   As a wise man once said "Making predictions is really hard especially if they are about the future."

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2. 2. Jay Powell 05:19 PM 12/20/12

   My 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.
   They 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.

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3. 3. profchuck 06:09 PM 12/20/12

   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.
   So 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.

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4. 4. RSchmidt 04:37 PM 1/14/13

   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.

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5. 5. julianpenrod 02:18 AM 1/15/13

   In fact, in talking about the future, so many actual facets seem rarely, if not never, to be discussed.
   The 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".

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6. 6. Quinn the Eskimo 08:40 PM 1/16/13

   Cinder Earth

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