Futurism’s past is littered with faulty forecasts

John W. Schoen Senior producer • Profile • E-mail

To make a bold prediction about the future, you have to think outside the box. But as the history of these predictions shows, when you try to stare too deeply into the future, it’s all too easy to end up way outside the ballpark.

History, in fact, is littered with Big Ideas that went nowhere. From the paperless office to teleportation; flying cars and undersea cities, predicting the future can be a perilous business. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying.

Popularized by 19th-century novelists like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, predictions of social and technological trends many years hence have entertained and fascinated generations. Along the way, these forecasters have logged their share of hits and misses. Time travel and manned-exploration of the Earth’s core remain the realm of fiction. (On the other hand, Verne got it right about men walking on the moon; Wells correctly foresaw that recorded video would one day be commonplace.)

Some of the boldest predictions are also the oldest. In “Looking Backward,” an 1888 utopian novel, author Edward Bellamy wrote of a man who awoke, Rip Van Winkle-style, in the year 2000 to find himself in a society that had banned war, eliminated wealth disparity and organized its workforce around individuals’ talents and abilities. The book also predicted the widespread use of credit cards and a world in which music would be available to all — anytime, anywhere.

Today, with uncertainty about the future widespread and the pace of change apparently accelerating, the demand for predictions has never been greater. But that hasn’t made it any easier to get them right. A lot depends on how far into the future you want to look.

“Between now and the next three years you can be damn close," said Joel Barker, an author and futurist who advises companies on technology trends and paradigm shifts. "Because the stuff is in the labs, and it's coming out and you’ve got to have certain capacity in manufacturing to do that. When you’re looking five to 10 years out, you really have to look at very raw stuff. That’s when I look at raw science and very early technology.”

Some predictions don’t unfold exactly as planned but, upon further inspection, it turns out they come close enough. The 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey," based on a 1951 short story by Arthur C. Clarke, depicts a 21st-century road warrior Dad, on a quick business trip to the moon, checking in with his young daughter via AT&T Picturephone. Alas, the Picturephone, first demonstrated by AT&T in the 1960s, is today about as common as a phone booth. But Internet telephony, combined with cheap Web cams, has brought videoconferencing to anyone with a PC and a high-speed Internet connection.

Interactive Visions of the future A look at some notable visions of the future of business, technology, and the economy, and how they have fared.

“Part of the reason people get ticked off with futurists is we that don’t give the exact description of how it’s going to happen,” said Barker. “Quite often, you have basically technology choke points and you can’t get to that breakthrough until you get through the chokepoint. The transistor was that way: lightweight portable radios then became portable telephones.”

In fact, many apparently faulty predictions turn out to be dead on — if you’re willing to stretch the original idea a little. Dick Tracy, the hero of a long-running comic strip, wowed readers in 1946 with two-way wrist-watch radio that, when upgraded with video in the 1960s, became a symbol of overreaching futurism. Today, the strip’s creator, the late Chester Gould, would no doubt smile today at the sight of people walking down crowded city sidewalks, apparently talking to themselves, wearing Blue-tooth-enabled appendages tucked in their ears. Gould got the wrist radio right; he just missed the body part it would be attached to.  

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