From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Fri Dec 10 1999 - 11:52:25 MST
A favorite exercise of futurism skeptics is to look at how far off past
predictions were.
But today as we approach the year 2000, we most major media are full of
futurist articles, purporting to tell us what is coming in the next century,
or even the next millennium. And I can't help but notice that the people
they have write these articles are mostly *not* decent futurists!
Mostly they take someone who is famous in field X, typically a technology
field, and ask them to project that field into the future. And sometimes
they publish things by famous science fiction writers. And overall, these
people aren't very good at thinking about the future. The first group
hasn't thought about much beyond their field, and the second group mainly
knows how to tell a ripping yarn.
It seems like I must know a half dozen people who are better futurists than
99% of these commentators (many of which have been on this list). But as
far as I know none of these people have been asked to write millennial
futurist articles. Either the media aren't really interested in credible
futures, or they have no idea how to distinguish them.
Either way, it makes me more optimistic that there were smart people in the
past who could forsee the outlines of what was to come. All those dumb past
forecasts were probably made by folks just as clueless as the today's
millennial commentators. Those people in the past we know of that did get
it right may not have been such flukes; maybe they just put enough effort
into the topic to get results. And this makes me more optimistic that, with
some effort, we can in fact now see the outlines of our future. Maybe
futurism isn't as hard as past reviews of Sunday-supplement futurism makes
it seem.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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