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                                                                                SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 

LOOKING FORWARD, Page 90

Future Schlock


Only one forecast is a cinch: people will keep on predicting

BY RICHARD LACAYO - With reporting by Barbara Burke/New York


    The future, a destination so close that it is arriving
every second, is somehow always too distant to be clearly seen.
That has not stopped generations of would-be forecasters, from
Nostradamus to Alvin Toffler, from squinting in that direction.
But prognosticating has always been a difficult, if not
perilous, undertaking. No less a person than Henry Adams, one of
America's most perceptive thinkers and historians, declared in
1903: "My figures coincide in setting 1950 as the year that the
world must go smash." Close, but no prize.

    Old Testament prophecy assumed that history would proceed
along lines laid down by a purposeful God. Pagan deities were
more capricious, scattering clues to the future through animal
entrails and the constellations. But both traditions believed
that human destiny was directed from above. With the growth of
science and technology, a new idea arose: perhaps the future
was largely in mortal hands, capable of being plumbed through
an examination of human capabilities and ambitions.

    In this century, an entire futurology industry has arisen
to satisfy the planning needs of corporations, governments and
military establishments. At the same time, the popular audience
for social trends and future talk has grown steadily. Toffler
(Powershift), John Naisbitt (Megatrends 2000) and Faith Popcorn
(The Popcorn Report) have all made visits to the best-seller
list in the past two years.

    Yet, generally speaking, the imponderable will of God was
easier to predict than the course of human affairs. The first
rule of forecasting should be that the unforeseen keeps making
the future unforeseeable. In the 1890s it was widely predicted
that the U.S. would be bare of trees by the 1920s -- they would
all have been chopped down to provide wood for heating and
cooking. Along came oil burners and the gas stove, saving the
trees to be menaced instead by acid rain.

    Futurologists in recent decades predicted the rise of couch
potatoes nesting at home (Popcorn), the arrival of the home
office and the multiple-marriage lifetime (Toffler). But by and
large they missed out on many developments of much greater
consequence, like the rise of OPEC and the mass arrival of women
in the workplace.

    Probably the single biggest pitfall of prognostication is
the assumption that current trends will extend indefinitely into
the future, like those high rates of firewood consumption.
Another peril is basing forecasts on assumptions about what
science might be capable of producing without taking into
account what people will actually welcome or demand. Two-way
picture phones, for example, which went on sale in the 1960s,
have yet to find a market largely because there has been no
demand for them.

    Another pitfall is accepting too readily the idea of steady
and rapid change. True, the scientific advances of the 20th
century were watershed occurrences that created a world of swift
and continuing transformations. But Steven Schnaars, author of
Megamistakes, a critique of technological prognostication, says
that in many cases the speed of change has been exaggerated. "If
you look at the forecasts for the past 10 to 20 years," he says,
"the most accurate ones assume a certain constancy to the
world."

    Many forecasters seem to succumb to either excessive
optimism or overheated pessimism. The overoptimists are heirs to
the Golden Age of wishful thinking in the 19th century, when
conventional wisdom foresaw ever greater prosperity and ease.
Jules Verne invented science fiction in the 1860s with his
tales of space flight and submarine voyage, and the American
Edward Bellamy, in his widely read 1888 novel Looking Backward,
imagined Boston around the year 2000 as a genteel Utopia where
everyone enjoys equal pay and crime has all but disappeared.

    The discovery in World War I that scientific advances had
also produced better engines of death and destruction turned
speculation about the future excessively sour. Bellamy's
radiant city became the high-tech slave societies of Yevgeny
Zamyatin's novel We and Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis.
Aldous Huxley perfected the notion of dystopia in 1932 with
Brave New World, and George Orwell weighed in with his haunting
classic 1984.

    Optimistic or pessimistic, even some of the best-informed
men and women simply cannot bring their imagination to accept
certain possibilities. In 1901, two years before they took off
from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur Wright told his brother
Orville that man would not fly for 50 years. Not long before
the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Admiral William Leahy
advised President Harry Truman, "That is the biggest fool thing
we have ever done . . . the bomb will never go off."

    Yet too much imagination can be just as perilous. Popcorn's
company, BrainReserve, prides itself on exhaustive research. "We
go out into the culture to interview and observe," she says.
"Then we make a leap that is impossible to explain." In 1988 she
leaped to the conclusion that Americans wanted a "nonflashy
workaholic" like Michael Dukakis for President.

    With the new millennium just a few years away, futurism's
mixed record is unlikely to dull the human impulse to peer
ahead. Everyone should keep in mind, however, that there is
only one prediction that can be made with confidence: look for
the future to bring a lot more predictions.