Future Schlock

By Richard Lacayo

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.

With reporting by Barbara Burke/New York