Back to the future again

Review of Megamistakes: Forecasting and the Myth of Rapid Technological Change. By Steven Schnaars. The Free Press/Collier Macmillan

Among Britain’s burgeoning ranks of design critics, the way to show you’re hip these days is to bang on about how flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) will allow the products of the future to be individually customised at no extra cost. But where have we heard this before? In 1967, the Hudson Institute’s futurology supremo, Herman Kahn, named ‘inexpensive design and procurement of “one of a kind” items through the use of computerised analysis and automated production’ as one among 100 technical innovations ‘very likely’ to occur before the year 2000. Yet, though there are a grand total of perhaps 300 FMS installations worldwide, most of them only make engines, and virtually none turn out consumer products.

Steven Schnaars, a marketing whiz at New York’s City University, has written a useful warning against our futurologist friends. Too many, he argues, extrapolate from past trends in wildly optimistic fashion; too few go back in history for another reason – to check out where previous predictions went wrong. Schnaars has done this with some thoroughness and, though Megamistakes suffers from repetitions, a tinge of that familiar, clipped US management textbook style and several worrying typographical errors, it contains some scholarship and not a little hilarity.

Dominated by the ‘can do’ allure of the Apollo mission, the 1960s were the most bizarre decade in turns of America’s willingness to play with crystal balls. Ford, GM and Chrysler spent millions on jet-powered cars; to appeal to fashion-conscious women drivers, Goodyear tested tires with sidewalls in translucent pastels, under which burned a series of light-bulbs. As far as the seers were concerned, it would not be long before humans were deep-frozen and turned into part-machine ‘cyborgs’. Underwater mining, farming, transport and hotel-going would equally be mass pursuits. Modular, volume-made homes would have 3D colour TV, videophones, illuminated hot-and-cold wall panels and ‘robot slaves’; likewise, dishes would be moulded in the home and washed – like clothes, and indeed, grubby human beings – ultrasonically. Food? It was to be dehydrated, and the director of America’s National Institute of Dental Research helpfully opined that tooth decay and gum disease would, in the 1970s, ‘come to a virtual end’. Meanwhile, Gulf Oil, Standard Oil and Nestlé made biscuits, soups and cereals from oil.

As the author shows, no American business magazine entirely escaped the technological euphoria of the Kennedy-Johnson era. Perceptively, Schnaars includes a chapter on the zeitgeist of those years – how opinions were nearly unanimous among ‘the experts’, who found it well nigh impossible to break free from their times. Cleverly, too, Megamistakes notes that, even today, laboratories are full of Cadillacs with cameras instead of rear-view mirrors, joysticks instead of steering wheels, and GM night vision driver aids that are cooled by liquid nitrogen.

All this is great knockabout stuff. But Schnaars complements it with home truths which, though they look like hindsight today, are still frequently ignored. ‘Maybe,’ he argues, ‘we would all like to think that the future will be very different from the present. That way we might feel that we are really moving ahead’. The writer observes that most new products never even get on to the famous S-curve of the product lifecycle; that most – transistors, video cassette recorders, microwave ovens and fax machines, for example – take decades to reach mass audiences. Schnaars reckons, indeed, that less than a quarter of predicted growth markets actually materialise.

Megamistakes concludes with some earnest common sense. Innovations often come from industry newcomers, their ultimate uses are rarely foreseen with much precision, and they tend to get perfected by imitators, not pioneers. When drawing up forecasts, be conservative, except when it comes to anticipating where your competition will come from. Also, avoid endless discussions of methodology, massive number-crunching exercises, and words like parameter.

Employ lots of different methods. Write prose, not formulae. Trace through all the years to your final destination. If you use multiple scenarios, establish clear themes for each and refuse either to attach probabilities to them or – worse still – to plump for just one. Suspect fast-growing fads (Citizens’ Band radio was a perfect example), and suspect, too, the benefits your product is really going to offer and the alacrity with which economies of scale will bring down its price.

I think, however, that Schnaars can be faulted. He is fair about those forecasts which have proved correct; but many of those which he gleefully dismisses now look like runners once again. Thankfully, our mail will never be delivered by guided missile, as RCA ex-chairman David Sarnoff once announced. On the other hand, it saddens me that business travellers can’t look forward to vertical takeoff planes or individual flying platforms. But carbon fibre; computer‑guided, safe and ecologically acceptable cars; the manned exploration of space, teleshopping – all these, waxed lyrical about in the past, now look as if they just might have a future.

As for Herman Kahn, he was not that far off the mark when it came to the darker side of late 20th-century society. How do we live now? More and more, it seems, through means which Kahn forecasted. correctly: space-based weapons, high-tech, counter-insurgency techniques, the tracing of criminals by genetic fingerprints, and ‘flexible penology’ based on electronic bracelets for offenders confined to their homes.

Rapid technological change, then, may indeed be a myth. But where defence and security are concerned, technology really does put on a head of steam.