Forecasting failure: A short history of the future

Watch the video of James Woudhysen’s lecture on Forecasting at The Academy, 2023

From the exuberance of Jules Verne to the forebodings of HG Wells, visions of the future are well known to say more about their own times than they do about the future itself. At the height of the Cold War, for instance, some still had faith in the future: the scientist and novelist Arthur C Clarke looked forward to harnessing nuclear energy for space travel, so that Mars and Venus would be ‘only a few hours away’. Yet just 10 years later, in a famous report for the elite Club of Rome, the mood had darkened. Donella Meadows and her co-authors insisted that growth clashed with the inescapable limits of nature.

Today, airport booksellers groan with bestsellers telling us what the future will be like. As Peter H Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives, an ‘editor’s pick’ at Amazon US, insisted three years ago: ‘Sure, AI is powerful. Augmented Reality is too. But it’s their convergence that is reinventing retail, advertising, entertainment, and education… these convergences are happening at an increasing rate’. But when was the last time you saw a Tesco cashier or a university lecturer don the goggles of AI-assisted AR?

If predictions of the future indeed say more about the present than the future, are they a fool’s errand? Is society’s confidence, or lack thereof, simply reflected in our dreams about what the future is like? Today, these dreams often look more like nightmares. Pessimists and optimists, technophobes and technophiliacs: all the usual experts unite in future worlds marked by presentism, in which a bogus acceleration of everything is matched only by the absence of human agency in any scenario you care to mention. So, is there anything worth saving in the idea of forecasting the future? Can we learn from the pitfalls of past attempts, or perhaps even be inspired by them? Can we dream of the future, but without regurgitating the present?

00:00:00 Introduction

00:03:40 Prehistory of forecasting

00:10:45 Modern forecasting

00:20:40 Forecasting in culture

00:23:00 Philosophy or Politics in forecasting Kontradiev Forebodings of war

00:27:08 Post war optimism

00:31:00 Overturning historical cynicism

00:34:30 21st Century forecasting fetishised

00:39:20 The verdict on forecasting