Herman Kahn – the forecaster as think-tank

Interview with the man who was the model for Dr Strangelove. Herman Kahn is big. He always was big

I can still remember picking up copies of Time magazine when I was a kid and seeing pictures of his enormous frame. The pictures were always next to sentences that had the phrase ‘think-tank’ in them. Kahn looked like a think-tank himself. Kahn would be in Time because of his books on the Bomb. His books had good, weighty titles like On thermonuclear war (1960), Thinking about the unthinkable (1962) and so on. Later, Kahn would be in Time writing about The emerging Japanese superstate. Over the years, his concerns seem to have become more and more relevant. Today everybody worries about arms proliferation, everybody worries about Japanese car imports. But Kahn got there first. Now, he says, he’s writing a book about the future role of West Germany.

Kahn’s kind of crystal ball gazing has always had an expansive style about it. His World economic development (1979) was ambitious in scope, to say the least; and his background – physics at CalTech, research for the RAND Corporation – reads like a cipher for everything to do with American brains and American technology. Today, Kahn is director of research at the Hudson Institute, New York, and, in that post, charts out mankind’s progress for the next 20 years with enormous self-confidence.

So where does he think we’re going? ‘You don’t have to ask why people are still poor – why millions are still earning less than $500 a year. That’s normal. The real question is how the parts of the world which got through the $500 barrier ever did so in the first place.’ Kahn believes that world poverty can be ended, but only if its persistence is seen in long-term historical perspective.

In the 10,000 years between the demise of hunter-gatherer societies and the Industrial Revolution, Kahn says, ‘man spent most of his time playing games with and against nature. Then he turned his attentions to playing games with and against materials; now he’s into playing games with and against organisations’. The problem, says Kahn, is to complete what he terms ‘the Great Transition’ – a three-century (1775-2175) period of upheaval which, barring war and bad management, should see want eliminated. Once that’s done, he hopes, industry and even today’s mushrooming information sector will make up only a small part of human endeavour.

At the moment, though, prospects look bleak to him. After two periods of boom (1886-1913 and 1948-1973), we look like we’ve drifted into a recession almost as long as the last one (1914-1947). Kahn also feels that the very idea of progress is still under threat from ecological, ‘small is beautiful’ attitudes and pressure groups. In addition, he has sharp words for health and safety legislators, denigrates hedonism and describes hostility to ostentation and materialism as ‘upper middle class show’. What’s needed, he argues, is a renewed commitment to technology, ‘not as a panacea, but certainly as sine qua non’.

Kahn is very specific about the kinds of technology he has in mind. Like Raymond Loewy (DESIGN, May 1980, page 55), he remains convinced that space exploration will bring manufacturing industry real benefits: growing very large crystals in a weightless environment will, he suggests, provide us with materials of unprecedented hardness, resistance to corrosion and general durability. In fact, Kahn sees materials technology as a whole as continuing to have great potential: ‘Right now the innovation there is going on like a house on fire. The thing to watch for is the development of superconducting metals capable of operating at room temperatures rather than at Absolute Zero.’

Though Kahn notes that increasingly sophisticated transport, telecommunications and information systems have made Western culture more suburban than urban, he doesn’t think that society is going to start working at home rather than at the office: ‘People like to go out to work,’ he says exuberantly. But he does suspect that homes will become highly automated, with programmable vacuum cleaners and voice-operated kitchens becoming commonplace within the next 20 years or so. Oddly, however, he also sees a growing role for domestic helps: ‘one good servant,’ he insists, ‘is worth scores of appliances’.

Other Kahn technological bets: by the year 2000, natural gas, not coal, nuclear power or oil; solar power, but only by AD2100; trade-related construction projects like super-ports; the ‘hyphenated sciences’ (bio-physics, bio-electronics); sensors; and artificial intelligence.

How does he rate the prospects for British business over what’s left of this century? ‘The UK,’ Kahn says testily, ‘is too much like Europe. In America, management achieves flexibility by firing people. Men come home from work every day and tell their wives “I got fired” and their wives think nothing of it. In Japan, management achieves flexibility not by firing people, but by changing their jobs, giving them new tasks. In Britain, as in Europe, you achieve flexibility by death – by letting people carry on in the same old posts till they’ve had it. You’ll never get the technology you want or bring in the technologists and designers you need unless you change that attitude.’