forecasting

The record of technological forecasting has, overall, been pretty dim. Predictions of specific technologies have been poor. Predictions of their implementation and implications have fared even worse. This page highlights writing about crystal ball gazing.

It covers -

• past predictions
• the forecasting game
• technology and economy
• futures organisations 
• and some clangers - specific predictions by the great & good that in retrospect seem ludicrously wrong

     past predictions

Ithiel de Sola Pool's Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment of the Telephone (Norwood: Ablex 1983) is crisp, entertaining, erudite and without the compulsion to spraypaint jargon on every second page.

Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communications in the Late 19th Century (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1990) and Paul David's 2000 Understanding Digital Technology's Evolution and The Path of Measured Productivity Growth: Present & Future in the Mirror of the Past (PDF) are also suggestive.

Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books 1973) deserves mention for introducing the notion of the 'information society' into general debate.

Michael Dertouzos's The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View (Cambridge: MIT Press 1979) is somewhat starry-eyed but overall shows the intelligence you'd expect from the author. Derek Leebaert's Technology 2001: The Future of Computing & Communications (Cambridge: MIT Press 1991) is also valuable, more so than Stephen Saxby's The Age of Information: The Past Development & Future Significance of Computing & Communications (New York: New York Uni Press 1990).

Reality Check (San Francisco: Hardwired 1996) edited by Brad Wieners & David Pescovitz collects the Reality Check column from Wired magazine. 

Ostensibly an exercise in debunking (no, don't expect to teleport to Mars or play cybertennis on Pluto when you're aged 506) it's glibly upbeat, with an emphasis on technology as such rather than the wider economic and social ramifications. We regard it as information economy elevator music, though not recommended to those who dislike Wired's how-many-weird-fonts-can-I-squeeze-on-the-page typography. 

The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York: Macmillan 1967) by Herman Kahn & Anthony Wiener is a classic example of the genre. It's like a particularly rich Christmas pudding: the odd bit of silver mixed in with the nuts and the glace fruit.

A less academic example of the genre is Alvin & Heidi Toffler's Future Shock (New York: Random House 1970), which prophesied that by 2000 - oops - much of the population would be living in comfort on the ocean floor or in floating cities and that the climate would be controlled. Oops - the crystal ball didn't detect global warming, women's liberation, holes in the ozone layer, AIDs or other nasties. Computers get a mere 12 passing references.

Unabashed, the Tofflers subsequently released The Third Wave (New York: Bantam 1991), supposedly predicting the "rise of the information age and the Internet", with "the embedded industrial civilization based on social conformity and muscle power" being replaced by "an information and technology culture dependent wholly on the creativity of the individual mind".

Sociologist Daniel Bell notes that

in 1946, William Fielding Ogburn, the leading sociologist of social change, wrote a sober book, The Social Effects of Aviation, in which he sought to trace out the possible impact of airplanes for the remainder of the century. He looked to see how aviation might affect our lives in 21 different areas, such as population, family, cities, religion, health, environment, recreation, crime, education, marketing, agriculture, public administration, international relations--you name it. Quite an exhaustive list for effects from a single cause.

Ogburn began with population, since those changes "affect almost all the phenomena of social life," and went on to say "Aviation will probably have the effect of reducing the number of births slightly." One rubs one's eyes in "slight" astonishment. Ogburn was reasoning from the economist's model of the introduction of the automobile, since "families postponed the expense of ... rearing a child in order to own an automobile. ... In a similar manner some families will be smaller than would otherwise be because of the expense of owning and operating an aircraft."

The Temporary Society: What is Happening to Business & Family Life in America Under the Impact of Accelerating Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 2000) by Warren Bennis & Philip Slater was first published in 1968 and has proved to be more percipient, perhaps because it concentrated on broad attitudinal changes rather than specific technologies. George Gilder's rather silly Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionise Our World (New York: Free Press 2000) is discussed earlier in this guide.

Scanning the Future (London: Thames & Hudson 1999) by Yorick Blumenfeld is another mixed bag, distinguished by platitudes from Nobel Prize winners. Utopistics: Or Historical Choices of the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press 1999) and The End of the World As We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: Uni of Minnesota Press 2001) are bolder explorations by world systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein.

Our profile on the communications revolutions highlights some of the economic and historical studies about visions, plans and actualities.

     the forecasting game

William Sherden's The Fortune Sellers: The Big Business of Buying & Selling Predictions (New York: Wiley 1997) is a crisp introduction to the history and nature of business, economic and technology forecasting. 

Steven Schnaars' MegaMistakes: Forecasting & the Myth of Rapid Technological Change (New York: Free Press 1988) is an entertaining study of why people get it wrong in predicting consumer acceptance of new technologies. 

There's another perspective in William Gosling's Helmsmen & Heroes: Control Theory As A Key To Past & Present (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1994) and James Beninger's Control Revolution: Technological & Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1989).

We've highlighted particular concerns about forecasting and promotion in discussing the dot-com and telecommunications bubbles of the 1990s.

     technology and economy

Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma Of Technological Determinism (Cambridge: MIT Press 1994) is a collection of essays edited by Leo Marx & Merritt Smith with a far more nuanced analysis than anything in Toffler, Roszak, Gilder or Sale. 

Knowing Machines: Essays On Technological Change (Cambridge: MIT Press 1998) by Donald MacKenzie, Exploring The Black Box: Technology, Economics & History (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1994) by Nathan Rosenberg and the lucid Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in 20th Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 98) by David Mowery & Nathan Rosenberg are three insightful examinations of economic/technological development and the perils of forecasting.

Graeme Snooks' ambitious The Dynamic Society: Exploring The Sources of Global Change (London: Routledge 1996) is a panoramic history that argues that technology and economics rather than politics are the drivers for social and cultural development (although many would say, of course, that they're inextricably intertwined). 

Fans of Snooks or Manuel Castell may enjoy The Carrier Wave: New Information Technology & the Geography of Innovation, 1846-2003 (London: Unwin Hyman 1988) by Peter Hall & Paschal Preston, an analysis of economic development in terms of the information infrastructure and Kondratieff waves. 

There's a broader perspective in the detailed report on Fostering Research on the Economic & Social Impacts of Information Technology (Washington: National Academies Press 1998) and in the exxcellent Wharton Forecasting Principles site.

     futures organisations

The vogue for professional futurology - as distinct from filler for 'slow news days' - seems to recur about every twenty years, reflecting economic cycles and the lifespan of corporate memories.

Among organisations dedicated to study of the future we note the World Future Society (WFS), publisher of Futurist magazine, and the Australian-based Futures Studies Centre (FSC) under the leadership of Richard Slaughter, Professor of Foresight at Swinburne Uni of Technology. 

His Futures For The Third Millennium: Enabling The Forward View (St Leonards: Prospect Media 99) is somewhat too New Age for our taste but supplies a useful bibliography.

     and some clangers 

In retrospect it's fun - if somewhat unfair - to highlight what in retrospect are ludicrous predictions by the great & good. (Their technological expertise or access to market intelligence may, in some cases, have led them to drop the clanger.)

Among the more entertainingly dud new media predictions are -

I do not believe television will come to stay until the picture shown is sufficiently larger, cleaner and more detailed to permit a family of five to see what is going on, without exerting any great amount of effort on their part.
Waters Milbourne of WCAO Baltimore (1944)

While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.
Lee DeForest (1926)

Electronic mail will put two-thirds of postal workers out of work by 2000.
US General Accounting Office (1981)

Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.
Darryl F Zanuck, 20th Century Fox (1946)

The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most.
IBM letter to Chester Carlson of Xerox (1959)

640K ought to be enough for anybody
Bill Gates (1981)

Before man reaches the Moon your mail will be delivered from New York to Australia by guided missile
US Postmaster General (1959)

Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition.
Dennis Gabor Inventing the Future (1962)

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1/2 tons.
Popular Mechanics (1949)

By the year 2000 most postal systems, separated from their respective national telephone and data systems, will have become expensive luxuries and sending and receiving physical mail ... will have become like home visits from the doctor or direct delivery of coal or milk, a slightly archaic luxury
new media analyst Anthony Smith (1983)

Collections of past forecasts include Tim Onosko's entertaining Wasn't the Future Wonderful?: A View of Trends & Technology from the 1930's (New York: Dutton 1979) and Laura Lee's Bad Predictions (New York: Elsewhere Press 2000).

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