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Predicting the future

Michael Fitzpatrick

Past seers gawped into the glitzy future to envisage a hi-tech world. But how many of them were right?

WHAT COULD be more futuristic than 2007? But life in the early 21st century tells us otherwise: no flying cars, no dinners in a pill, and certainly no cool rocketing off to space cities in the required outfit of the future (shaved heads and Bacofoil jumpsuits).

We seem to have failed the expectations of the most wild-eyed seers from the past — futurologists who were for the most part in love with a supercharged, technologically sexy future where science would free us from the daily grind for holidays on the moon or underseas. But here we remain, plodding along somewhere between Orwell and Huxley in a familiar world that is neither utopia nor dystopia.

What the futurologists did get right, however, were some of the more prosaic details that define us proto-21st-century-types, such as mobile phones and digital technologies.

Japan was particularly attuned to where technological development was heading 47 years ago. About 40 per cent of the 135 advanced technologies predicted in 1960 to become reality by 2010 by Japan's Science and Technology Agency, set up by the government to help decide where R&D should go, have actually done so. And they're not all self-fulfilling prophecies either; most are non-Japanese inventions.

Accurate predictions

Mobile phones, microwave ovens, artificial insemination, permanent preservation of sperm, desalination, and a voice-activated typewriter able to turn speech into text are just some of the things on the agency's list, which included 54 correct predictions. Heavy investment in areas highlighted by the agency certainly helped their future realisation, and goes some way to explain why cities such as Tokyo are seen as futuristic while London — hello, Victorian sewerage and transport systems — seem backward.

"Britain could have led the world in developing the internet and computer games if the government had listened to the advice of a former editor of New Scientist [Nigel Calder] three decades ago," wrote Mick Hamer in New Scientist in 1994.

Mr. Hamer was revisiting predictions made by New Scientist's special issue on the future in 1964, many of which came true but were ignored by the U.K. Government.

More forward-thinking than the British, Americans too can tally up some major hits in past predictions; but anyone reading The New York Times in 1950 might have been seriously misdirected. In "Miracles You'll See In The Next Fifty Years," its science editor stuck his neck out to predict such things as "sawdust and wood pulp converted into sugary foods." Lucky children would be treated to "discarded paper table `linen' and rayon underwear bought by chemical factories to be converted into candy."

The New York Times' mistakes, like many wild claims of the same period, stemmed from extrapolating hot areas of research at the time. When the U.S. got it right it was during earlier, less developed times. The prize for the best informed predictions must go to the extraordinary seer-like minds of the writers for a 1900 issue of Ladies Home Journal, who wrote: "Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electronically with screens at the opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span" and "photographs will be telegraphed from any distance."

There's no doubt technological divination is a tricky business, says Ian Pearson, head of British Telecom (BT)'s Foresight and Futurology Unit, a BT Group think tank. He has correctly forecast the rise of SMS, the search engine, and interactive digital TV. There have been some misses, too, including virtual reality, whose allure he vastly overestimated.

Tricky indeed. Below we've outlined some key areas or modern life where past fortune-tellers were sure we would or wouldn't make technological strides. Enjoy reading with perfect 20/20 hindsight; unfortunately the 3D version isn't available. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

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