For those who predict the distant future, there are two traps to avoid.
One is to assume human nature will change dramatically and that people will abandon things embedded in their souls, such as patriotism or the desire to succeed financially.
The other is the temptation of projecting today’s fashionable concerns onto the future.
As an added warning, those two traps tend to collide easily and often, which is why predicting the future is a fool’s errand most of the time.
But not always.
The perspective from 1975
The other day, while perusing newspapers.com, I happened across a special edition of the Philadelphia Daily News, printed in 1975 to commemorate the paper’s 50th anniversary. Half of it — an easy assignment for those lucky writers — was dedicated to reviewing the progress of the first half century. The other half was devoted to predicting what life would be like in 2025.
Those writers fell into both traps in abundance. Much of their work read as if the attitudes of the mid-70s were to continue forever.
Overpopulation and ecological desolation would destroy the world by 2025, aided by war and poverty. These were popular themes. Really, a group of smart people familiar with civilization’s resilience through a depression, two world wars and persistent (if not always steady) prosperity should have known better.
Architect, inventor and poet R. Buckminster Fuller thought democracy by now would have evolved to a point where everyone set aside national identity in favor of a computer that constantly measured the thoughts of all humans worldwide.
“The one-world management will be taking its instructions directly from the computer read-out volitions of the majority,” he wrote. “When the majority discovers a given decision is leading humanity into trouble, the popular realization will be immediately computer manifest and the world management will alter the course accordingly.”
Fuller, who was nearly 80 at the time, died in 1983. It would be interesting to take him to a campaign rally today, for any candidate from any party, or to let him scroll X.
Accurate predictions
But amid all this I found some incredible, almost eerie perceptiveness. Robert Shayon, a writer and producer for WOR and CBS radio in New York and a college communications instructor, gets my first prize. He wrote as if he had been here. Even the headline to his piece, “Will you get this paper on TV?” was profound.
“You won’t buy the paper at the newsstand (in 2025),” he wrote. “You will ‘retrieve’ it at home by pressing a button on a small keyboard near a transistorized flat wall screen.”
Well, close enough. But listen to this:
“In the kitchen you’ll punch up a film and follow a recipe. Kids will do their homework by checking in with two-way television instruction programs. …
“Television no longer will be just three major networks distributing programs through some 8,000 local stations. The more than 100 channels will send signals not in wireless fashion through the air but through cables along thin glass fibers no wider than a single hair on your head.”
Could the word he’s searching for be “fiber optic?”
But wait, there’s more.
“That finger keyboard won’t be just an entertainment ‘Open sesame.’ You’ll punch up the local supermarket and scan the steak you want for dinner. You’ll shop, bank and receive your mail via television. Electronic police and firemen will guard your home when you go out. You’ll vote by TV, attend community meetings and business conferences, use the libraries of the world. You can produce your own programs, be your own publisher over TV and receive royalties.”
The lure of predicting the future
Why is it so fascinating to read old predictions of the future? Perhaps it’s because, then as now, people are creating the future through their collective values, dreams and imaginations. We learn more about today than about tomorrow.
It was fashionable in the mid-’70s to be a bit dark and pessimistic. People had just emerged from the Vietnam War and Watergate, after all, and gas prices were soaring to more than 50 cents a gallon.
But in reality, we weren’t really so pessimistic.
Or, more realistically, we were crazy enough to create the many problems of hyperpartisanship and destructive social media silos that have hindered the healthy abrasion that human interaction can apply to extremist views. We developed identity theft and malware. The future is never without challenges.
But we also were brilliant enough to create much of what Shayon, clearly an optimist, could see.
He found us through the noise of the mid-’70s and the clutter of our utopian dreams. He avoided the traps.
I’m not going to spoil that record by telling you what I think 2075 will be like.