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
No 10 on #Shapps? 'Strong on media, sharp instincts, useful in the election'.
BUT former Army chief Richard Dannatt: Shapps “knows very little about defence”.
Since 2002, when BBC head Jon Birt was put i/c of rail futures, ignorance has been cool. Fab!http://on.ft.com/3PnJeuQ
A reminder that the brilliant British film written by the wonderful playwright Barrie Keefe and starring Bob Hopkins and Helen Mirren is on tonight @Film4 11.10 pm #BarrieKeeffe #HelenMirren #BobHoskins
Add EVs, heat pumps, and hydrogen electrolysers.
Good luck powering all of that with wind & solar.
Either you start building gas and nuclear power plants now, or we will once again bow to King Coal for the rescue.
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Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls
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