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), Laura Otis' Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: Uni of Michigan Press 2001), Richard Barbrook's Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machine to the Global Village (London: Pluto Press 2007) 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 would 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, do not expect to teleport to Mars or play cybertennis on Pluto when you are aged 506) it is 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, although not recommended to those who dislike Wired's how-many-weird-fonts-can-I-squeeze-on-the-page typography.

There is a less frenetic collection in the Predictions site under the auspices of the Pew Internet & American Life project and Elon University. It features the usual suspects: Barlow, Dyson, Gilder, Negroponte, Stoll, Mitchell and Rheingold.

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 is 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". It might be usefully read in conjunction with Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century (New York: HarperCollins 2009) by Paul Milo.

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. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2006) by Warren Belasco is more entertaining.

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. Cautions are provided in Apollo's Arrow: The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything (New York: HarperCollins 2007) by David Orrell and The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2007) by David Edgerton.

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 is 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 have highlighted particular concerns about forecasting and promotion in discussing the dot-com and telecommunications bubbles of the 1990s. The track record of many pundits - equipped with the best information and analytical models or otherwise - has often been poor. The savants at McKinsey for example announced during 1981 that there would be fewer than a million US mobile phone users in the year 2001, which saw around 130 million users.

The value of much forecasting is also problematical, although that has not deterred a succession of print and online publishers. 2004 saw launch of earlywarning.com, a service that aims to forecast major world events and analyse their likely impact on the global economy. Some readers might derive more insights from careful reading of the Economist or even Foreign Policy.

     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 1998) 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 are 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 is 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 excellent 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 1999) is somewhat too New Age for our taste but supplies a useful bibliography.

     and some clangers

It is 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)
• [recording won't] "last any longer than such parallel gimmicks as the stereoscope and the hot-air balloon."
  Fred Gaisberg (1909), suggesting that it's time to "cash in and get out"
• "Next Christmas, the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput."
  Sir Alan Sugar, Amstrad chief executive (February 2005)
• "It is true that the farm tractor is on the way, but it has less prospect of displacing the work animal in food production than the automobile has of driving the work horse off the road."
  US geographer (1919)
• "It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could, by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies."
  Richard Gatling (1877)
• "There are going to be no more than one million people capable of being trained as chauffeurs"
  Carl Benz (1901) in explaining why the global car market was going to be no bigger than 1.5m vehicles
• "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."
  Sir William Preece, Royal Post Office chief engineer (1878)
• Electronic mail will put two-thirds of postal workers out of work by 2000.
  US General Accounting Office (1981)
• "... however beneficial it might be as a private enterprise, and however advantageous to the Government in the rapid transmission of intelligence, yet it could never become a paying concern."
  US Postmaster General Cave Johnson in refusing to fund the first US electric telegraph network (1844)
• "What use could this company make of an electrical toy?"
  William Orton, President of Western Union, in rejecting chance to buy Bell's telephone patents for US$100,000 (1876)
• " An amazing invention - but who would ever want to use one?"
  attributed to US President Rutherford Hayes (1876) regarding the telephone
• "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)
• " Books will be obsolete. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed in ten years."
  Thomas Edison
• "There is no cause for worry. The high tide of prosperity will continue"
  Andrew Mellon, a month before the 1929 Crash
• "The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most."
  IBM letter to Chester Carlson of Xerox (1959)
• "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
  Bill Gates (1981)
• "Two years from now, spam will be solved"
  Bill Gates (2004)
• "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)
• "The digital world is moving so fast that before the end of next year, we will see a billion people on the internet."
  Nicholas Negroponte (1999)
• computers will "usher in a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity"
  Marshall McLuhan (1968)
• atomic power will "thaw the frozen poles, and make the entire world one smiling Garden of Eden"
  Frederick Soddy (1908)
• "there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form."
  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (2008).

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), Laura Lee's Bad Predictions (New York: Elsewhere Press 2000) and Today Then: America's Best Minds Look 100 Years into the Future on the occasion of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (Helena: American & World Geographic 1992).

A note of caution about the authenticity of some forecasts is provided by Samuel Sass in the Skeptical Inquirer, debunking the supposed 1899 claim by Charles Duell of the US Office of Patents that "Everything that can be invented has been invented".

IBM has sought to debunk the story that Thomas Watson forecast a market of five for IBM's landmark electronic computer, claiming it is a misunderstanding of Thomas Watson Jr's statement at IBM's 1953 annual meeting

IBM had developed a paper plan for such a machine [the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine] and took this paper plan across the country to some 20 concerns that we thought could use such a machine. I would like to tell you that the machine rents for between $12,000 and $18,000 a month, so it was not the type of thing that could be sold from place to place. But, as a result of our trip, on which we expected to get orders for five machines, we came home with orders for 18.

A perspective is provided by assessments of the economy, including

• There will be no interruption of our permanent prosperity
  Myron Forbes, Pierce Arrow Motor Car executive 1928
• Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late. The Depression is over
  US President Herbert Hoover, June 1930
• Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel that there will soon, if ever, be a fifty or a sixty point break below present levels ... I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher than it is today within a few months.
  Yale economist Irving Fisher, 16 October 1929

   next page  (declinism)