Seeing the future

It's a risky business, this 'seeing into the future' lark. If you get it wrong, you look like an idiot. In ancient times, a prophet's life depended on whether he got it right. In the old testament sories, being a 'false prophet' was actually a crime. Prophets who got it wrong were put to death. That's why the smart ones predicted stuff that would happen hundreds of years later. If it didn't happen, they were no longer around to get whacked.

Nowadays, many people consult clairevoyants and fairground crystal ball gazers who tell them what they want to hear. It's very much a psychological game in which the 'fortune teller' fishes away by questioning, and watches body language to see if they can gain a purchase on their client's life story. Many of us remain fascinated by the apparent ability to see into the future. A lot of people revere the likes of Edward Cayce and Michael Nostradamus for the long range forecasts they made that appear to be uncannily 'accurate'. But both, although seemingly accurate in some ways could also be said to be playing a similar game to the fortune tellers. The criticism is that their generalised statements could apply to any number of world events at any time.


Predicting the future of technology is just as risky, even though we can often detect trends. Several eminent scientists have got it very wrong when they have tried to predict technological trends. Thomas Edison for example, famously claimed that moving pictures would one day make books redundant. They patently hasn't happened, and even though devices such as Amazon's Kindle are making e-books available to us all, paper based books have not been supplanted. Another famous gaffe came from Thomas J. Watson (then the head of IBM) who in 1943 was alleged to have said that he saw a world market for about 5 computers. There was the U.S. Mayor in a wild west town who, when he saw Alexander Graham Bell's new invention - the telephone - demonstrated for the first time, declared bullishly 'One day every town in America will have a telephone!' He was right of course, but his prediction was also so far off that it's now laughable. Virtually every person in America has a telephone, and many carry them around in their pockets.


I was intrigued to read an article that was written back in 1900 in a magazine called 'Ladies Home Journal'. The article entitled What may happen in the next hundred years is both startingly accurate, and laughingly off-beam. It predicts for example that by the year 2000, cars will be cheaper than horses. It predicts that by 2000, coal will no longer be used in our houses to heat or cook with. It predicts that there will be aerial warships and forts on wheels. All of these are startlingly accurate if you look at the fact that the motor car has been the preferred mode of transport for families for decades, coal fires and cookers are no longer used in the majority of western homes (although some coal fired power stations remain, there are alternative methods in predominance) and wars have been fought since World War 1 using fighter planes and tanks.


By far the best predictions in the article though, are these: Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world (Internet?); Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance (Flickr?); And this one: Man will see around the world. The article says: 'American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place.' That's the part that really grabs me. Satellite TV, large screen technology and worldwide television coverage are now taken for granted. In 1900 they were science fiction. If you ignore the archaic language, the article is actually a very accurate set of predictions about future technology. I think it would be difficult to do the same again though, standing in 2010. Technological progress is a lot faster now than it was in 1900, and even predicting what might happen 5 years down the line will be problematic. That's my prediction.


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'Seeing the future' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.