Well, they they didn’t anticipate the internet either!

PROSPECTIVES

The following excerpts are from:

THE NEXT THIRTY-THREE YEARS: A FRAMEWORK FOR SPECULATION

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

by Herman Kahn & Anthony J. Wiener

This chapter is from a draft prepared for the Working Papers of the Commission on the Year 2000 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It is a working document and is not in final form. Mr. Kahn is Director of the Hudson Institute.

"At first sight one might think that there would be many good reasons for trying to imagine what the world will be like in the year 2000. The most important, of course, would be to predict the shape of this world in reasonable detail and with an accurate evaluation of how the outcome depends on current policy choices. If this were feasible, we could exfect with reasonable reliability to change the future through appropriate policy changes today. Unfortunately, for most purposes -but possibly not all - the uncertainties in any study looking more than five or ten years ahead are so great that the simple chain of prediction, policy change, and new prediction, is very tenuous indeed .

...Specifically, the major objectives of such research are:

...Another important, but, unfortunately often unattainable objective for a long-range study is to share in a process which leads to anticipating some problems early enough for effective planning .

...Thus in policy research we are not only concerned with influencing the future-with attempting to make the desirable more likely and the undesirable less likely. We are also trying to put policy makers in a position to deal with the future as it actually arises--to be able to he satisfied with linear or simple projections; a range of futures must be considered. One may try to affect the probabilities of these various futures by decisions made today, but in addition one attempts to design programs able to cope more or less well with more than one possibility in this range of futures .

...in much of our study, we depend very heavily on straightforward extrapolations into the future of existing and past trends, often including in this projection an extrapolation of the rate of innovation. The expert is often hostile to this last, because extrapolations which depend upon the successful introduction and acceptance of as yet uninvented, undiscovered, or at least unproved innovations, other creative acts, or chancy programs, usually seem to him irresponsible. The expert is usually an expert on the present and sees no compelling reasons for believing that innovations he does not know how to evaluate or even to recognize will necessarily occur. Insofar as he emphasizes the word 'necessarily;' he is, of course, right.

On the other hand, unless specific account is taken of the fact that there will be innovation, creativity and successful programs of various kinds in the future, we will sharply misunderstand or misestimate the future ....It is, of course, quite clear that at any point in the last 30 years an attempt to look five or ten years ahead which ignored the possibility of new techniques would have sharply underestimated the actual progress that was made.

..Thus there are many areas in which the expert who has specific knowledge very much in mind may actually do less well at forecasting than the 'naive' journalist, or the 'naive but sophisticated' systems analyst, who assumes, perhaps implicitly or unconsciously, that innovation and creativity will occur at a certain rate, even though (or because) he does not know precisely how .

...One cannot simply argue that the less sophisticated projection is better than the more expert one, but one can argue that both the sophistication and the expertise must be about the right things."The authors list 100 "very probable" technical innovations which may be expected to occur before the end of the centuryt These are projections of already existing trends in research and development Of greater interest is a list of projections which the authors refer to as: "less likely, but important possibilities"