The Futurists

[southsider2k5]

Pay attention to the publishing date.

 

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,835128,00.html

 

Friday, Feb. 25, 1966

Essay: THE FUTURISTS: Looking Toward A.D. 2000

 

THE U.S. has always been a country in love with the future. Americans have never quite shared the traditional notion that prying into tomorrow is suspect if not downright dangerous—the sort of feeling that made Dante consign soothsayers to the fourth chasm of the Inferno. On the contrary, the U.S. readily accepted the fact that modern science established progress as a faith and the future as an earthly Eden. Yet recently, the American passion for the future has taken a new turn. Leaving Utopians and science-fiction writers far behind, a growing number of professionals have made prophecy a serious and highly organized enterprise.

 

They were forced into it by the fact that technology has advanced more rapidly in the past 50 years than in the previous 5,000. Men in business, government, education and science itself realize that they must look at least two decades ahead just to keep abreast, must learn to survive under totally different conditions. The new futurists, as they sometimes call themselves, are well aware of past failures of vision. Soon after World War II, top U.S. scientists dismissed and derided the notion of an accurate intercontinental ballistic missile, and as late as 1956, Britain's Astronomer Royal called the prospect of space travel "utter bilge." Relying on the atom's almost limitless energy, the computer's almost limitless "intellect," the futurists predict an era of almost limitless change. With remarkable confidence, and in considerable detail, they present a view of man not only in total control of his environment but of his own brain and his own evolution.

 

New Skill & Time

 

The exploration of the future has become a sizable business. General Electric has set up Tempo (Technical Management Planning Organization) in Santa Barbara, where 200 physical scientists, sociologists, economists and engineers contemplate the future on a budget that tops $7,000,000 a year. The armed forces have long been in the future business. The Air Force, at Wright-Patterson A.F.B., conducts studies of the whole problem of scientific prediction, also contributes $15 million a year to Santa Monica's Rand Corp. to think—and not necessarily about weapons systems. The nonprofit Hudson Institute investigates the possibilities of war and peace along with the future in general. At the University of Illinois, Dr. Charles Osgood is conducting a "computerized exploration of the year 2000," and the Southern Illinois University is providing money and facilities for Buckminster Fuller's World Resources Inventory. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences helps to support the Commission on the Year 2000, headed by Columbia Sociologist Daniel Bell. The Ford Foundation has allocated $1,400,000 this year to a group called Resources for the Future, also supports a Paris-based organization, headed by Veteran Futurist Bertrand de Jouvenel, whose studies are known as "Les Futuribles."

 

Forecasting is an art that still has few textbooks. Its basic tool is extrapolation from yesterday and today. As John McHale, executive director of World Resources Inventory, puts it: "The future of the future is in the present." Some other methods seem fairly arcane. Defense Expert Herman Kahn, for instance, uses "scenario writing," in which various alternative future situations are dramatized. Some forecasters use computers to produce a symbolic "model" of particular social or economic structures—including whole industries or nations—and then simulate the interaction of variables. Rand uses the "Delphi" method, in which a wide range of experts are queried and re-queried for their forecasts, arriving finally at a near-consensus. Prognosticators concede that the timing and nature of pure inventions or basic breakthroughs—such as the achievement of atomic fission—are not predictable. In many cases, they must still rely on "imaginings."

 

In the recent flood of forecasts, what are the futurists saying? By no means are all their predictions new, but taken together, they present a remarkable vision. Most convenient benchmark for that vision is the year 2000, a rounded and romantic date that is nearer than is generally realized—only 34 years away, it is nearly as close as the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

 

People & Weather

 

By A.D. 2000, the U.S. population will have risen to about 330 million, and nine out of ten Americans will be living in supercities or their suburbs. But cities, like industry, will tend to decentralize; with instant communications, it will no longer be necessary for business enterprises to cluster together. Futurist Marshall McLuhan even foresees the possibility that many people will stay at home, doing their work via countrywide telecommunication.

 

None of the forecasters seem to have any good solution for the traffic problem, though they count on automated, and possibly underground, highways. McLuhan and others predict that both the wheel and the highway will be obsolete, giving way to hovercraft that ride on air. Planes carrying 1,000 passengers and flying just under the speed of sound will of course be old hat. The new thing will be transport by ballistic rocket, capable of reaching any place on earth in 40 minutes. In Rand's Delphi study, 82 scientists agreed that a permanent lunar base will have been established long before A.D. 2000 and that men will have flown past Venus and landed on Mars.

 

That closer inner space, the ocean, will be even more radically transformed. Rand experts visualize fish herded and raised in offshore pens as cattle are today. Huge fields of kelp and other kinds of seaweed will be tended by undersea "farmers"—frogmen who will live for months at a time in submerged bunkhouses. The protein-rich underseas crop will probably be ground up to produce a dull-tasting cereal that eventually, however, could be regenerated chemically to taste like anything from steak to bourbon. This will provide at least a partial answer to the doomsayers who worry about the prospect of starvation for a burgeoning world population. Actually, the problem could be manageable before any frogman wets a foot; Oxford Agronomist Colin Clark calculates that if all the presently arable land were farmed as the Dutch do it, it could support a population of 28 billion. Even the gloomiest forecasts assume a world population of not more than twice the present size, or 6 billion by the year 2000.

 

One of the more dramatic changes will be climate control. Tempo scientists estimate that the entire electrical energy needs of the U.S. could be supplied by a dozen nuclear generating stations spotted around the country, each with a capacity on the order of 60,000 megawatts (v. 1,974 megawatts for Grand Coulee). If one such station were built on Mount Wilson above Los Angeles, the heat produced as a byproduct could be guided into the atmosphere, raising the inversion layer that hangs over Los Angeles to 19,000 feet, thus ridding the city of smog. A sea breeze could be drawn into the space beneath, bringing rain that would transform the high desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas into a flowering land.

 

Medicine is in a similar state of exhilarated anticipation. Already widely discussed today, artificial organs—hearts, lungs, stomachs—will be commonly available by the year 2000. An expected development in immunology will make possible the widespread transplanting of organs from either live donors or the recently dead.

 

The blind and the deaf will have new sight and new hearing. A pocket radar will scan a blind man's surroundings, relay the information either through sounds or through vibrations. A comparable device will let the deaf "hear." Artificial arms and legs could be motorized and computerized, perhaps linked to the brain, so that the wearer will find his impulse translated into action. Medical men foresee fetuses grown outside the uterus (in case women want to be spared the burdens of pregnancy) and human tissues grown to specifications. The Cleveland Clinic's Dr. Willem J. Kolff prophesies "artificial skin with all the appendages built in, such as ears and nose." How they would look is a cosmetic problem that the doctors dismiss with a shrug.

 

Nearly all experts agree that bacterial and viral diseases will have been virtually wiped out. Probably arteriosclerotic heart disease will also have been eliminated. Cells have only a few secrets still hidden from probers, who are confident that before the year 2000 they will have found the secret that causes cancer. The most exciting, and to some the most frightening, prospect is the chemical and electrical treatment of the brain. Dr. David Krech, psychology professor at the University of California, believes that retarded infants will be diagnosed at birth, and chemical therapy will permit them to function as normal people. The memory loss accompanying senility will be eliminated.

 

In general, drug control of personality will be widely accepted well before the year 2000. If a wife or husband seems to be unusually grouchy on a given evening, says Rand's Olaf Helmer, a spouse will be able to pop down to the corner drugstore, buy some anti-grouch pills, and slip them into the coffee. Or a lackadaisical person could be dosed into a sense of ambition. Electrical stimulus of brain areas has been shown to produce responses of fear, affection, laughter or sex arousal; such techniques, says Yale's Dr. Jose Delgado, "will certainly increase man's ability to influence the behavior of man." By the year 2000, a symbiotic link between the brain and a computer-memory may also be in the experimental stage.

 

An even more momentous prospect is offered by DNA, the complicated molecule that contains the elements of heredity. Biologists think that before the century is out, they will have succeeded in changing the "information" contained in DNA. If so, it will become possible eventually to control the shape—or color—of men to come. Genetic "intervention" could improve learning capacity. Hudson Hoaglund, executive director of the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, believes that thus "man will become the only animal that can direct his own evolution."

 

Some futurists are less sanguine; they worry not only about the social problem of who would supervise this man-made evolution, but also about unforeseen side effects, such as genetic mutations. Medical optimism is also limited by the notion that there may be an increase of accidents and the general wear and tear of urbanization. Great population density will create the "encounter problem," the fact that the effect of any event, from an accident to a riot, may be multiplied beyond control when masses of people are involved. Even the most optimistic experts see no real sign that they can learn enough about the process of aging to dramatically prolong life beyond 70 to 80 years average.

 

Food & Work

 

Some futurists like to make predictions about homey details of living. The kitchen, of course, will be automated. An A.D. 2000 housewife may well make out her menu for the week, put the necessary food into the proper storage spaces, and feed her program to a small computer. The experts at Stanford Research Institute visualize mechanical arms getting out the preselected food, cooking and serving it. Similarly programmed household robots would wash dishes, dispose of the garbage (onto a conveyer belt moving under the street), vacuum rugs, wash windows, cut the grass. Edward Fredkin, founder of Cambridge's Information International Inc., has already developed a computer-cum-mechanical-arm that can "see" a ball thrown its way and catch it. Soon, Fredkin expects his gadget to be able to play a mean game of pingpong.

 

As for shopping, the housewife should be able to switch on to the local supermarket on the video phone, examine grapefruit and price them, all without stirring from her living room. But among the futurists, fortunately, are skeptics, and they are sure that remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop—because women like to get out of the house, like to handle the merchandise, like to be able to change their minds. Not everything that is possible will happen—unless people want it. One thing they almost certainly will want is electronic "information retrieval": the contents of libraries and other forms of information or education will be stored in a computer and will be instantly obtainable at home by dialing a code.

 

In automated industry, not only manual workers, but also secretaries and most middle-level managers will have been replaced by computers. The remaining executives will be responsible for major decisions and long-range policy. Thus, society will seem idle, by present standards. According to one estimate, only 10% of the population will be working, and the rest will, in effect, have to be paid to be idle. This is not as radical a notion as it sounds. Even today, only 40% of the population works, not counting the labor performed by housewives or students. Already, says Tempo's John Fisher, "we are rationing work. By 1984, man will spend the first third of his life, or 25 years, getting an education, only the second one-third working, and the final third enjoying the fruits of his labor. There just won't be enough work to go around. Moonlighting will become as socially unacceptable as bigamy."

 

By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy. With Government benefits, even nonworking families will have, by one estimate, an annual income of $30,000-$40,000 (in 1966 dollars). How to use leisure meaningfully will be a major problem, and Herman Kahn foresees a pleasure-oriented society full of "wholesome degeneracy."

 

There are some who gloomily expect a society run by a small elected elite, presiding over a mindless multitude kept happy by drugs and circuses, much as in Huxley's Brave New World. But most futurists believe that work will still be the only way to gain responsibility and power.

 

Fear & Bliss

 

Social and political changes are far harder to forecast than technological ones. Futurists are earnestly considering all kinds of worries: the possible failure of underdeveloped countries to catch up with the dazzling future, the threat of war, the prospect of supergovernment. Today's "New Left" predicts the need for political movements to break up big organization. But the skeptics are plainly in the minority. Some futurists, like Buckminster Fuller, believe that amid general plenty, politics will simply fade away. Others predict that an increasingly homogenized world culture—it has been called "the culture bomb"—will increase international amity, although Rand's experts rate the probability of major war before the end of the century at 20% .

 

Certain prophets are in a positively millennial mood. Harvard's Emmanuel Mesthene, executive director of a ten-year, $5,000,000 program on Technology and Society commissioned by IBM, believes that for the first time since the golden age of Greece, Western man "has regained his nerve" and has come to believe, rightly, that he can accomplish anything. "My hunch," says Mesthene, "is that man may have finally expiated his original sin, and might now aspire to bliss."

 

This may be a rather naive form of hubris. But even the more cautious futurists are caught up in a renewed sense of human freedom. "The function of prediction," says Columbia's Daniel Bell, "is not, as often stated, to aid social control, but to widen the spheres of moral choice." And Bertrand de Jouvenel has suggested that various types of future should be portrayed on TV, allowing the public to vote in a referendum on "the future of your choice." The chief message of the futurists is that man is not trapped in an absurd fate but that he can and must choose his destiny—a technological reassertion of free will.

[Iwritecode]

Interesting that they were pretty spot on with some things. I'm still waiting for that whole "completely automated" house and the ability to no longer need roads.

 

[hogan873]

Reminds me of one of those old cartoons about the houses of the future. It's funny, I wonder if in 2045 we could be reading a similar article written about how things will look in 2040.

[shipps]

I am still waiting on my damn hovercraft!