If you have been reading this blog for a long time you will note that I have covered several issues about futurism and its failures. There has been a decline in the number of people who call themselves futurists because they are inadvertently wrong too much of the time. The Association of Professional Futurists shows a picture at their last meeting, last month, with only 45 attendees.
I find two serious problems with futurist projections. The first one deals with all of the missing dots, the second one deals with all of the missing reality.
In the early 70's I was confronted with a book sized object at Xerox Research Park. It was called the Dynabook and I was told that this object exemplified a future portable encyclopedia which would be a development that would grow out of computers.
In order for this object to come into existence there turned out to be several important developments that could not be foreseen. Missing dots. One was the advent of Wi-Fi and the other was the development of HTML.
When Wi-Fi and HTML finally came along, decades apart, the analogy to an encyclopedia turned out to be trivial. Wikipedia became far more comprehensive and useful than any printed encyclopedia had ever previously been. But the most stunning difference was the development of Google which became the primary source of information on this portable electronic book that no one foresaw.
The second problem in futurism is best illustrated by the post-World War II expectation for a personal jet pack. 70 years later the personal jet pack remains a fantasy.
The reason is simple and straightforward. To this day most people are unaware of what every butterfly knows: The air around us is is made up of many layers of air moving in different directions at different speeds. A jet pack would lift a person off the ground and the air flow layers, at some point, would flip him over.
The futurists simply were missing this fact of reality.
I don't make predictions. I don't pay much attention to predictions.