I found Andy Kessler’s column in the Wall Street Journal about predictions of the future amusing and maybe a little sad:
Founded in 1867, the Keuffel & Esser Co. commissioned a study of the future for its 100th anniversary. If you’re of a certain vintage, you might have used a K&E slide rule. Their “visionary†study was a huge dud, missing completely the electronic-calculator boom that came a few years later. They shut down their slide-rule engravers in 1976. As Mark Twain said, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.†Or was it Niels Bohr? Maybe Yogi Berra?
My father was a proud member of the Book of the Month Club. Bored on a visit home in 1989, I devoured that month’s selection, “Megamistakes†by Baruch College professor Steven Schnaars, where I read about K&E’s study. The book’s message was simple: Don’t be fooled by prevailing opinion, and don’t extend trend lines into the future. Mr. Schnaars chronicles how 1950s jet-age thinking morphed into ’60s dreams of a space-age utopia. A 1966 study by conglomerate TRW forecast manned lunar bases by 1977, autonomous vehicles by 1979 and intelligent robot soldiers by the ’90s. AT&T ’s Picturephone service, ultrasonically cleaned dishes, cheap energy forever, future shock everywhere—all wrong.
Predictions of the future are highly conditioned by the present. If we can’t agree about what happened in the past how can we possibly predict the future? When the “first draft of history” is hopelessly biased, it isn’t surprising that the future nearly always takes us by surprise.
As with the past, so too with the future. In addition to miscalculating future conditions, most people project today’s conditions into the past and future.
What are the results of curing cancer? There will be more people alive, and most likely, they will be sickly. How does this affect healthcare, housing, employment, etc.?
What about fusion? What about … ?
Most things have a downside, and often, the downside is proportional to the upside.
One of the relatively few physicians to write science fiction, Alan E. Nourse, wrote a novel with just that premise—Blade Runner. The only thing the movie took from the novel was the name.
In the novel medicine was illegal except under very restricted circumstances because it was found to weaken the species. An illegal physician was a “blade runner”.
But AGW is settled science………..