May 17, 2021 7:00 AM

Why Humans Are So Bad at Seeing the Future

People tend to make predictions while looking through their own narrow lens. The real vision lies in seeing connections.

illustration of man with scifi tech juxtaposed with man with current tech

The book of Predictions is a 500-page anthology from 1980, assembled by the same people who gave us The People’s Almanac. It’s a simple conceit: They asked various experts and sci-fi types (with the occasional psychic or spoon-bender) to imagine the next 50 years. I bought the book years ago, left it on the shelf at the office, and never read it.

If anything was predicted, it was this pandemic. And yet somehow we didn’t believe it was happening. Many still don’t. I found myself thinking often in the past year about predictions, long- and short-term, and reading up on predictive frameworks and forecasting methods (i.e., browsing Wikipedia). My mind kept wandering back to this volume with its bright-yellow slipcover, one forbidden commute away. I could have ordered another copy, but you should have limits.

So two weeks after my second shot, in I went on the express bus to the frozen-in-time office, where a jacket still hung over the back of a chair, and hair gel and dress shoes sat under my desk, as if we’d fled a war. I puttered around the office alone, the last man on Earth, and when the workday was done I grabbed the book and started to read.

Here is my review: All of the predictions are wrong. Every now and then someone writes something like “By 2000 you’ll be able to listen to any album in a record store through a data service,” and you can squint and see Spotify. Or someone else describes wrist phones. My favorite was Erskine Caldwell, known as the author of tragic-but-comic sex satires like Tobacco Road, who perfectly predicted Bitcoin, except he expected it for 1990. No, really. He wrote: “A different kind of money will be in circulation. Not gold and not paper. It will be a computer type of exchange of credits and debits.” This is the firmest evidence produced so far that Erskine Caldwell, author of God’s Little Acre, who died in 1987, is Satoshi Nakamoto. Caldwell also said that the capital of the US would move to Minneapolis in 1999, including the “spies, and call girls.”

When you aggregate hundreds of predictions, the result is a special, concentrated kind of wrong. Everyone was trying their best, and everyone missed. And these 40-year-old predictions don’t seem wrong in the fun, steampunk way that, say, late Victorian predictions of personal blimps or hot-air-ballooning robots might seem wrong. They’re just saggy middle-aged predictions.

In 1980, nuclear war was right next door and space was salvation. Many people in this book believed that the next 50 years would give us people on Mars, and millions more in orbit. The mistake was assuming that the rate of progress would keep accelerating until we left the planet. Consider: The Soviet Union shoots a tin can into orbit with Sputnik. Twelve years later, in 1969, the USA sends another tin can to the moon—and, more impressively, sends it back without murdering its contents. That is a very rapid rate of change. It’s also roughly the same amount of time that Microsoft took to go from Windows 95 to Windows Vista Service Pack 1.

Each correspondent in this volume has their own personal definition of progress, and they are pessimistic or optimistic in direct correlation to that definition. The Catholic priest predicts the return of traditional sexual mores; the sci-fi writer has us renting asteroids; the CIA guy says the Soviets will rule the world; the dentist predicts increased use of dental lasers.

I started to see each prediction as a little work of literature, almost painfully revealing. To ask someone to predict is invariably to ask them to prioritize, and then fantasize. Sportswriter Martin Abramson predicted that by 2030 a 3,000-pound fish would be caught in Alaska with a rod. Here was a man who, when asked to paint a portrait of the future a half-century away, imagined a very large and wonderful fish. We talk about “progress” like it’s a vast, shared contract between our era and future generations, signed in hopeful ink. But progress is individual, personal, and in the eye of the beholder.

People could imagine a future for their disciplines, a future with wars, a future on Mars, or a future with laser dentistry. What no one could see was the potential of all the layers of infrastructure coming into being right around them. Think of Twitch, the video game streaming platform. How could you have predicted Twitch 40 years ago? It’s a child with so many parents: It required alchemy between the internet, the AAA video game industry, specialized 3D computer chips, low-cost camera equipment, and a thousand other ancillary industry-scale things that seem obvious in hindsight. You’d need to predict all of those things to predict Twitch. Of course, it also required Amazon to buy it and host it and build it ever larger, so now you need to predict Amazon too.

Try to go in the other direction and retcon the concept of Twitch to 1980: It comes out like, “A new cable TV station will launch that shows live video of people playing Space Invaders at arcades, and Sears will buy it for $370 million.” (Frankly, I’d watch it.) Imagining jetpacks is the easy part; imagining the multitrillion-dollar personal-jet refueling industry is less exciting; imagining the liability and insurance products required to deal with malfunctioning-jetpack lawsuits is harder still. And where will they park?

The future is messy. There are still lawyers. It’s no surprise that billionaires like Jeff Bezos (and Elon Musk too) keep funding space exploration. It’s a way to pick up where the world left off, take the old future out for a spin, and force the old predictions into coming true. The best way to predict the future is to spend billions of dollars reinventing it. What, then, for mortals?

What I took away from The Book of Predictions, 40 years later, is to watch for the curious and interesting intersections between very large things. Look for points of contact or points of conflict. Pick two enormous forces and wonder how they connect. Climate and transit. Software-as-a-service and protest movements. Pandemics and entertainment. You can’t predict the future. You can only better understand the layers and let your mind wander over them until you find a connection worth making and a new thing worth building, even if you’re the only one who sees it. You can give it a name and believe in it, and try to make it come true. That’s progress.