futurology

The attempt to forecast the future by constructing theories of history is as old as philosophy itself. But the systematic practice of futurology-projecting statistical trends in order to construct realistic future scenarios-dates from the 1950s and is a distinctively social scientific enterprise. Early predictions such as those of Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener in The Year 2000(1967) tended to be optimistic, and even utopian.

This pattern changed with the Club of Rome's report on The Limits to Growth (1972). Futurology in the 1980s and 1990s has been more pessimistic, and sometimes apocalyptic, focusing on negative trends in population, environment, and social order. However, positive predictions can still be found in books likeAmerican Renaissance by Marvin Cetron and Owen Davies (1989).

Most forecasting depends on identifying historical trends and patterns, and projecting them into the future. The simplest forecasts focus on a specific vector of change, like population or technology. These may offer more or less definite answers about the future: world population will definitely grow by one billion in the next decade; technology will definitely become more sophisticated, and so on. Other vectors like economic performance, drug use, crime, religious belief, or social attitudes are far more difficult to predict. Sophisticated modelling systems can take many variables into account, but they offer so many branching pathways of change that their usefulness is limited. Futurology in general is interesting as a speculative exercise, but has little or no scientific basis, and has an almost complete record of predictive failure.