howardpark/futurism

How come science fiction writers, whose business presumably involves quite a lot of thinking about the future, never seem to get it right? Even when their factual predictions come true, they always seem to miss the point of what they predicted. Perhaps it has something to do with the tendency to overdramatize. Huge, important things may happen, but that doesn't mean people will act like they are huge and important. Most people will just carry on with their lives. Even the biggest changes seem to have little effect on the overall balance of human happiness and misery. Here is how Adam Gopnik put it:

The Next looks not only like the Now but very often like the Way Back There. When we try to imagine the future in any kind of detail, we turn for guidance to the only alternative to the present we possess, and that is the past....

Yet the thing that all these attempts to guess what lies ahead seem to miss is any sense of the inescapable dailiness of life, which no period of the past has ever been able to escape. It isn't just the failure of so many predictions to come true that makes reasonable people doubt the whole futurist enterprise (where now are our personal helicopters? our robot maids? our space academies?) but the fact that so many predictions have come true without changing the tenor of lived experience. We have the two-way wrist radio, but we are not yet Dick Tracy.... Maybe only the animators at Hanna-Barbera, back in the sixties, ever really grasped this truth in all its complexity, thereby producing what some bright student of cultural history has probably already called the Flintstones-Jetsons Theory: it is not just that the ancient past and the dim future will resemble each other but that both will resemble the basic plot line of "The Honeymooners."

Probably they will; the burden of normal life--wanting and getting or failing to get the things we want--seems irreducible. And that, of course, leaves us where we always are: right here and right now. If projecting ourselves into the future has any special value, it may be that it enables us to think about the present historically. When we do, it doesn't seem unreasonable to regard this particular moment--not this epoch but this month, in the fall of 1997--as a particularly golden one. With all our troubles, we are in a period of relative peace and prosperity that the world has not seen in at least a hundred years. (Adam Gopnik, "What Next?")

Now there's a writer who got it right.