Worried about the future? History proves it’s hard to predict

In 1974, the worthy Saturday Review, then in its 50th year, published several anniversary issues that took stock of how the century led to a grim present of Watergate scandals, impending thermonuclear war, a population boom that would soon outrun the planet’s food and tappable energy, and other world-threatening fumbles. To wrap up, however, the Review offered an atypically fantastical issue full of imaginative, sometimes loopy predictions and proposals for the world a half century into the future.

More erudite than newspapers or news weeklies and more timely and readable than academic journals, the now defunct Review was a home for center-left commentary, reviews, and reports. The magazine mostly dived deep into culture and geopolitics, yet it worked to offer a bright side to a bleak world, too.

One of the anniversary issues in ’74 was devoted entirely to ways “The World Can Get Its Confidence Back.” The issues were shepherded by the Review’s longtime editor Norman Cousins, himself a prolific public intellectual and once the nation’s most famous optimist.

Cousins was a kind of High Lama in our home. My mother, a high school counselor, cornered our family (or was it just me?) with snippets from his columns. In 1979, his bestseller, Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient, described how, following a terminal diagnosis, he successfully treated himself, in part, with madcap movie comedies and belly laughs. Anatomy still influences my mom for whom, at 97, joy remains a potent elixir.

Cousins’s optimism hit my mailbox recently, too. When an editor friend was clearing out his parents’ home, he found a copy of the prognosticative anniversary issue that his mom had saved. He sent it to me. Because I write about the future, he said, he wanted my thoughts on this past version of it. He knew I’d bite.

Famous futurists

Cousins assembled a roster of world-famous mandarins, such as Andrei Sakharov, Neil Armstrong, Jacques Cousteau, Isaac Asimov, and Clare Boothe Luce (the only woman). Some of the problems they most hoped the world would engineer a way out of—especially the scarcity of oil and overpopulation—have receded. Wisely or not, those concerns have been superseded by their seeming opposites. In rich countries.

Today, hands wring over epidemics of obesity and the wreckage of too-abundant fossil fuels. Only two of the world’s big oil and gas companies, Saudi Aramco and Exxon, are more valuable than Novo Nordisk, the maker of weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy.

Nations now panic over the worldwide slide in birth rates and their shrinking and aging populations. This trend, by the way, is one I once dissected at length in two future-focused books—China, Inc. and Shock of Gray. I can be smug at how much I got right, but I am also aware of what my own futurism was blind to. I predicted that shrinking birth rates would grip the whole world, but I didn’t foresee how many adults—in some countries nearly 40%—would choose to have no children at all.

I predicted correctly that China’s one-child-per-family policy would push Chinese families to invest ever more in the education of their children in order to ready them for the global market. I didn’t foresee that millions of college-educated but professionally frustrated young Chinese (the so-called rotten-tail kids) would prefer to remain unemployed for years instead of taking jobs they regard as beneath them. Or that they’d stay dependent on their parents, unmarried and childless.

I certainly didn’t foresee that in America, prosperity and low unemployment would dissuade young men from going to college, or that “The Uneducateds” would brandish their lack of degrees as a political virtue and then be puffed up as vanguards of America’s great-again rejuvenation.

Future shock

The stuff I missed isn’t nearly as wild as some of the wacko visions of the Review’s crew in 1974. Neil Armstrong foresaw whole enclaves of humans living in an ocean of methane goop under the survivable surface of Jupiter. They’d work their day jobs, shop and party while they floated around in wetsuits, but only after surgery replaced the colonizers’ hearts and lungs with implantable oxygenators. Bizarrely, Armstrong, an aeronautical engineer, saw this as a rosy vision of 2024. I would like to experience it, though . . . as a Paul Verhoeven movie.

Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet H-bomb and future (1975) Nobel Peace Prize winner, also dished out ideas on how to get people “out of an industrial world that is overcrowded and inhospitable to human life and nature.”

Sakharov believed the world of 2024 would be divided into grim industrial zones and densely populated green belts where people would spend most of their time. But the Earth’s surface would not be enough for its “7 billion people in 2024” (he was short by 1 billion). Sakharov also foresaw vast cities in space that would be home to farms and factories. I guess that sounds like a utopian vision if the dystopia on surface Earth is so much worse. Especially if you were a Soviet dissident who already suffered it.

More upsetting to me than the hellscapes described as escapes is that Sakharov’s description of 1974 sounds so much like our moment today. “In the present,” he wrote, “. . . the world is openly dividing into opposing groups of governments [and] all the dangers that threaten mankind increase by an incredible degree.”

What he saw as the dark fruit of Communism applies to a growing list of autarchic states today. “The party and the state monopoly in all aspects of economic, political, ideological, and cultural life; the persistent burden of the uncovered bloody crimes of the recent past, the permanent suppression of non-conformist thought; the hypocritical, self-praising, dogmatic, and nationalistic ideology; the oppression in these societies . . . create a situation that is . . . dangerous for all mankind.” Jupiter, here I come!

Political conservative and LSD-tripper Clare Boothe Luce, who had been a playwright, congressional representative, ambassador to Italy, and wife of powerful men, wrote that the too-slow progress of women could be seen in the contours of their past. Luce’s essay features pictures of 18 other prominent women writers, artists, athletes, and intellectuals, including Joan Didion, Gloria Steinem, and Billie Jean King. It’s doubtful that any of them would agree with Luce’s view that “the very durability of the superior male-inferior female relationship is reasonably good proof that it has so far served the best interests of human society.”

Luce believed equality for women would come, but would take a century or more. Reaching “somewhat reluctantly for my crystal ball,” she wrote, “I am sorry to say that the picture I see there is not one of the Woman sitting in the Oval Room of the White House in 2024.” Perhaps the other diviners would have been as uncannily timely with their predictions had they dropped acid.

Future Faith

Lately, I’ve been trying to see the future by spending time at the building sites of data centers that are springing up around the country to capture the boom in artificial intelligence. One astounding prediction driving money and policy today is that the world will spend more than $1 trillion building out data infrastructure (Sam Altman, OpenAI’s founder, predicts $7 trillion) for next-gen computing that could obviate human prediction and replace it with predictive models run by machines. Though no one knows where all that computing power will lead, the world is betting big on it nonetheless. The boom makes my imagination—something I’ve been pretty proud of—feel small, overwhelmed.

Yet, like my mom, I can take some comfort in the optimism of Cousins, the editor. He noted that expert predictions routinely fall short because they—like the output of AI—are based on the facts up to now. Cousins was moved less by the visions of the future extrapolated from current fact than by the emotional intelligence and hopeful visions of those who used their knowledge to break with the past.

Paradoxically, he argued, predictions do not account enough for the optimism people project into the future. If enough people have faith that the human species is sufficiently intelligent and energetic to work on global problems together, he concluded, “the pessimistic forecasts of the experts will lose their power to paralyze or intimidate. The biggest task of humanity in the next 50 years will be to prove the [pessimistic] experts wrong.”

My mom would agree. I can’t predict whether I’ll come around.