Futurism’s past is littered with faulty forecasts

“It’s a highly turbulent situation with tremendous pressure to come up with novel ideas,” said Wilson. “When you have a situation where everything is running smoothly there’s no pressure to change.”

No accounting for taste
Sometimes a prediction makes perfect sense and technology cooperates, but public sentiment changes. When astronauts in the 1960s squirted their paste-based dinner from a tube, for example, the next logical step was the “food pill.”

“Every time these predictions are made they're made with the current cultural zeitgeist,” said Wilson. “Part of that in the '50s was Man over Nature: ‘We are going to conquer nature. We’re going to take every natural function of the human body and conquer it and figure out exactly why we need food. We can make our own food. We’re in control.’”

Today, modern food processing has delivered on its promise of simplicity and convenience, with ingredients engineered to satisfy nutritional requirements and prevent spoilage. But after 50 years of modern food-processing technology (including the near-ubiquitous presence of corn fructose), the idea of a 1960s-era Space Age food pill has been supplanted by public demand for naturally grown foods.

Still, when measuring the success or failures of past predictions, you have to take a long view, said Barker. Owners of the first generation of 1970s-era DiscoVision laser disc players may have a hard time finding the huge platters originally used to record video programming. But anyone who watches a DVD today owes a debt of gratitude to those pioneering early adopters.

“Sometimes people make the mistake of saying, 'That failed.’ No it didn’t. It evolved,” he said. “One of the things we sometimes forget there is there’s an evolutionary period in there just like there is with good old Darwin where it failed. But it actually sets the stage for the next attempt which is in fact much more successful.”

Tracking technological evolution can be fairly straight forward. When it comes to predicting human behavior, the process gets much more complicated. In the end, there’s no accounting for taste.

“I don’t believe that we're ever going to get really good at predicting future technology,” said Wilson. “There are too many missing variables. Human beings are very unpredictable; we’re not very good at predicting what we want.”

Interactive Visions of the future A look at some notable visions of the future of business, technology, and the economy, and how they have fared.

Even Smell-o-Vision, a technology used to add an olfactory dimension to movies, seemed like a good idea when it was introduced for the first — and last — time in 1960.

Still, measuring the success or failure of predictions misses the point, say some of those involved in making and tracking them. The most useful predictions are the ones that spur people to build a better mousetrap, said Wilson.

“If you don’t stir the pot, you don’t get new ideas,” he said. “People have to take shots at these things. You get your perpetual motion machine about every 20 years; somebody says: ‘I’ve finally done it.’ Well, good for them. Because, if nothing else, people have to rethink it, take a look at it and say, ‘Well, that didn’t work either. But, boy, you made me think about that.' "

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