A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future
A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future
Editorial
Futurism Is NOT Dead
by Cindy Wagner
Managing Editor, THE FUTURIST
cwagner@wfs.org
n assertion just published in Wired magazine that "futurism is dead" had already been contradicted by the flurry of correspondence that was generated when a preview of the story was leaked to members of the futurist community. So it's hard to get too worked up about it.
To read the original editorial, "Futurism Is Dead" by Hope Cristol (Wired, 12/03), go to http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/view.html?pg=1
The first point we should make in response is that the author of the Wired editorial neglected to disclose that she was, until September 2003, an employee of the World Future Society; she'd been on THE FUTURIST's editorial staff for about a year and a half. (She also failed to identify futurism-critic Michael Marien as the editor of WFS-published Future Survey.)
Futurism is both a profession and a mind-set. Professional futurists are consultants who must meet their clients' needs; they help draw the maps to the future and identify the obstacles (and opportunities) along the way.
But in fact, most members of the World Future Society are not professional futurists. Occupations and backgrounds are richly varied: students and deans, clerks and CEOs, architects and ambassadors, poets and planners, engineers and editors, musicians and marketers, farmers and fashion designers.
Futurists share a passion for ideas and an urgent need to look over the horizon--or at least over the walls of their cubicles--to see what's going on in the world, what it could lead to, and what they can do about it.
With some 22 years (and counting) of familiarity with the field, I offer the following responses to specific points in the Wired editorial:
- The lead anecdote of the editorial shows the president of WFS being asked for a prediction, "any prediction."
(A) Is that a reasonable request? A prediction about what? The market demands sound bites and flash, not substance. We don't promote that point of view but recognize the demand, so we do supply an annual roundup of forecasts in our Outlook report. The top 10 forecasts from Outlook are posted on our Web site, where we also post four or five forecasts from each issue of the magazine. You can look 'em up.
(B) Later in the editorial we're blamed for making forecasts, for being wrong very often, and for boasting when we're right. There's no way we can win an argument like this.
[Factual error in the anecdote about Ed Cornish's computer. It's not a "DOS" machine. He has Windows. He prefers to work with WordPerfect rather than Word. And as for not using e-mail, that's perhaps typical of a busy association president who has an administrative staff to support him. And we all have a preferred medium of communication--I, for instance, hardly ever use the telephone.]
- No major newspaper covered the conference.
Reuters, a wire service with global distribution, picked up speaker Michael Zey's remarks on the lengthening of the human life-span. Also generating some ink were Jerome C. Glenn's remarks on the possibility of a "single individual massively destructive" weapon, or SIMDs, which got picked up in the Oakland Tribune and syndicated to others, and John Challenger's remarks on outsourcing of white-collar jobs, picked up in a chain of business newspapers.
- No WFS member has been invited to the White House since the Reagan administration.
Not counting Al Gore? We don't know what basis there is for this assertion since we have not checked the White House invitation list.
[Full disclosure: A fact checker for Wired magazine called me on this point and, without thinking too hard about it, I responded that as far as I knew the assertion was true. The fact checker asked me no other questions and did not reveal the author of the story.]
- Membership is down vs. 10 years ago.
The editorial makes no attempt to provide an explanation. In the last 10 years we got new competition from something called the Internet. And also the economy has been troublesome of late. Membership levels sometimes drop when we have to raise our dues, but we're working on it. We initiated a discounted student-membership program this year, which we hope will stimulate membership levels.
- Long gone are the days of Isaac Asimov, Bucky Fuller, and Arthur C. Clarke...
Asimov and Fuller, sadly, are no longer living. Sir Arthur C. Clarke serves on the Society's International Council.
But of course there are new visionaries, though perhaps more specialized than their predecessors: Eric Drexler on nanotechnology, Ray Kurzweil on AI, and Greg Stock on genetic engineering come immediately to mind. Drexler and Stock were at our San Francisco meeting, and Kurzweil has written for THE FUTURIST.
This is an argument for a cult of personalities. I'm reminded of the line from The Right Stuff, where one of the astronauts says, "They all want to see Buck Rogers."
The demand for visionaries isn't clear to me right now. Whenever a civilian finds out I write for THE FUTURIST, I'm inevitably asked something about what the stock market or real estate will do next year. So what do people really want? Buck Rogers's financial advice?
- As the supposed successors to Asimov, Fuller, and Clarke, several authors of recent or forthcoming articles are named.
There was no attempt in this editorial to identify these authors or contextualize the subjects they're dealing with. The one on interspecies communication, for instance, is part of a group of articles asking "what if" questions, scheduled for the March-April 2004 issue of THE FUTURIST.
- Mike Marien as "recovering futurist."
I don't know what that means, since he is still the editor of Future Survey, which he's put out monthly for 25 years. That he is an outspoken critic, we already knew. We don't censor him. In fact, we try to view his (and other people's) criticism as feedback, which is valuable to the growth of any organization.
The editorial makes no attempt to include the point of view of a defender of futurism; as an editorial, though, perhaps it didn't have to be balanced, but I think readers might have found it more persuasive if it were.
- Futurism is a con because it doesn't have a crystal ball.
?! Sorry. That's just too funny to respond to.
- Any hausfrau with gumption could study trends like a futurist does.
The point is that they don't. WFS, if it advocates anything, would say they should.
- Forty years of failed predictions.
Stories about failed predictions are always entertaining--the book Bad Predictions by Laura Lee made a great cover story in THE FUTURIST a few years ago. But most of those predictions were made not by futurists but by people who were presumably experts in their fields. That's a cautionary tale about narrow, overly specialized thinking. Futurists encourage cross-disciplinary and big-picture thinking.
- Re: Watts Wacker's Postal Service e-mail prediction.
I don't know anything about it and so can't comment. Possibly it was a prescription rather than a prediction.
- Terrorists...hijack a plane and crash it into buildings... "By 1996, Tom Clancy had written two novels based on the premise."
The warning about "aerial suicide attacks" was published in the July-August 1987 issue of THE FUTURIST in an article by RAND Corporation antiterrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins.
- Futurists are the first to say futurism is about examining trends and fleshing out scenarios.
Because it is. We spout predictions because people ask us to--go back and re-read the lead anecdote of the Wired editorial. "The logic here is circular."
- We credit "scientific" methodology when we're right about predictions.
No source or examples are given, so I don't know what this refers to. Is "scientific" in quotes because someone said it?
That futurists have no "success-measuring metrics" suggests that their work is not continuously evaluated. It is, of course. One classic text on how to do just that is Anticipatory Management by James Morrison and William Ashley (digested in the September-October 1997 issue of THE FUTURIST).
Also, in the January-February 1997 issue of THE FUTURIST (its 30th anniversary), founding editor Ed Cornish went back to the very first issue of the magazine and gave it a report card. Evaluating 34 specific forecasts, he tallied 23 hits and 11 misses, or 68% accuracy. Most of the misses, according to Ed, were due to the fact that the forecast was not realized in the period of time specified.
- Eric Garland, president of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the World Future Society, is quoted here. He can speak for himself:
"My quotes are altered and taken out of context." (From an e-mail to WFS.)
- The author "was once a futurist-in-training."
To my knowledge she did not attend any of the proprietary professional courses offered at World Future Society conferences or do course work at any of the schools (elementary, secondary, undergraduate, graduate, or corporate) offering such training. This claim, probably intended simply to be ironic, would be like me getting an editing job at The Economist and calling myself an economist-in-training.
There are people who call themselves futurists because futurism represents a worldview they embrace, like optimism. But there are also indeed professional futurists (some may call themselves strategic planners, trend analysts, forecasters, or imagineers). Those of us writing about the field are usually pretty careful to explain the difference.
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