{"id":25889,"date":"2014-05-23T00:01:19","date_gmt":"2014-05-23T04:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25889"},"modified":"2023-02-02T16:01:51","modified_gmt":"2023-02-02T21:01:51","slug":"qotd-futurologists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/05\/23\/qotd-futurologists\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Futurologists"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Futurologists are almost always wrong. Indeed, Clive James invented a word \u2013 \u201cHermie\u201d \u2013 to denote an inaccurate prediction by a futurologist. This was an ironic tribute to the cold war strategist and, in later life, pop futurologist Herman Kahn. It was slightly unfair, because Kahn made so many fairly obvious predictions \u2013 mobile phones and the like \u2013 that it was inevitable quite a few would be right.<\/p>\n<p>Even poppier was Alvin Toffler, with his 1970 book <em>Future Shock<\/em>, which suggested that the pace of technological change would cause psychological breakdown and social paralysis, not an obvious feature of the Facebook generation. Most inaccurate of all was Paul R Ehrlich who, in <em>The Population Bomb<\/em>, predicted that hundreds of millions would die of starvation in the 1970s. Hunger, in fact, has since declined quite rapidly.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the most significant inaccuracy concerned artificial intelligence (AI). In 1956 the polymath Herbert Simon predicted that \u201cmachines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do\u201d and in 1967 the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky announced that \u201cwithin a generation &#8230; the problem of creating \u2018artificial intelligence\u2019 will substantially be solved\u201d. Yet, in spite of all the hype and the dizzying increases in the power and speed of computers, we are nowhere near creating a thinking machine.<\/p>\n<p>Bryan Appleyard, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/culture\/2014\/04\/why-futurologists-are-always-wrong-and-why-we-should-be-sceptical-techno-utopians\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;Why futurologists are always wrong \u2013 and why we should be sceptical of techno-utopians: From predicting AI within 20 years to mass-starvation in the 1970s, those who foretell the future often come close to doomsday preachers&#8221;, <em>New Statesman<\/em><\/a>, 2014-04-10.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Futurologists are almost always wrong. Indeed, Clive James invented a word \u2013 \u201cHermie\u201d \u2013 to denote an inaccurate prediction by a futurologist. This was an ironic tribute to the cold war strategist and, in later life, pop futurologist Herman Kahn. It was slightly unfair, because Kahn made so many fairly obvious predictions \u2013 mobile phones [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,41,16,15],"tags":[1506,686,39,308,810],"class_list":["post-25889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-quotations","category-science","category-technology","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-futurism","tag-junkscience","tag-malthusianism","tag-skepticism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6Jz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25889"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79751,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25889\/revisions\/79751"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}