Previous: The Professional Prophets
In 1972, Kahn and the Institute published ``Things to Come: Thinking about the Seventies and Eighties''. Despite the fact that he was looking only two decades ahead, and despite being a specialist in military matters, Kahn included in this book such predictions as
There will be nuclear-powered aircraft, weighing thousands or tens of thousands of tons.
And,
Between 1975 and 1985, the next nations to develop nuclear weapons may be Japan, followed in about five years by West Germany, soon to be followed by Italy. Other possibilities are India, Australia, Sweden and Switzerland.This prophecy scores one out of a possible seven, though we should also take points off for the now-nuclear nations that he fails to mention.
One of the most interesting chapters in the book is Chapter 8, ``The 1985 Technological Crisis''. Kahn quotes from John von Neumann:
The great globe itself is in a rapidly maturing crisis - attributable to the fact that the environment in which technological progress must occur has become both undersized and under organised... in the years between now and 1980, the crisis will probably develop far beyond all earlier patterns.(John von Neumann, Fortune, 1955.)
With hindsight, we can see that the crisis did not occur. Was the problem solved, or was the crisis just deferred? In his subsequent books, Kahn and the Institute rapidly migrate to the view that there never was a crisis. For example, in ``The Next 200 Years'', written in 1976, Kahn suggests that by 2000, a quarter of mankind will live in `post-industrial' society, in which the task of procuring the necessities of life has become trivially easy. Virtually everyone in these societies will be rich and devote their leisure to cultured pursuits, and more than two-thirds of humanity will earn more than $1,000 a year.
It's evident by now that these forecasts are excessively optimistic. But as time went on, Kahn and his colleagues became even more cheerful. For example, `The Resourceful Earth', published in 1984 by Kahn and his disciple Julian Simon, assured the reader that
Fish catches are resuming their long upward trend
There is no sign of climate change
There is no evidence of species loss
The truth is, just two decades years later, that virtually all scientists agree that climate change is taking place (though there is still some disagreement on the cause), and that we are losing species at the rate of about one every ten minutes, a rate of extinction without precedent in the last sixty-five million years.
Previous: The Professional Prophets