— Futures Studies —
History

The desire to know the future stretches into antiquity.  Most cultures had some form of divination which promised to foretell future events.  The most famous was probably the Delphic Oracle that advised rulers and common people alike on their fate and the implications of their choices.  The Oracle, though very successful, was probably nothing more than modern day astrologers and fortune tellers, giving sufficiently vague pronouncements so that people could read into them whatever they wished.  We hope that our approach to the future these days is somewhat more systematic, but one never knows how historians of the future may treat our meager attempts today.

The formal consideration of the future began with the Enlightenment--that optimistic time when men believed that science would conquer all.  Newton’s laws of motion had brought regularity and understanding to many disparate fields.  The Enlightenment thinkers generalized from that great scientific victory to all manner of human affairs.  They believed, sincerely, that it was just a matter of time before the laws of society would be revealed as well and used to create good people and good institutions.

That belief was expressed by Louis-Sebastian Mercier in his book L'Ann 2440, first published in 1770.  L’Ann 2440 was a utopian story, the first work of utopian fiction set in the future.  Utopians since Thomas More, the inventor the genre, were traveling the seas so they had always placed their utopias on some far away land.  The Enlightenment, however, introduced the idea of continuous progress as a function of increasing scientific and technological capability and thereby changed our image of the future, perhaps forever.  Another influential utopian in Mercier's tradition was Edward Bellamy.  Bellamy's positive image of the future was so strong that Nationalist clubs sprang up around the country to implement his ideas.

Darker images of the future also appeared, first in H.G. Well's classic The Time Machine and later in George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.  The future was now on the literary agenda.  Works of science fiction began appearing in the 19th century following Jules Verne's tremendous success.   More speculative works on the future began to appear following H.G. Well's Things to Come.  The popular imagination was stirred by the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 which showed the wonders of electric lighting, appliances, the kinetoscope  (Edison’s first motion picture camera) and the telephone.  The Chicago Tribune asked 74 notables of that time to speculate on the coming century (Today Then: America’s best minds look 100 years into the future on the occasion of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition compiled by Dave Walter, American and World Geographic Publishing 1993).  They were optimistic for the most part although they missed almost all of the significant events of the 20th century--such as the automobile, heavier than air flight, radio and television, the world wars, atomic energy, spaceflight, and, of course, the computer.

The formal study of the future began under the direction of William F. Ogburn, director of President Hoover’s Committee on U.S. Social Trends from 1930-33.  Leading a team of researchers from the nascent discipline of sociology, Ogburn developed the first catalog of trends for the United States.  Published in 1933, Recent Social Trends documented changes in the U.S. from 1890 to 1930.(http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/coolhtml/coolenin.html)  They noted perennial trends like technological and economic growth and some trends which no one had expected, such as widespread immigration and the rise of divorce.  That study launched the scientific study of the future using trend extrapolation and analysis as its method.

New methods were created following World War II.   Technological forecasting began with an analysis of German and Japanese technology immediately following the war.  Conducted by Theodore von Karmen under the direction of General Hap Arnold of the Army Air Force, it forecast a number of technological achievements of the 1950s and 60s including the radar, intercontinental ballistic missile and the jet transport.

The Cold War also presented military planners with new problems for which they had to come up with new solutions.  The first problem was  the incredible speed of a nuclear exchange compared to conventional warfare.  Planners in conventional war typically had months or even years to plan and prepare for combat while armies were assembled and moved into place.  A nuclear exchange, on the other hand, could take place in less than an hour.  Once the missiles started to fly, planning time was over!

The Department of Defense with the aid of the RAND Corporation, the first government sponsored think-tank, developed the war game as a response.  War games are simulated combat, first employed to "play out" the realities of a nuclear exchange.  They were not predictions of how World War III will happen; rather they were possibilities of how it might happen.  The war game grew up to be the scenario, a common tool of business planning today.  Herman Kahn, a researcher at RAND during this period, claimed that the scenario allowed people to "think the unthinkable," notably nuclear war, in an atmosphere that allowed time for reflection and preparation.  The same can be said of the scenario method today.

A second difficulty of military affairs in the Cold War was the complexity of the weapons.  Airplanes, tanks, even ships could be turned out in relatively short order as demonstrated by the incredible production during World War II.  Improvements to those devices could be incorporated almost immediately into the next version.

Intercontinental missiles and nuclear submarines are a different story.  Design and development might well take a decade.  The problem is the technology available at the beginning of that decade was far less capable than what was available at the end.  A weapons systems that incorporated the technology that existed when development started would be obsolete when it was finally deployed.  Military planners therefore had to anticipate the technological capabilities that would be available when the system went into production.  That requirement gave rise to the field of technological forecasting, still practiced today primarily under the auspices of competitive intelligence.

The need for technology forecasts also spawned perhaps the most famous futures technique, the Delphi, survey in 1964.  Again under the auspices of the RAND Corporation, Olaf Helmer and Ted Gordon conducted an extensive survey of technology experts on what new technologies would occur in the next 100 years.  The study covered six topics: scientific breakthroughs; population control; automation; space progress; war prevention; weapon systems.  The technique asked experts to give their estimates, consider the distribution of responses from all the experts, discuss their differences and provide new estimates. The results of this most famous of all Delphis were uncannily accurate in predicting the appearance of technologies decades into the future.  (http://www.iit.edu/~it/delphi.html)

Futures studies as a public activity appeared in the 1960s.   French futurist Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote the first theoretical study of the future in The Art of Conjecture.  He anticipated the field by pointing that there were no future facts.  As a result, non-traditional methods of evidence and inference were necessary.  Olaf Helmer made the same point in 1959 with “The Epistemology of the Inexact Sciences" in which he defended the use of informed, yet subjective evidence in forecasting the future.

Consciousness about future problems also began to surface around this time.  Harrison Brown wrote The Challenge to Man's Future in 1954, forecasting most of the ecological and developmental problems we are dealing with today.  Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962,launched the environmental movement with its overwhelming image of a world without robins.  The analysis of problems in the early period culminated in Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb and the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth which traumatized society with the ultimate collapse of industrial society, complete with computer projections.  The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the appearance of poverty on the national agenda, the student revolution with protest, drugs,  and sex, civil rights turmoil, the war in Vietnam, the oil crisis, Watergate--the world seemed to be falling apart indeed, and futurists seemed to be right on track predicting its demise.

The positive extrapolists were also hard at work in the 1960s.  Sociologist Daniel Bell coined the term "post-industrial society" in his book of the same name.  He also headed up the Commission on the Year 2000 sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965.  Bell began a long-line of futures thinkers which included Marshall McLuan (The Medium is the Message), Alvin Toffler (Future Shock and The Third Wave)and John Naisbitt (Megatrends, perhaps the most popular futures book of the 1980s.)  While their future took a little longer in coming, the 1980s saw the PC transform work, and the 90s saw the Internet transform communication and business.  The future had arrived and it was digital.

The infrastructure for the new discipline of futures studies was also being laid in the 1960s.  Jim Dator taught the first course on the future in 1963 at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and Wendell Bell began his series of courses at Yale shortly thereafter.  Dator moved to the political science department at Hawaii where he created a strong concentration in futures studies for both Master's and Doctoral students.  The University of Houston-Clear Lake established its free-standing Master of Science in Studies of the Future under the leadership of Jib Fowles and Chris Dede in 1974.  Futures concentrations sprang up at universities in Massachusetts, Akron, Minnesota, USC, and Portland State University.  (Unfortunately, all except Hawaii and Houston are closed today.)

The two major futures organizations in the world were also established during this flurry of activity:  the World Futures Society (WFS) in the U.S. in 1967 and the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF) in Paris in 1973.   WFS enrolled up to 40,000 members, published the popular Futurist magazine,  and held conference of upwards of 5,000 people in the early 1980s.  The WFSF, a more international organization, organized futurists around the world into a professional community.  The Elsevier Publishing company also launched the journal Futures in the 1980s which has been the flagship of academic and intellectual publication since then.  The WFS also published Futures Research Quarterly beginning 1990 and Camford Publishing just created foresight, a new journal of futures studies.

The current state of futures studies is more extensive yet more muted than during the Golden Age of the 1960s and early 70s.  The world today is more ready to consider the future explicitly than it was then.  The future is not left to a small band of marginal writers and teachers.  Business people, government officials, and educators are all waking up to the fact we better focus on the future if we want to be successful there.  They are making strategic plans powered by visions and informed by scenarios.

At the same time, formal programs of education and training in futures have shrunk rather than expanded.  New concentrations like competitive intelligence and strategic management have adopted many of the tools of the futures field without necessarily adopting its theoretical or ideological positions.  In the end, futures may end like many of the social sciences.  Having sparked the society's interest in a subject of immense importance (e.g., human and social relations) and having developed many tools to deal with that subject, the social sciences today are almost purely academic while the applications are being pursued in business and government agencies without their continued involvement.