What Futurists Believe (A World Future Society Book)

335 Pages·1989·13.422 MB·English

by  Joseph F. Coates, Jennifer Jarratt

Copyright 1989 by J.F. Coates, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 88- 82961
-I -S-BN: 0-912338-66-0 (Clothbound) :
ISBN: 0-912338?9 (Microfiche)
A World Future Society Book
Published by:
Lomond Publications, Inc.
P.O. Box 88
Mt. Airy, Maryland 21771
and
The World Future Society
4916 St. Elmo Avenue
Bethesda, Maryland 20814
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FoREwoRn ........................................... vil
PREFACE ..............................................xi
PART ONE
ROLE OF TIiE FUTURIST
Chapter 1 The Futurist and the Corporation ..................2
Chapter 2 Characteristics of the Selected Futurists ............. 9
Chapter 3 What Futurists Believe: Comparisons Among 17 ......19
Chapter 4 Strengths, Weaknesses and Gaps in
Current Futures Thinking .....................45
PART TWO
FUTURIST PROFILES
Chapter 5 Roy Amara ..................................59
Chapter 6 Robert U. Ayres ..............................71
Chapter 7 Daniel Bell .................................. 87
Chapter 8 Kenneth E. Boulding ..........................103
Chapter 9 Arthur C. Clarke .............................115
Chapter 10 Peter Drucker ...............................127
Chapter 11 Victor C. Ferkiss .............................143
Chapter 12 Barry B. Hughes ............................. 155
Chapter 13 Alexander King ..............................167
Chapter 14 Richard D. Lamm ............................181
Chapter 15 Michael Marien ............................. 195
Chapter 16 Dennis L. Meadows ...........................207
Chapter 17 James A. Ogilvy ..............................219
Chapter 18 Gerard K. O'Neill ............................229
Chapter 19 John R. Pierce ...............................241
Chapter 20 Peter Schwartz .............................. 253
Chapter 21 Robert Theobald .............................265
PART THREE
OVERVIEW
Chapter 22 As We See the Future ......................... 281
vi What Futurists Believe
Keeping Up and Digging Deeper: A Guide to
thé Fatntea Uteratnte .......................309
Second Thoughts : Roy Amara, Robert U. Ayres,
Kenneth E. Bonlding, Victor C. Ferkiss,
Barry B. Hughes, Richard D. Lamm,
Michael Marien, Péter Schwartz,
and Robert Theobald ........................313
Name Index ............................................ 327
Key Word Index ........................................ 330
FOREWORD
by Edward Cornish
President, World Future Society
Editor, The Futurist
The term "futurist," in its current meaning, did not become part of
our language until the 1960s, when it began appearing in U.S. magazines
as a handy way to describe people who are seriously interested in what
may happen in the years ahead. Until then, it seems, such people were
sufficiently rare that the absence of a word for them was not a serious
problem, though one Fortune magazine writer in the pre-futurist days
was driven to invent the phrase "wild bird" as a name for the visionary
thinkers who were moving into corporations.
During the sixties, futurists multiplied in the excitement over space
exploration and the abundance of scientific and technological
breakthroughs, and Time magazine devoted a major essay in 1965 to
describing these "futurists." This usage of the term in its new sense-it
had previously been used to describe an early-twentieth-century art
movement-seems to have been the impetus that made the term what it
is today. The World Future Society named its initial newsletter (later a
magazine) The Futurist, and today "futurist" is widely used as a
catch-all term for people interested in long-term issues. It received a kind
of official status in 1985 when the President of the United States invited
a group of people described as "futurists" to have lunch with him at the
White House.
Many people now described as futurists might prefer to call
themselves something else-long-range planner, forecaster, social
theorist, trend analyst, etc.-but the public cannot get very excited over
niceties of word and meaning; the term "futurist" is easily understood,
and being called one is no longer the worst of fates. Society has corne to
accept futurists as people worth listening to, not because they have the
right answers, but because they do have the right questions-those that
concern the serious long-term issues that our society faces.
Since the sixties, futurists have acquired steadily increasing respect in
government, business, education, and other areas. The U.S. Congress
now has its own futurist "club:" the Congressional Clearinghouse on the
Future, to which several-score senators and representatives belong. Top
business leaders participate in futurist activities and hire futurists to
vüi What Fntnrists Believe
advise their companies. And futurists at universities have established
numerous courses dealing with the future.
The growing respect accorded futurists does not mean that there is
agreement on just what a futurist really is-or should be. Some futurists
want the term to apply only to people professionally engaged in studying
or planning for the future; they want futurists to be a professional group,
with the usual accouterments of such-academic degrees, peer review,
etc. Other futurists insist on a more democratic approach, arguing that
the future belongs to everyone and should not be made a private preserve
for specialists. This conflict has resulted in a World Future Society
policy: People of all kinds are admitted to membership, but there is also
a professional section with its own journal and members-only meetings.
Though anyone interested in the long-term future may be called a
futurist, the term strongly implies an interest in a broad range of issues,
not just those in a particular specialty. The interconnections among the
many different aspects of our society become abundantly clear to anyone
who tries seriously to explore the future: new technology will influence
education, which will mold the work force of the future, and the new
work force will have values that may encourage an entirely new direction
for technology. Nothing in our society exists all by itself; each element is
connected to every other element by subtle and intricate chains of cause
and effect. Thus, good futurist thinking is holistic.
Futurists insist on a rational or even scientific basis for their
speculations about the future. They have little patience with mystical
predictions (palmistry, astrology, etc.), but are generally ready to listen
to a very wide range of opinions based on scientific or historical evidence.
As a group, they are pragmatic rather than ideological: They want to
know what will "work;" that is, what will really be effective in improving
the human condition over the long term. Though they distrust ideologies,
they are very hospitable to social experiments and innovations.
The reality of human choices in shaping the future is one of the basic
tenets of today's futurists. They do not see the future as predetermined
by fate or divine providence, but as constantly being shaped and
reshaped by human actions based on human choices. We humans
determine the future, so we think about the future not to predict what
will happen, but to create a better future than we will otherwise have.
Each of us is an active participant in the historic process of determining
mankind's future.
Futurists thus share a basic orientation toward the world that
provides the framework for fruitful dialogue. Because they are
broad-gauge in their thinking habits and generally open to new ideas and
experience, they have considerable flexibility in their thinking and are
Foreword ix
more willing than most people to change their minds and adopt new
positions.
The broad, long-term perspective of futurists means that they have a
lively appreciation of the complexity of society and the myriad
interactions that appear and influence it over time. Because the subject
of their concern is extraordinarily complex, individual futurists see
different things happening and wind up with very different views about
what is likely to happen in the future.
The notion that futurists are mainly concerned with predicting the
future is one of the persistent myths that futurists have to live with. A
corollary myth is that their predictions are usually wrong. The latter
myth arises partly from the hilarious blunders made mainly by
nonfuturists, prominent amateurs who, through the ages, have attempted
to anticipate the future. At the turn of the century, for instance, many
distinguished scientists went on record as stating that no successful flying
machine would ever be built.
Another myth is that futurists are technocrats, who believe that
technology will solve every human problem. This myth is countered by
the fact that futurists led the movement to establish the U.S. Office of
Technology Assessment, which serves as a kind of check on technology
by advising Congress on both the pros and cons of new technologies now
being developed.
Yet another myth is that futurists are neophiles-lovers of gee-whiz
gizmos-who have little concern for either the natural environment or
the treasures of antiquity. In fact, futurists as a group are extremely
concerned about the environment, constantly sounding the alarm about
such dangers as acid rain and the greenhouse effect; they also want to
preserve the human heritage so that future generations can benefit from
it. As editor of The Futurist magazine, 1 well remember the outraged
protests that erupted when we published an item suggesting that earth
might someday solve its waste-disposal problem by rocketing the stuff
out into space. Using space as a dumping ground for earth's wastes
aroused extraordinary fury among futurists: It's bad enough to turn our
own planet into a wasteland, they suggested; making the universe our
dumping ground would be totally unthinkable. Futurists want to be good
citizens of the universe as well as of the earth; preservers of nature as
well as creators of technological wonders; custodians of the past as well
as advocates of the future.
This book goes far toward explaining what futurists are by describing
what some of them think. The great value of this study is that (1) it
presents systematically the views of 17 unusually thoughtful futurists on
a variety of important issues, and (2) it analyzes their views in various
x What Futuriste Beheve
useful ways so that a reader can pick up incisive new insights into the
issues under discussion. The authors, futurists themselves, have
contributed their own views of the future which adds to the liveliness of
this book. It should make an unusually effective textbook, practically
guaranteeing lively classroom discussion.
The futurists whose views are presented here are not "average"
futurists (assuming it is possible to find such an animal), but rather an
outstanding selection of thinkers tackling the great issues. Any one of
these futurists would be a guest of honor wherever the future is being
thoughtfully discussed. To have their ideas brought together in this
unique way is an outstanding achievement for which we owe a debt of
gratitude to futurists Joseph F. Coates and Jennifer Jarratt.
1 am delighted that the World Future Society has been able to
collaborate with Lomond Publications, Inc. (through the offices of its
President, Lowell H. Hattery) and J.F. Coates, Inc. in the publishing of
this volume.
PREFACE
More and greater pressures on organizations, the development of
more reliable tools for anticipation, and the build-up of a cre;dible body
of futurist works are promoting a positive attitude toward study. of
the future. Systematic attempts to identify the factors which are shaping
the future and to anticipate their conséquences as" an aid to
decisionmaking have steadily grown over the last 35 years.
The military interest in strategic planning and profound need to
better understand the implications of atomic power in the immediate
post-World War II period led to a prolifération of organizations
committed to strategic planning. One outcome of that passion for
planning was the rise to prominence of Herman Kahn and his approach
to the future. He strongly influenced the military, and to a lesser extent,
corporate and other planners. Central to Kahn's thinking were: First, the
concept of alternative futures, that the future is not a single inevitable
state, but change can evolve in strikingly different ways. Second is the
notion that stable, long-term trends can be identified and used in
probing the future. Third was his extensive use of scenarios as a tool for
understanding and presenting complex situations.
In the military and the commercial sectors, technological forecasting
flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, along with shorter term futures
studies tied to market research.
Commonly one finds the engineer offering scientific or technically
grounded speculations about what could or ought to be, in the form of
new structures, materials, gadgets, devices, systems, or other
technological wonders. Related but distinct and usually sharply
dissociated from the realities of our current world is science fiction. From
the point of view of futures studies, sci-fi is of little, or no, value.
Science-fiction is usually so barren of plausible psychological, social, or
institutional sophistication as to fall into one of three categories:
entertainment, fantasy, or cautionary tales.
Science-fiction, however, does reveal one important feature of the
exploration of the future, and that is the intellectual difflculty in
identifying and describing plausible positive futures in contrast to the
relative ease with which negative, hostile, and destructive futures may be
generated.
The academic community continually rediscovers the future. One
branch of futures studies often flourishes in departments of sociology,
where there are recurrent attempts to develop grand theories of human
affairs.
xii What Futurists BeUeve
Within the corporation, the adoption of a futures perspective makes
its clearest mark in stratégie planning, which a generation ago often took
a 15- to 20-year look ahead. In recent decades, under pressures of
market competition, international developments, and a volatile stock
market, corporate planning has tended to be foreshortened.
The greatest stimulus in the corporate world for concern for the
future cornes from the awareness that the two mainstays of earlier
corporate strategic planning-market research and technological
forecasting-have become less reliable as the corporate external
environment has become increasingly complex. The result is the revival
of interest in the corporation in methods or techniques which will help in
understanding and interpreting the world in which the firm is embedded,
the so-called corporate external environment. Reflecting that interest in
its environment is the rise of issues management in the past decade as a
tool for anticipating short- or mid-range, i.e., one- to five-year,
developments.
Against that background of expanding concern, interest, and
awareness of the benefits the systematic study of the future may have for
the corporation and other organizations, the project which led to this
book was begun. The project, subscribed to by eight American
corporations and two corporate service organizations, identified a group
of prominent primarily American futurists. Through a process described
more fully in the Introduction (Chapter 1), the authors analyzed the
published works of the seventeen futurists, interviewed all but two of
them, and prepared a profile of each. Review and feedback on the
profiles was sought and received from all but one of the futurists. The
authors then undertook to compare the futurists' beliefs and to critique
the present state of futures studies as represented by their panel. Finally,
the authors present their own view of forces and factors shaping the next
decades.
The authors' statement (Chapter 22) is offered neither as synthesis of
nor counterview to those of the panel of futurists. It is an independent
piece reflecting another view of forces influencing and shaping the future
of American and global society which have strong implications for the
corporation and other institutions.
The present volume, while in the main following the text of the
original project report, has been updated and reorganized somewhat as a
result of the reception and use by the corporate sponsors and continuing
study by the authors.
To increase the timeliness of this book, each of the seventeen futurists
was invited to prepare a 500-word commentary, expansion, supplement,
or other kind of statement appropriate to the theme and objectives of the