Did you ever have one of those job interviews in which the robot doing the hiring looked down the list of boilerplate questions and asked, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
Didn’t you hate that? I did. I always mumbled something that didn’t meet expectations. But I must tell you of the one answer that I wished I’d had the wits to deliver. It was by Jim, a former work colleague who was looking for a humdrum emerging-from-retirement position, answering the phone at an insurance company’s customer inquiry desk.
“I see myself in a rocking chair on my front porch in five years.”
He got the job. Maybe because he was both prescient and honest.
Jim’s cheeky reply came to mind today when I read a magazine piece (National Review, February 2024 edition) about another magazine, long since out of business. That magazine was Saturday Review/World, and the year was 1974. The editor, antinuclear activist Norman Cousins (1915-1990) conceived and published an entire issue titled “2024 A.D.” Beneath that banner headline came the subtitle “A probe into the future by…” followed by nineteen names of the most eminent minds of the day.
So how did they do?
Some of them whiffed. Astronaut Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) predicted that by 2024 there would be colonies of humans on the moon, with “massive subterranean lunar cities, ‘underground apartments and workrooms…connected by tunnels and powered by giant solar generators and flywheels spinning at incredibly high speed.’” He also said that we’d have had manned space flights to Mars and probably a few selected asteroids.
None of that happened, of course. In case you’d forgotten (I did) the last U.S. moon landing was back in 1972, two years before Armstrong made this prediction.
Faring little better than Armstrong was Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987),the playwright, congresswoman, and ambassador. Despite a few advances such as availability of birth control pills and better access to higher education, Luce lamented that there has been little progress in “overthrowing male supremacy…and achieving equality of the sexes….[and that the American woman of 2024 would be] playing many more roles that were once considered masculine. I see her making a little more money than she is making now. But I still see her trying to make her way up – in a man’s world – and not having much more success than she is having now.”
Nice try, Clare. Looks like you really didn’t have a lot of faith in women and their abilities.
So who got it right? Surprisingly (for me anyway) three of the best answers came from people who’d seen and lived in the darkest and cruelest recesses that humanity devised during the 20th Century: Communism and Nazism. Perhaps seeing those evil systems from the inside gives one a special clarity of mind. See if you agree.
Russian physicist and human rights champion Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989), who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974, foresaw the unique role that “communications and information” would play, beginning with the creation of a “global telephone and videophone system. Then came his prophecy about what we could only call “the Internet:”
“Far into the future, more than fifty years from now, I foresee a universal information system, (UIS) which will give everyone access at any given moment to the contents of any book that has ever been published or any magazine or any fact. The UIS will have individual miniature-computer terminals, central-control points for the flood of information, and communication channels incorporating thousands of artificial communications from satellites, cables, and laser lines.
“Even the partial realization of the UIS will profoundly affect every person, his leisure activities, and his intellectual and artistic development. Unlike television, the major source of information for many of our contemporaries, the UIS will give each person the maximum freedom of choice and will require individual activities.”
Wow. Sakharov was off a little bit on his timing, but that’s all.
Milovan Djilas (1911-1995) was from Yugoslavia. He was a higher-up in the regime of dictator Josip Broz (Tito), but he became disillusioned with communism and spent six years in prison for his honesty. He saw what would happen in his part of the world when he wrote:
“The most significant change in the next fifty years will be the disintegration of the Soviet empire…The crucial factors will be the domestic ferment and the pressure from China…[and possibly] uprisings in Eastern Europe…With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the Eastern European countries now under Soviet hegemony will become independent and will join the European community. Germany will be reunited, without a civil war.”
Got that right.
And how about Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), the rocketry whiz who designed the V-1 and V-2 rockets that rained down on Britain from Adolf Hitler’s Germany, and who came to America after World War II and was the guiding genius behind the Saturn Rocket program?
With a vision much like that of Sakharov, the former Nazi foresaw the power and ubiquity of orbiting satellites, which would spawn a “revolution…a global telephone network interconnecting nearly 100 nations…handling millions of television channels simultaneously and billions of telephone conversations [and providing] direct ties between computers in support of such operations as banking or ticket reservations.”
There was even more, and finely detailed it was, to von Braun’s preview:
“Controlled by an orbital switchboard, laser beam connections could be established (and withdrawn after use) that provide direct links between any two points on Earth. The abundance of available channels would soon lead to worldwide video-telephone service. And as communications improve, commuting for work would go out of style. It would become more convenient to let electrons, rather than people, do the traveling.
“The average American household of 2024 will be equipped with an appliance that combines the features of a television set with those of a desk computer and a Xerox machine. In addition to serving as a TV set and a print-out device for news, the push-button-controlled console will permit its owners to receive facsimile-radioed letters, review the shelves of a nearby grocery store, order food and dry goods, pay bills, balance books, and provide color-video-telephone service to any point on Earth.”
Not totally accurate, but you get ample partial credit and a high final grade, Herr von Braun.
Some others who contributed predictions to that 1974 Saturday Review/World were Indira Gandhi, Robert McNamara, Coretta Scott King, David Rockefeller, and Pierre Trudeau.
The NR piece does not mention any of their predictions. But it does surmise – and I think correctly – that it would be “difficult to imagine anyone convening a panel of ‘influencers’ like this today.” And that’s unfortunate. Society as a whole doesn’t have too many people to whom it can look, with trust and confidence, for advice and guidance.
Maybe there are a few out there who can see the future as clearly as did Messrs. Sakharov, Djilas, and von Braun. But I wouldn’t know where to look for them.
Veteranscribe's Blog 