Until now it was easy to be a futurist. You look at a few trends, tap into your imagination and extrapolate. And 20 years down the line, when nothing you predicted comes to fruition, no one remembers what you said. How wonderful: a job where everyone is fascinated by what you’ve got to say but nobody cares when it turns out you’ve got it totally wrong.
Man has made some amazing leaps forward: it’s only 120 years since the first powered flight and 32 years since the arrival of the World Wide Web. But have we stalled? By now, most futurists would have predicted we’d be established on Mars considering we first reached the Moon 54 years ago; meanwhile the web – instead of turning us into multilingual polymaths – is awash with porn and Donald Trump.
