What is Next Forward Thinking?

Oracles, Futurist, Visionaries-Some people make their living by trying to divine the shape of things to come before anybody else. And we all avidly await their predictions.
Albert Einstein remarked in 1932 that There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. Thomas Edison thought alternating current would be a waste of time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once predicted, when he was Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy, that airplanes would never be useful in battle again a fleet of ships. There is nothing like the passage of time to make the world’s smartest people look like complete idiots. So let us look at a few more. In 1883 Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society and no mean scientist himself, predicted that “X ray will prove to be a hoax”. When Gary Cooper turned down the Rhett Butler role in Gone With The Wind, he is said to have remarked. “ I am just glad it will be Clark Gable who’s falling flat on his face and not Gary Cooper.” “Everything that can be invented, has been invented,” Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the U.S. Patents Office, we said to have announced-in 1889.
Why is predicting the future so difficult? After all, if history

is just one damn thing after another, shouldn’t the future be more of the same? But over and over again, even our most highly educated guesses go disastrously wrong. (Here is Coco Chanel on the miniskirt, in 1996: It is a bad joke that won’t last. Not with winter coming.”)
Of course, the smart play would be not to try to guess what’s coming next. But that’s not how we are wired. Tapped as we are in the one-way flow of time, not predicting the future would be like driving a car without bothering to glance through the windshield from time to time. We desperately need prophets, even false ones, to help us narrow the infinity of plausible futures down to one or at least to a manageable handful. We look at present and see the present; they see the seeds of the future. They are our advance scouts, infiltrating the undiscovered country, stealing over the border to bring back priceless reconnaissance maps of the world to come.
In the following pages, you will meet some of them. There is Hiroshi Tsutsumi, who tries to predict the behavior of one of the most fickle, most influential demographics in the world: the Tokyo hipster. Former jazz musician (and current U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman) Alan Greenspan has been staring the future in the face for years and has to put America’s (and his) where his mouth is. Peter Schwartz is the man whom U.S. Senators, CEOS and movie director go to for previews of the future. He predicted the rise of OPEC in the 1970s and the fall of the world trade center in 2001.
Sherri Lansing picks blockbuster for Paramount Pictures-she has scored in the past with big bets on Forrest Gump, Braveheart and-maybe you have heard of it?-Titanic and mathematical geophysicist Vladimir Keilis-Borok comes into the office every morning to try to work out where the next major earthquake is going to strike. He has had a few notable successes and one recent, prominent failure. No pressure there, Vladimir.
You have to feel for them. Look at how often we disagree over events in recent history, let alone on what’s next. But thank God some people are willing to put themselves out on a limb, even at the risk of being made fun of by future generations of smart-Aleck writers.
We humans are gamblers by nature, incorrigible ones, but we are certainly not stupid gamblers: we need to know what the odds are and when the fix is in. So let’s fools like Albert Einstein-as well as to Einstein’s high school teacher, who once made the following immortal prediction to Einstein’s father: “It doesn’t matter what does-he will never amount to anything.”