As anyone who’s played the ponies, visited Tomorrowland or flipped through an old issue of Popular Mechanics can tell you, predicting the future is no mean feat. Even when we get the broad strokes right, we often misgauge society’s responses. Scientists reveal, inventors dream, engineers build and marketers flog, but human nature has the final say.
Prediction is a sucker’s game, but we have to play: If we don’t predict, we can’t plan. In this article, I look at how the field of futurology developed – and how it works.
