In 1900, Ladies’ Home Journal published an article by civil engineer John Watkins that predicted how the U.S. would look one hundred years hence:

Although some of the predictions are howlers (no more city noise or mosquitoes?), the article has received buzz in recent years for its prescience. In fact, the article captures so much of the texture of modern life, from air conditioning to the ubiquity of cameras and telephones, that you might have thought Watkins was a traveler from the timeline next door. A timeline in which, among other things, pneumatic tubes were useful for more than factories and drive-up banks.

Not surprisingly, my tweet about this article received a lot of likes and retweets. More, in fact, than all my other tweets put together have received since I started my Twitter account eleven days ago:

In 1900, railroad engineer John Watkins predicted what the world would look like in 2000. He got a *lot* right. pic.twitter.com/EQYkaQ1rhD — Jordan Chase-Young (@jachaseyoung) September 27, 2019

People are impressed.

A few caveats. As economist Robin Hanson noted in 2012, John Watkins’ predictions overestimated people’s ability to coordinate on big efforts. They also underestimated the odd behaviors and widespread inefficiencies a rich civilization can get away with.

I would also add that the predictions failed to anticipate big value shifts (e.g. the sexual revolution and feminism), the devastating reach of ideologies (e.g. fascism and communism), and the creep of global catastrophic risks (e.g. nuclear weapons and climate change). Victorian futurists before and after Watkins, including H.G. Wells, anticipated these sources of social change and wrote about them, so it’s unclear why Watkins left them out. Maybe they were too heavy for a drawing-room lifestyle magazine.

Still, this humble civil engineer’s batting average was higher than any of the famous futurists of his time (H.G. Wells among them).

What made him so successful? It’s there in the first paragraph: He asked specialists to make predictions in their “own field[s] of investigation” — that is, to make narrow forecasts on the subjects they knew best, where their analysis would be concrete and sensitive to trade-offs, and not to look at the big picture, where their analysis would be sloppy and value-laden. He then put these predictions together, as if nailing down a railroad to the future one slat at a time.

But it couldn’t have been that easy. He had to make judgment calls along the way: which scholars to talk to, which questions to ask them, which predictions to ignore. His intuitive grasp of the world had to be sound to filter signals from noise, and he must have had good self-discipline to resist slanting his predictions with hopes and fears and biases, as many futurists do. I suspect he would have made a good superforecaster.

Crucially, Watkins didn’t take the stickiness of social equilibria for granted. Even in our fast-growing industrial era, change only happens when people and institutions let it. And when innovations, however useful, are widely enough adopted that people don’t look weird using them. What changes happen when depends on all sorts of stochastic cultural quirks, and to some degree on the whims and fashion cycles of elites.

The marvelous Apollo missions, for example, could be seen as a fluky, elite-driven indulgence more akin to the building of the Great Pyramid (the tallest structure in the world for 3,800 years) than the start of a new age of space travel. Futurists as far back as Watkins had predicted that space colonization (like undersea cities and domestic robots) would be a defining feature of the twentieth century and beyond. That’s because they almost never took his approach of curating other people’s expertise, favoring their own seat-of-the-pants intuitions instead.

Watkins confined his futurism to a practical baseline scenario in which the core features of the human condition don’t change much. Food, safety, entertainment, travel, education, and information-sharing remain the fundamental aspects of life, on which all social and technological progress incrementally turns. Exotic conditional scenarios (human cloning, world government) were sensibly left out.

Now, contrast Watkins’ forecast with that of the science-fiction legend Philip K. Dick, first published in The Book of Predictions in 1980:

Only two of these eleven predictions (a nuclear accident and widespread computer use) were remotely accurate, despite Dick covering a much shorter time frame. Why?

You might have noticed that most of these forecasts could be the plots of, well, science-fiction novels. They have the vivid imagery, high stakes, and cynical edge that make science-fiction compelling. And that’s the problem. Dick’s futurism is full of narrative bias: the tendency to see the world as a story rather than a world ⁠— that is, a mostly mundane mix of people and institutions locked into mostly stable equilibria by competing costs, capacities, and interests. A lot of futurism is story-like in this way. Which is good for story-lovers but bad for the world, because good forecasts are needed for good policy.

A lot, but not all. One fine exception is Robin Hanson’s The Age of Em. Watkins-like in its method of combining specific insights in many fields to make a picture of the future — one in which mind uploads run the show — Em is likely to be vindicated for similar reasons. But that’s a post for another day.