50 Years Later: Remembering How the Future Looked in 1974

The New Stack, August 24, 2024. By David Cassel, who bought a copy of the 1974 Saturday Review 50th-anniversary issue on eBay.

Key Takeaways

• The setup is the best thing about it: in 1974, Saturday Review asked twenty leading thinkers to describe the world of 2024. Cassel read the actual issue, ads and all — Bell Telephone, Smith-Corona typewriters, a new restaurant chain called Benihana.
• Two of them described the internet. Andrei Sakharov envisioned “a universal information system 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” — accessed through “individual miniature-computer terminals.” Wernher von Braun independently predicted networked computers supporting banking and ticket reservations.
• Sakharov’s misses are as instructive as his hits: flying cities as industrial satellites, agriculture extended across the oceans, Antarctica and the moon. He also got battery-powered vehicles right — but imagined them with mechanical legs, so as not to disturb the grass.
• Asimov wrote his entry as imagined 2024 news clippings, including a Mets manager disputing a computer’s game prediction: “The game is still won on heart.”
• The sharpest miss is social, not technical. Clare Boothe Luce, writing when women were 39% of the US workforce with no female senators or governors, predicted the working woman of 2024 would be “still trying to make her way up — in a man’s world — and not having very much more success than she is having now.”
• The pattern worth extracting: the technologists predicted the infrastructure with startling accuracy and the consequences barely at all. Nobody in the issue anticipated what a universal information system would do to attention, institutions or truth.

Connections

• Ingested into Historical Futurism from the “Sandbox ideas” note, whose only other content was the phrase “Historical futurism” — Kyle filed it there himself.
• This is close to an ideal artifact for that concept: a dated, checkable set of predictions by named people, with both hits and misses legible fifty years later.
• The infrastructure-vs-consequences asymmetry is the transferable lesson, and it is a caution for anyone doing the same exercise today — see Forecasting and Predicting The Future.