Essay: Looking for Tomorrow (and Tomorrow)

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. —Niels Bohr

Asked to make sense of Pharaoh's dreams about fat and lean cows and plump and withered ears of corn, Joseph took them as signs of coming events. The Book of Genesis records his forecast: "Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt. And there shall arise after them seven years of famine." Pharaoh was so pleased to get a fix on the future that he made Joseph the ruler of Egypt. If Joseph materialized now, politics would make it hard for him to get his old job back, but with his proven foresight he would soon find work.

Today people crave to know what lies ahead at least as much as they did in Pharaoh's time. Probably more. Modern times have created a perpetual bull market in futures. Society spends so much time looking ahead that the present sometimes seems entirely forgotten. Corporations live for the next quarter; ordinary citizens exist to fulfill next summer's vacation budget. Governments at all levels stay mired in hassles over how things will turn out.

All the tools of technology are brought into the effort to see around the distant bend in the river. Thus planning has grown into a full-fledged industry in the 20th century. The trend is striking, but even more impressive is how little mankind has progressed LA its efforts to plumb the future since those days of prophetic dreams.

Still, scarcely a salient public issue

comes up that does not demand at least an effort to read the future. How long will the recession go on? Whither Central America? Will the energy crisis ever come back? Will space become a theater for military action? Society flourishes or languishes by guessing the drift of things. If it had guessed right about consumer trends a few years ago, the auto industry might not be in such a sorry state. But in that industry, as Chrysler's chairman Lee la-cocca put it, "you make a decision and then wait three years to get the stuff kicked out of you." Congress has such a hunger to know coming trends that it requires the President to project budget deficits five years ahead—an exercise to whose futility Ronald Reagan recently attested. Said Reagan: "I have to be honest with you and tell you that while I have to project. . . I don't believe what I'm saying."

Even professional planners are learning (from bruising themselves on the future's impenetrable surface) to put only qualified belief in their own findings. Says Roy Amara, president of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif.: "Anything that you forecast is by definition uncertain." Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM, would surely have agreed, and perhaps not too long after forecasting "I think there is a world market for about five computers." Leon Eplan, ex-president of the American Institute of Planners and now chairman of the city planning department at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says that the planning profession has finally been chastened by the uncertainty of technological change. Says Eplan: "When I started my career, I was predicting 20 years into the future. I never do that any more."