Arthur,
Yes, "The Year 2000" was quite a book. I remember
reading it with great excitement. And quite a
contrast to "Limits to Growth" published only
five years later in 1972. Since then, the real
world has been a hybrid with many surprising
extras thrown in from both camps. For example,
neither dwelt on genetics and neuroscience, and
the huge effect their findings are already having
on health and education (particularly among what
I call the 20-class). The result is that the
modern world is heading in a direction
perpendicular to both books. And this goes in two
opposite directions also -- up and down the page,
if you like -- if one considers the very latest
'Big Science', epigenetics, and what it has to
say as to inherited psychological
susceptibilities and thus their immensely
powerful 'peer group' effects on the rate of
change of cultures in adapting (or not) to a hyper-scientific era.
It makes one think -- among the apparent trends
of today -- which ones are scalable and extrapolatable and which aren't!
Keith
At 18:16 09/07/2012, Arthur wrote:
Anthony J. Wiener, Forecaster of the Future, Is Dead at 81
*
* by DOUGLAS MARTIN
* June 26, 2012
*
<http://www.readability.com/articles/uutgqpw7?legacy_bookmarklet=1>Read Later
Einstein said he never thought about the future
because it comes soon enough. Anthony J. Wiener
thought about it deeply and influentially.
In 1967, Mr. Wiener, a self-described futurist,
collaborated with
<http://www.hudson.org/learn/index.cfm?fuseaction=staff_bio&eid=HermanKahn>Herman
Kahn to write a 431-page book brimming with
forecasts for the year 2000. Home computers?
Check. Artificial organs and limbs? Check.
Pagers and perhaps even two-way pocket phones? Why, yes!
But the millennium turned without noiseless
helicopters replacing taxis. Artificial moons
still do not illuminate huge swaths of the
Earth. And are you, too, still waiting for that predicted 13-week vacation?
Mr. Wiener no relation to the former
congressman with a similar name died on June
19 at his home in Closter, N.J., at 81. His
wife, the former Deborah Zaidner, said the cause was cardiac arrest.
The book he and Mr. Kahn wrote was The Year
2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next
Thirty-three Years, and its publication was a
milestone in the futurism fad of the 1960s. The
book combined multifarious elements, from the
insights of Aristotle to sophisticated
statistical analysis, to create what the authors
called a framework for speculation.
About half of its 100 predictions panned out
not including 150-year life spans or months of hibernation for humans.
But accuracy mattered less than what Mr. Wiener
called reducing the role of thoughtlessness in
making societal choices. Clarification, not prophecy, was the goal.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences helped
finance the study, sponsored by
the<http://www.hudson.org/> Hudson Institute, for which both authors worked.
Ken Weinstein, president of the institute, said
Tuesday in an interview that the book was
remarkable for its sophisticated methodology at
a time when advanced computer modeling was still
far off. More than simply extrapolating from
trends observed in the 1960s, it tried to
calculate the complex and unexpected ways the
future was going to be different.
Anthony Janoff Wiener was born on July 27, 1930,
in Newark and grew up in Maplewood, N.J.
He set up a public address system in his high
school. He and a friend once took apart a car
and then rebuilt it, just to see if they could
do it. He graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law School.
His first wife, the former Helga Susanna
Gerschenkron, died in 1977. He is survived by a
son, Jonathan, and a daughter, Lisa Juckett, from that marriage.
In addition to his wife, survivors include their
son, Adam; his sister, Carol Seaver; and three
grandchildren from his first marriage.
In 1961, Mr. Wiener was a founding member of the
Hudson Institute, a research center known for
Mr. Kahns investigations of nuclear weapons
strategy. Mr. Kahn was outspoken in urging that
society grapple with the consequences of nuclear
war with thinking the unthinkable.
Mr. Wiener consulted on the future with clients
as diverse as the Stanford Research Institute, NASA and Shell Oil.
He worked for two years in the Nixon White House
on urban policy and was a longtime editor of the
journal Technology in Society. He taught for
many years at what is now Polytechnic Institute of New York University.
Mr. Wiener died before his grander predictions
like finding life on other planets or settling
undersea colonies could be fulfilled. But his
prophecy that fax machines would become office
workhorses by 2000 hit the mark, at least until e-mail displaced them.
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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