The Year 2000

I'm reading, perhaps rereading, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years. It was produced by the Hudson Institute in 1967 under the sponsorship of the The Commission on the Year 2000, an initiative of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It's a book that I've had in my possession for longer than I can remember.  There's a mysterious bookmark about 2/5ths of the way into it, so perhaps I started it at least at some earlier point in my life.

This book is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.  First, the approach providing a framework for thinking about the future seems pretty rigorous and I'm interested in their techniques.  Second, their future is now our past (at least mostly so), which provides some interesting insight into how well their techniques may have worked.

I'm only a couple of chapters into it but so far it has provided some interesting insight into the history of looking at the future. There is apparently a series of books or essays, published in the early part of the 20th century, entitled Today and Tomorrow that explored a wide range of speculations about the future.  They look like they might be entertaining to read.

A key element of The Year 2000 work is something they call the "Multifold Trend".  It's described in Table 1 as...

There Is a Basic, Long-Term Multifold Trend Toward:

1. Increasingly Sensate (empirical, this-worldly, secular, humanistic, pragmatic, utilitarian, contractual, epicurean or hedonistic, and the like) cultures
2. Bourgeois, bureaucratic, "meritocratic," democratic (and nationalistic?) elites
3. Accumulation of scientific and technological knowledge
4. Institutionalization of change, especially research, development, innovation, and diffusion
5. Worldwide industrialization and modernization
6. Increasing affluence and (recently) leisure
7. Population growth
8. Urbanization and (soon) the growth of megalopolises
9. Decreasing importance of primary and (recently) secondary occupations
10. Literacy and education
11. Increasing capability for mass destruction
12. Increasing tempo of change
13. Increasing universality of the multifold trend

Though perhaps nuanced on some of these vectors it seems like a pretty solid set of assumptions to have begun an exploration of the future between 1967 and 2000.  Many of these appear to have become significantly enhanced since the year 2000.  Some less so.  Some may be approaching a kind of reset or tipping point.  Exploring such things is really the work.

From this, for the rest of the book, they create a "surprise free" projection and explore a set of canonical variations. It should be interesting.