10 “futurism fallacies” that have bedeviled earlier predictions
"One of the biggest fallacies is imagining that future society will be just like present-day society, only with more gadgets. 'You can’t just project a technology forward, you also have to think about it in the context of all other technologies also advancing over the same period of time,' co-author Steven Novella says. 'So we won’t be traveling in space in 500 years, our genetically-modified cyborg descendants will be traveling in space in 500 years. And you have to include that as part of your calculation.' Despite the checkered history of futurism, Novella thinks it’s an important pursuit that deserves more attention. 'If you’re living your life in this brief little window of time, without any sense of where you are in history, you could lose sight of what’s important, you could lose the ability to adapt nimbly to changes in technology, to changes in culture, to make decisions about the future,' he says. 'So I do think there’s a lot of benefit to futurism as an academic discipline, we just have to be realistic about it.'”
Article: Can Society Learn From the Mistakes of Futurism?