ABSTRACT
These few examples indicate some of the main causes of failure in social forecasting or prediction. When a statistical tendency (for instance regular increase of suicide rates as shown through the level of statistical record throughout the nineteenth century) or a correlation (for instance the negative correlation between inflation and unemployment) persists, a ‘natural’ temptation occurs, that of extrapolation. More exactly, the persistence of a tendency or a correlation prompts the production of theories which enable it to be taken into account. Such theories can only be conditional. But it is often difficult to specify the conditions which validate them. This leads to a tendency to hold them as unconditionally true. When an invention appears, it can lead to variable predictions according to whether its potentialities are visible or not. The first cars were hardly faster than the horse-driven vehicle and certainly much noisier and smellier. From the aesthetic point of view, they looked like carts with a strange lump where it was necessary to accommodate an engine. Likewise, as Konrad Lorenz observes, the first railway wagons had the curious form of a row of horse-drawn coaches which could have been welded together. It is only many years after the first appearance of the invention that railway engine and car acquire speed, that coaches are transformed into compartments of a carriage, that the car progressively takes forms which no longer recall the cart. But at the time of the invention, technical and aesthetic evolution was difficult to forecast. Hence the appearance of predictions which infer the social rejection of the invention. In an opposite way, the rapid progress of genetic engineering immediately suggests the possibility of choosing the sex of children. This ‘potentiality’ is immediately understandable. The futurologist may then easily be tempted to neglect both the time necessary for the effective realization of technical potentialities and also the social resistances which would oppose the implementation of these potentialities.
