“Un siglo de mañanas: cómo imaginar el futuro da forma al presente”

By Glenn Adamson
c.2024, Bloomsbury $32.99
337 pages

The weather forecast for this weekend is great, and you’ve got big plans.

For sure you’ll get outside, get together with friends, have some fun; you’ve got a major project coming up at work, and it’ll be stressful, so you’ll want to grab some downtime while you can. Just thinking about it will make you smile all week because, as you’ll see in the new libro “A Century of Tomorrows” by Glenn Adamson, your personal forecast is sunny.

It’s a safe bet that humans have been making prognostications since they first stood upright. Where’s the best place to hunt? Where might danger lie? Ancient Sumerians left prophecies on clay tablets, while others predicted the future via knuckle bones, tarot cards, prophets and later, through scammy seers and secret knocks.

In the 1920s, evangelists and religious men predicted the end of the world again and again, and at around the same time, the nephew of Sigmund Freud learned how to manipulate consumers by using his uncle’s psychoanalytical predictions to insert “subtle messages” into advertising. In the 1930s, experts believed that society should be “managed,” in part by statisticians; Adamson says that one of the “converts” to the idea was Elon Musk’s grandfather.

We even hosted a World’s Fair based on prognostication.

When robots began to catch the attention of mid-20th century Americans, predictions of highly automated life and vast changes in the workplace were hailed. A proliferation of the subject in literature and Hollywood was the next natural step, and as technology eased into medicine, peering into the future spread from the doctor’s office to the laboratory, insurance companies and funeral homes in an attempt to make sense of illness, life and death.

You don’t have to look far to see it: In politics, business and finance, we still try to see into the future, even if we don’t realize we’re doing it. This illusion of control, as Adamson indicates, helps us mortals feel better, so we “may as well try and look forward, as far as we can.”

One peek at your calendar Sunday night, and you (mostly) know what kind of week you can anticipate having. Says Adamson in “A Century of Tomorrows,” this tossing of the dice is comforting, and so ingrained in humanity that we barely even notice the presence of “futurology,” though we obviously rely a great deal on it.

Scoff if you will at seers and psychics and disbelievable doomsdayers, but prediction, says Adamson, is important to humans. You likely do a great deal of prognostication of your own, as he shows, and you do it spontaneously and quite purposefully. What’s fascinating is that your predictions, like most, fall into one of six wide categories that will surprise you and make sense to you once they’re pointed out.

You’re right if you predict that you’ll like this book because it’s a fun read that twists and turns in history, science, business and culture. The other thing you’ll like: “A Century of Tomorrows” could help you weather what’s to come.

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