‘Could Should Might Don’t’ Review: A Profession of Prediction

Futurists disagree over how much the future lends itself to control and foreknowledge. Many focus too much on the grandiose.

Excerpt: "If futurists really want to help everyday people, perhaps their goal should be to help us deal with our anxiety about the future rather than to simply predict what will happen. From this perspective, the most valuable section in Mr. Foster’s book recounts his first trip in a self-driving taxi. Mr. Foster was initially awestruck, but he soon found himself daydreaming and thinking about what to eat for lunch. “What had been incredibly futuristic and achingly modern just moments ago,” he writes, “had transitioned to something almost banal within the space of a single ride.”

The grandiose sooner or later becomes mundane. Even Khrushchev understood that what seems like rapid change in the moment often proves far less monumental over time. “The main difference for the history of the world if I had been shot rather than Kennedy,” he supposedly once observed, “is that Onassis probably wouldn’t have married Mrs. Khrushchev.” Maybe Khrushchev wouldn’t have been a bad futurist after all."