AGI, fusion, space and nanotech also share the reference class of cornucopian predictions.
Although there have been some pretty successful cornucopian predictions too: mass production, electricity, scientific agriculture (pesticides, modern crop breeding, artificial fertilizer), and audiovisual recording. By historical standards developed countries do have superabundant manufactured goods, food, music/movies/news/art, and household labor-saving devices.
Were those developments predicted decades in advance? I’m talking about relatively mainstream predictions, not predictions by some individual researcher who could have got it right by chance.
Reader’s Digest and the like. All you needed to do was straightforward trend extrapolation during a period of exceptionally fast change in everyday standards of living.
Although there have been some pretty successful cornucopian predictions too: mass production, electricity, scientific agriculture (pesticides, modern crop breeding, artificial fertilizer), and audiovisual recording. By historical standards developed countries do have superabundant manufactured goods, food, music/movies/news/art, and household labor-saving devices.
Were those developments predicted decades in advance? I’m talking about relatively mainstream predictions, not predictions by some individual researcher who could have got it right by chance.
Reader’s Digest and the like. All you needed to do was straightforward trend extrapolation during a period of exceptionally fast change in everyday standards of living.