Unmentioned in your post but personally more problematic is failing to predict something. Predicting X and getting less than X, well, okay. Failing to predict at all things like home computers, the web, the fall of the Soviet Union, antibiotics, now those are serious black eyes for futurism.
Failing to predict at all things like home computers
Why does this misconception persist? The inventor/science fiction writer Murray Leinster predicted networked home computers, a Google-like search engine, voice interfaces and an accidentally emerging AI in his well known story, “A Logic Named Joe,” published in 1946:
Unmentioned in your post but personally more problematic is failing to predict something. Predicting X and getting less than X, well, okay. Failing to predict at all things like home computers, the web, the fall of the Soviet Union, antibiotics, now those are serious black eyes for futurism.
Why does this misconception persist? The inventor/science fiction writer Murray Leinster predicted networked home computers, a Google-like search engine, voice interfaces and an accidentally emerging AI in his well known story, “A Logic Named Joe,” published in 1946:
http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm
Did Leinster publish in academic journals and reasonably counts under a category like futurism? Or pulp sci-fi magazines and fiction?
Pulp sci-fi is closer to what I think of what I hear “futurism” than anything published in a reputable journal.
But so much pulp sci-fi was published, and in such variety, that one could find a plausible “fit” for pretty much any conceivable future invention.
Respectable predictions are even more common, though, so I’m not sure how meaningful either one can be.
It feels icky to claim that something was “predicted” by a fictional story that made no claim to being serious prediction, though.