"But for Every Amusingly Wrong Prediction, There's One Unnervingly Close to the Mark"

"With fourteen contributors, ranging from the weapons theorist Herman Kahn to the I.B.M. automation director Charles DeCarlo, penning essays on everything from 'Space' to 'Behavioral Technologies,' it's not hard to find wild misses. The Stanford wonk Charles Scarlott predicts, exactly incorrectly, that nuclear breeder reactors will move to the fore of U.S. energy production while natural gas fades. (He concedes that natural gas might make a comeback—through atom-bomb-powered fracking.) The M.I.T. professor Ithiel de Sola Pool foresees an era of outright control of economies by nations—'They will select their levels of employment, of industrialization, of increase in GNP'—and then, for good measure, predicts 'a massive loosening of inhibitions on all human impulses save that toward violence.' From the influential meteorologist Thomas F. Malone, we get the intriguing forecast of 'the suppression of lightning'—most likely, he figures, 'by the late 1980s.'"

Paul Collins at The New Yorker revisits the 1968 book Toward the Year 2018.