Books: The Shape of Tomorrow

THE YEAR 2000 by Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener. 431 pages. A/lacmi/-lan. $9.95.

The 20th century is approaching old age. Just 33 years away lies the birth of a new millennium, an event that will be witnessed by two out of every three Americans alive today. Even the most farsighted among them cannot accurately predict what the world will be like then. But in the fast-expanding new field called futurism, the once mystical art of soothsaying has developed a scientific approach.

The authors of The Year 2000 are two professional prophets; the future is their province and their discipline. Herman Kahn, 45, mathematician, physicist and author (On Thermonuclear War), is director of New York’s Hudson Institute, a policy-research center that specializes in educated guesswork for such clients as the U.S. Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense. Sociologist Anthony Wiener, 36, is a member of Hudson’s research staff. Their book, relentlessly technical and deliberately undramatic, is as far removed from Jules Vernean fantasy as sober analytical methodology can carry it. Kahn and Wiener cannot unlock the future’s doors, but they know where to knock. 50 in the Club. The authors develop what they call “scenarios,” or hypothetical future trends, which are projected in every conceivable direction from the known past and present. The result is a multiple hypothesis of the future that seeks to accommodate every plausible possibility—some more plausible than others.

Kahn and Wiener find it probable, for example, that the next 33 years will bring $20 battery-run TV receivers, three-dimensional film, home computers, prisonless penology and electronic prying into the human brain. Less likely, though still possible, are the laboratory synthesis of fetuses (possibly human ones), robot athletes competing in the Olympic Games, thought control, programmed sleep and laser beams capable of boring tunnels, taking a portrait of the atom, and detecting enemy missiles within a tolerance of inches.

The authors consider it likely that the next 33 years will be politically stable, in which case “the old nations of the world are likely to be free of invasion and even relatively free of domestic violence.” The U.S. and Russia will remain the world’s only superpowers, still frozen and possibly even united in postures of armed equilibrium. Such a world will have rejected aggression in favor of economic competition —which by 2000 will have elevated Japan to the third-ranking industrial power (now fifth).

But since by the 1990s as many as 50 countries may belong to the nuclear club, there is also a real possibility of atomic war—directed, most probably, by one small, adventurous state against another of the same kind: “While the balance of terror is a great deterrent to conservative powers, to a reckless power the balance of terror may look like an opportunity or shield behind which it can get away with a good deal.” In the event of nuclear war between two major powers—not necessarily involving the U.S. or Russia—the world is likely to survive. And the victor nation may appoint itself the shepherd of international peace.

No Steerage? The book’s cool tone invites no emotional response, but it is certain to evoke one. A sense of great hazard, of impending doom, pervades its pages, no doubt unintentionally. After projecting unprecedented wealth and leisure by the year 2000—median family income of $21,000 in the U.S., a four-day work week—the authors study the consequences: “There may be a great increase in selfishness, a great decline of interest in government and society as a whole . . . More and more people would act on the aphorism currently attributed to a leader of the new student left: ‘If you’ve booked passage on the Titanic, there’s no reason to travel steerage.’ “

Futurism is thriving now partly because the unknown always tantalizes man’s curiosity. That alone can account for the popularity of books on the subject, even those that have been proved wrong. But this volume and its authors provide a better reason for estimating the look of tomorrow. The future has enormous shock value for a world that has not sought to take its measure in advance. If the world at the beginning of the 21st century were to be as “intellectually unprepared” for change as it was in 1929, 1941 and 1947, write the authors, it would be “subjected to some very unpleasant surprises.” Man cannot safeguard himself against the surprises of the future, but he can try to prepare for them by reducing what Wiener calls “the role of thoughtlessness.” In that task, their book will help.