News You Can Bruise for 2008 September 14

Permalink [Comments] (3) Sun Sep 14 2008 21:31 The YEAR 2000!:

I borrowed a book from Hal a long time ago and now it's time for the book report. The book is The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, published in 1967. Here's what Hal had to say about it (and also Anathem).

I have lots of disorganized things to say about this book, so here's the first one. One of the coauthors is Herman Kahn, the court jester of nuclear war, subject of Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi's on-my-wishlist biography. So it starts off with a lot going for it. As Hal says, it is "not a bunch of pie-in-the-sky pronouncements, but a sober attempt to make plausible predictions and draw up likely scenarios for the future." But the book does contain three tables that pronounce the pie to be at various altitudes, and I thought it would be fun to audit those. Go check out what Herman Kahn thought was likely (and unlikely) to happen between 1967 and 2000.

More on this book later. One thing I want to point out is that the book's discussion of nuclear war (and Kahn's analysis in general) would be very different if Kahn had known about nuclear winter.

Comments:

Posted by Susie at Sun Sep 14 2008 22:37

Where did you get your info on whether or not his predictions were hits? Because I would argue some of them.

Posted by Leonard at Sun Sep 14 2008 22:52

I made it up from my subjective experience. It's fine to argue with them.

Posted by Susie at Mon Sep 15 2008 11:57

24. Three-dimensional photography, illustrations, movies, and television

I'm not entirely sure what this means, but they can do 3D ultrasounds now.

40. Capability to choose the sex of unborn children 42. Other genetic control and/or influence over the "basic constitution" of an individual

If you've got the money, you can mess with the genetics of your unborn children.

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