I've argued that the development of advanced AI could make this the most important century for humanity. A common reaction to this idea is one laid out by Tyler Cowen here: "how good were past thinkers at predicting the future? Don’t just select on those who are famous because they got some big things right."

This is a common reason people give for being skeptical about the most important century - and, often, for skepticism about pretty much any attempt at futurism (trying to predict key events in the world a long time from now) or steering (trying to help the world navigate such key future events).

The idea is something like: "Even if we can't identify a particular weakness in arguments about key future events, perhaps we should be skeptical of our own ability to say anything meaningful at all about the long-run future. Hence, perhaps we should forget about theories of the future and focus on reducing suffering today, generally increasing humanity's capabilities, etc."

But are people generally bad at predicting future events? Including thoughtful people who are trying reasonably hard to be right? If we look back at prominent futurists' predictions, what's the actual track record? How bad is the situation?

I've looked pretty far and wide for systematic answers to this question, and Open Philanthropy's¹ Luke Muehlhauser has put a fair amount of effort into researching it; I discuss what we've found in an appendix. So far, we haven't turned up a whole lot - the main observation is that it's hard to judge the track record of futurists. (Luke discusses the difficulties here.)

Recently, I worked with Gavin Leech and Misha Yagudin at Arb Research to take another crack at this. I tried to keep things simpler than with past attempts - to look at a few past futurists who (a) had predicted things "kind of like" advances in AI (rather than e.g. predicting trends in world population); (b) probably were reasonably thoughtful about it; but (c) are very clearly not "just selected on those who are famous because they got things right." So, I asked Arb to look at predictions made by the "Big Three" science fiction writers of the mid-20th century: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein.

These are people who thought a lot about science and the future, and made lots of predictions about future technologies - but they're famous for how entertaining their...

Futurism