The History of Predicting the Future

The future has a history. The good news is that it's one from which we can learn; the bad news is that we very rarely do. That's because the clearest lesson from the history of the future is that knowing the future isn't necessarily very useful. But that has yet to stop humans from trying. Take Peter Turchin's famed prediction for 2020. In 2010 he developed a quantitative analysis of history, known as cliodynamics, that allowed him to predict that the West would experience political chaos a decade later.