Futurist

A futurist (also "futurologist") is someone who makes predictions about the medium to long-term future shape of society through varying proportions of inspiration and research. The term excludes those who make future predictions through supernatural means, and also usually excludes those people who attempt to forecast the short-term or readily foreseeable (for instance, economists who forecast movements of interest rates over the next business cycle would not generally considered futurists, whereas those predicting the relative wealth of nations in a generation's time may well be).

Several authors became recognized as futurists. They researched trends (particularly in technology) and wrote books describing their observations, conclusions, and predictions. Initially, they followed a cycle of publishing their conclusions and then beginning research on the next book. More recently, they have started consulting groups or earn money as speakers. Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt[?] are two prominent examples of this class.

Futurists have some things in common with the writers of science fiction, and indeed some sci-fi writers, such as Arthur C. Clarke, have been regarded as such. The writers themselves often reject this label. For example, in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurists, not of writers: "a novelist's business is lying". See: Futurism (philosophy)

Futurists have a decidedly mixed reputation and track record of success. For obvious reasons, they extrapolate present technical and societal trends and assume they will develop at the same rate into the future, and technical progress in reality goes in fits and starts - for instance, many 1950s futurists believed that by now space tourism would be commonplace, but ignored the possibilities of ubiquitous, cheap computers.