As a science writer I always looked for stories about the future, so it’s no surprise that I started covering global warming and climate change during the late 80’s.  Recently going through my files I ran across one of those stories, from 1989, that ran on the cover of The Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine.  

What’s interesting now is how clear the science was, even back then--and how relatively uncontroversial the topic seemed.  I wrote about the researchers at Scripps Oceanic Laboratory, who were then arguably the leaders in atmospheric research.  

The Scripps researchers seemed confident that there was still time to slow or even stop the warming trend, as long as society acted relatively quickly.  I think back then, the success in the Seventies of the global community at banning Freon--to prevent atmospheric ozone destruction--was still a recent memory.  Of course the world would rally to prevent an even bigger hazard.

And back then, there were no climate change skeptics for me to quote--something I would have done in my normal science-writing practice.  Certainly there was no one from the fossil fuel industry to quote: back then, their own researchers were also concerned about global warming. 

What strikes me now about the story is its calm innocence, given how politically charged and divisive the issue has become in the United States. Back then, I don’t think anyone on the science side suspected what kind of opposition waited ahead as the fossil fuel industry moved to protect its commercial interests.  

Ironically, they learned quickly. Within a couple of years two of the Scripps researchers I profiled in the article were deep into the political thickets.  Roger Revelle, sometimes called “the father of global warming”, under dubious circumstances was made co-author of an article that questioned the need for action on the issue.  His young assistant, Justin Lancaster, publicly protested that his professor hadn’t been fully aware of the content of the article and that it didn’t reflect his views. 

Very quickly, an early group of global warming deniers sued Lancaster.  To avoid a lawsuit he couldn’t afford, the young researcher withdrew his statement--although years later, as Revelle’s apparent skepticism was repeatedly cited, he went back on the record.  

But perhaps we should have suspected back then just how powerfully the fossil fuel industry would attack the science. It was, after all, much earlier in the century that another writer, Upton Sinclair, observed that "It's hard to get a man to understand a thing when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it."  

For anyone interested in a bit of scientific nostalgia, a PDF of the article is here.

A few weeks ago in New York I was interviewed for a History Channel documentary called This is History: 2016.  The show is based on a new Pew Research Center poll that asked four different American generations--from Millennials through the Greatest Generation--to name the 10 most significant historical events of their lifetimes.  

For starters, the differences between generations clearly reflected their ages: for Boomers and the Greatest Generation, civil rights, the JFK assassination and Vietnam figured large.  Gen X and the Millennials, on the other hand, named school shootings like Columbine and Sandy Hook, or terrorist attacks such as Orlando and the Boston Marathon.  

Interestingly, each generation also had its own unique historical recollection not shared with any other generation: the Korean War for the Greatest Generation, Martin Luther King’s assassination for Boomers, the Challenger disaster for Gen X, and the Great Recession for Millennials.

In the end, however, all generations agreed on five key events: JFK’s assassination, September 11, Obama’s election, the Iraq/Afghanistan wars--and the tech revolution.

That last choice is noteworthy, considering that “the tech revolution” is neither a heart-stopping historical moment, nor an intensely emotional national experience.   No one ever asks “Where were you when you heard about the tech revolution?”  Yet technologic change has a place in the national memory that ranks with major social movements and tragic assassinations.

That’s what I talked about in the History Channel interview.  It’s obvious that 2016 will be remembered historically for the rise of nationalistic populism, as evidenced by the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s victory.  And there are, of course, lots of explanations for surging populism, ranging from anxiety over immigration to globalism and middle class malaise.

Yet I think that underlying this political upheaval is another chapter in the tech revolution: the oncoming ability of machines and software to replace human labor--from fast food workers and truck drivers to young lawyers and accountants.  This chapter is still on its first pages, but already a broad segment of the population feels the economic earth moving beneath their feet: a vague sense that the fundamentals of labor and employment are changing, and not in a good way for human beings. 

Of course that’s far too nebulous a threat to win a political campaign, so politicians turn to easier targets like illegal immigrants and overseas factories.   But I think history will ultimately remember the populist uprising of 2016 as a distant early warning signal of a much larger economic crisis to come.  And that crisis will, for yet another generation, be among their ten most significant events.     

Last week Farhad Manjoo, the technology columnist for The New York Times, had a thoughtful piece on the death of the early futurist Alvin Toffler, most famous for his book Future Shock.  

Toffler’s thesis back in 1970 was simple: “Change is avalanching upon our heads,” he wrote, “and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.”

Forty-six years later, says Manjoo, ”...it seems clear that his diagnosis has largely panned out, with local and global crises arising daily from our collective inability to deal with ever-faster change.”  Yet at the same time fewer and few institutions are even thinking about the future in substantive ways.

It wasn’t always thus: in the Seventies, various organizations, such as RAND and SRI worked for the government projecting the future of global politics and nuclear weapons. The Office of Technology Assessment was established by Congress in 1975 to look at the future impact of impending legislation.

But by the mid-90’s, when the OTA was shut down, the idea of futurism was distinctly tarnished.  Says Manjoo:  “Futurism’s reputation for hucksterism became self-fulfilling as people who called themselves futurists made and sold predictions about products, and went on the conference circuit to push them.” 

Alas, too true.  When I began speaking about the future I was most reluctant to use the futurist word.  Having spent twenty years in hands-on work inventing new media, I didn’t take futurists seriously: they often lacked technical understanding, or real business experience (or both).  Too often their predictions veered off into either science fiction or simply what they’d like to see happen.  Futurists became famous for their perennial predictions of flying cars.  (The one below was supposed to arrive in 1967.)

Thus, when The New York Times asked me to be Futurist-in-Residence, I tried to talk them out of that title. I’d been around journalists for a long time and I feared that no one in the NYT newsroom was likely to take someone called a “futurist” very seriously.  But the newspaper insisted, and in the end I decided that when The New York Times wants to call you something, you might as well go with it.   

As it turned out, the title worked.  When there is a “futurist” in the room, it gives everyone permission to untether, at least briefly, from quarterly reports and annual budgets.  The time spent thinking out five to eight years is then very helpful when discussion returns to the here-and-now.  A number of the organizations I’ve worked with in the past few years have initiated real changes in directions and strategy after a few hours of contemplating the world of the early Twenties.

Futurism is not dead; rather, as foresight has left the political process it has instead become more local.  And it's still a very good discipline for organizations and corporations to pursue. 

As another early futurist, Kenneth Boulding, once said: “The future will always surprise us, but we must not let it dumbfound us.”  That's the very least we should ask from our futurists.

One morning a few weeks ago three New York City policemen came to my door.  Not ordinary officers, but members of the Counter Terrorism Task Force, working with the FBI.  They wanted me to know that my name and address had just appeared on a ISIS hit list of 3,600 New Yorkers, released on a messaging app under the tag We Want Them #Dead.

Great way to start the day.  However, the officers were quick to say that the FBI didn’t think this was a serious threat--there wasn’t a clear pattern to the names on the list, and some of the information was quite out-of-date. Of course, one said, handing me his card, if you see anything unusual, give us a call. But it appeared to be almost random New York names and addresses picked up from somewhere on the Internet. 

Random?  I asked to see some pages from the list.  By far the most names were from my borough, Brooklyn.  Then I recognized a few neighbors and immediately suspected what had happened. 

Brooklyn may be the world center of worthy causes.  Universal pre-K, ban plastic bags, widen the bicycle lanes--you name it, and we have a group for it.  I’m partial to a worthy cause once in a while, and so are some of my more activist neighbors.  We sign petitions, donate, end up on mailing lists....and in databases.

Many of the worthy causes sooner or later win (or lose) their battles, run out of money, or just fade away.  But sometimes their Internet databases live on, perhaps tended by a volunteer with limited time, perhaps not tended at all.

Aging database software is easy prey for even low-skilled hackers.  I suspect that somewhere among the defunct worthy causes is where ISIS collected their list.  Why did they even bother?  As a kind of psychological warfare, perhaps, as well as a way to get publicity and waste some U.S. law enforcement time. 

But there’s a larger issue here.  For my audiences, Internet security is at the top of everyone’s mind.  Many fear, from the stories they’ve read, that real online security is impossible.  I remind them that most of the big, notorious computer hacks we read about actually used very simple techniques--more often than not, exploiting human fallibility rather than esoteric technology.  Those human foibles range from clicking on links in unknown emails to, well, leaving a database abandoned online. 

The solution is broader than just trying to educate employees; by then it's probably already too late. We need education that starts in elementary school.  We teach kids how to cross the street safely, and that if they leave their bike far from home, sooner or later it’s going to disappear.  It becomes what we call "common sense."  Online security awareness should also be taught from an early age--so that leaving a database of names and addresses untended on the Internet is as unthinkable as leaving for vacation with your front door open.