How to Predict What the World Will Look Like in 2122: Insights from Futurist Peter Schwartz

“It’s very easy to imagine things going wrong,” says futurologist Peter Schwartz in the video above. “It’s a lot harder to imagine things going right.” That’s how he demonstrated a quarter of a century ago with the Wired Magazine cover story “The Long Boom,” which he co-wrote with Peter Leyden. His predictions were made in the now techno-utopian year 1997 “25 years of prosperity, freedom and a better environment for a whole world” has since become the subject of ridicule. But in the play, Schwartz and Leyden also offer a number of less desirable alternative scenarios, the details of which — a new Cold War between the US and China, climate-related food supply disruptions, an “uncontrollable plague” — seem rather prescient in retrospect.

According to Schwartz, the intelligent futurist does not want to do everything right. “It is almost impossible. But you test your decisions against multiple scenarios to make sure you don’t go wrong in the scenarios that actually occur.” The art of “scenario planning,” as Schwartz calls it, requires a pretty deep rooting in the past.

His own life is an example of this: born in a German refugee camp in 1946, he eventually made his way to what was then called the Stanford Research Institute. “It was the beginnings that became Silicon Valley. This is where technology accelerated. It was one of the first thousand people online. It was the era when LSD was still used as an exploration tool. So everything around me was the future being born,” and he could hardly have avoided becoming addicted to the future.

This addiction has remained with Schwartz to this day: most recently, he predicted the future way Salesforce would work. The key question, he recognized, “wasn’t what I thought about the future, but what everyone else thought about the future?” curiosity”. He cites “future anxiety” as the biggest threat to scenario planning, calling it “one of the worst problems we have today”. There will be more setbacks, more “wars and panics and pandemics and so on.” But “the great arc of human progress and the gaining of prosperity and a better life for all, that will continue.” Despite what he has seen – and because of everything he has seen – Peter Schwartz still believes in the long one Boom.

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Colin Marshall is a Seoul based writer and broadcasterts about cities, language and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter books about cities, the book The stateless city: a stroll through 21st-century Los Angeles and the video series The city in the cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.