At the RAND Corporation in California during the 1950s, Herman Kahn and others pioneered the so-called scenario technique for analyzing the relationship between weapons development and military strategy. Later Kahn applied this technique in On Thermonuclear War (1960), a book that examines the potential consequences of a nuclear conflict.

During the time of Kahn’s first studies, the mathematician Olaf Helmer, also at RAND, proposed a theoretical basis for the use of expert opinion in forecasting.

In 1964 the French social scientist Bertrand de Jouvenel published L’Art de la conjecture (The Art of Conjecture), in which he offered a systematic philosophical rationale for the field. The following year the American Academy of Arts and Sciences formed its Commission on the Year 2000 “to anticipate social patterns, to design new institutions, and to propose alternative programs”; the commission’s 1967 report constituted the first wide-ranging futurological study in the United States.

The field was brought to wide popular attention in 1972 when Dennis Meadows and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published The Limits to Growth, based on a study commissioned by the Club of Rome, an international assembly of business leaders. This report focused on hypotheses derived from a computer model of the interaction of various global socioeconomic trends; it projected a Malthusian vision in which the collapse of world order would result if population growth, industrial expansion, and increased pollution, combined with insufficient food production and the depletion of natural resources, were to continue at current rates. To offset these trends, the report called for “a Copernican revolution of the mind,” to reevaluate the belief in endless growth and the tacit acceptance of wastefulness. Besides zero population growth and a leveling-off of industrial production, the report also recommended increased pollution control, the recycling of materials, the manufacture of more durable and repairable goods, and a shift from consumer goods to a more service-oriented economy. The U.S. government-commissioned Global 2000 Report to the President (1981) reiterated many of these concerns.

Criticism of these and other studies has centred mainly on the limitations of models and the subjective, interpretive nature of projections based on them. Futurologists generally acknowledge these difficulties but emphasize the increasing sophistication of their analytic techniques, which draw from such fields as mathematics, economics, environmental research, and computer science.

Other notable basic works in futurology include Future Shock (1970) by Alvin Toffler, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) by Daniel Bell, The Fate of the Earth (1982) by Jonathan Schell, and The Green Machines (1986) by Nigel Calder.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/futurology

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Singularity, theoretical condition that could arrive in the near future when a synthesis of several powerful new technologies will radically change the realities in which we find ourselves in an unpredictable manner. Most notably, the singularity would involve computer programs becoming so advanced that artificial intelligence transcends human intelligence, potentially erasing the boundary between humanity and computers. Often, nanotechnology is included as one of the key technologies that will make the singularity happen.

In 1993 the magazine Whole Earth Review published an article titled “Technological Singularity” by Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science fiction author. Vinge imagined that future information networks and human-machine interfaces would lead to novel conditions with new qualities: “a new reality rules.” But there was a trick to knowing the singularity. Even if one could know that it was imminent, one could not know what it would be like with any specificity. This condition will be, by definition, so thoroughly transcendent that we cannot imagine what it will be like. There was “an opaque wall across the future,” and “the new era is simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and evil.” It could be amazing or apocalyptic, but we cannot know the details.

Since that time, the idea of the singularity has been expanded to accommodate numerous visions of apocalyptic changes and technological salvation, not limited to Vinge’s parameters of information systems. One version championed by the inventor and visionary Ray Kurzweil emphasizes biology, cryonics, and medicine (including nanomedicine): in the future we will have the medical tools to banish disease and disease-related death. Another is represented in the writings of the sociologist William Sims Bainbridge, who describes a promise of “cyberimmortality,” when we will be able to experience a spiritual eternity that persists long after our bodies have decayed, by uploading digital records of our thoughts and feelings into perpetual storage systems. This variation circles back to Vinge’s original vision of a singularity driven by information systems. Cyberimmortality will work perfectly if servers never crash, power systems never fail, and some people in later generations have plenty of time to examine the digital records of our own thoughts and feelings.

One can also find a less radical expression of the singularity in Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance. This 2003 collection tacitly accepts the inevitability of so-called NBIC convergence, that is, the near-future synthesis of nanotech, biotech, infotech, and cognitive science. Because this volume was sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation and edited by two of its officers, Mihail Roco and Bainbridge, some saw it as a semiofficial government endorsement of expectations of the singularity.

Unprecedented new technologies will continue to arise, and perhaps they will synthesize with each other, but it is not inevitable that the changes they create will be apocalyptic. The idea of the singularity is a powerful inspiration for people who want technology to deliver a new spiritual and material reality within our lifetimes. This vision is sufficiently flexible that each person who expects the singularity can customize it to his or her own preferences.

https://www.britannica.com/technology/singularity-technology

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Bertrand de Jouvenel des Ursins

De Jouvenel was the heir of an old family from the French nobility, coming from the Champagne region. He was the son of Henri de Jouvenel and Sarah Boas, the daughter of a Jewish industrialist. Henri divorced Sarah in 1912 to become the second husband of French writer Colette. In 1920, when he was only 16, Bertrand began an affair with his stepmother, who was then in her late 40s.[additional citation(s) needed] The affair ended Colette and Henri's marriage and caused a scandal. It lasted until 1924. Some believe Bertrand to be the role model for the title character in Colette's novel Chéri, but in fact she had published about half the book, in serial form, before she and her stepson met for the first time, in the spring of 1920. Their affair actually inspired Colette's novel Le Blé en herbe. In the 1930s, he participated in the Cahiers Bleus, the review of Georges Valois' Republican Syndicalist Party. From 1930 to 1934, Jouvenel had an affair with the American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. They would have married had his wife agreed to a divorce.[3]

In his memoirs, The Invisible Writing, Arthur Koestler recalled that in 1934, de Jouvenel was among a small number of French intellectuals who promised moral and financial support to the newly established Institut pour l'Étude du Fascisme, a supposedly self-financing enterprise. Other personalities to offer support were Professor Langevin, the Joliot–Curies and André Malraux.[4]

However, that same year, de Jouvenel was impressed by the riot of the antiparliamentary leagues that occurred on 6 February 1934, became disillusioned with traditional political parties and left the Radical Party. He began a paper with Pierre Andreu called La Lutte des jeunes (The Struggle of the Young) while at the same time contributing to the right wing paper Gringoire, for which he covered the 1935 Nuremberg Congress in Germany where the infamous Nuremberg Laws were passed. He began frequenting royalist and nationalist circles, where he met Henri de Man and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle.[5]

He was in favour of Franco-German rapprochement and created the "Cercle du grand pavois", which supported the Comité France–Allemagne (Franco-German Committee). Here he became friends with Otto Abetz, the future German ambassador to Paris during the occupation.[6] In February 1936 he interviewed Adolf Hitler for the journal Paris-Midi,[7] for which he was criticised for being too friendly to the dictator.[citation needed]

That same year he joined Jacques Doriot's Parti populaire français (PPF).[8] He became the editor in chief of its journal L'Émancipation nationale (National Emancipation), wherein he supported fascism. He broke with the PPF in 1938 when Doriot supported the Munich Agreement. De Jouvenel's mother passionately supported Czechoslovak independence, and so he began his career as a private secretary to Edvard Beneš, Czechoslovakia's first prime minister.

After the outbreak of World War II, de Jouvenel served briefly in the French army.[9] However, following France's defeat in 1940, he stayed in occupied Paris and published Après la Défaite, in which he called for France to join Hitler's New Order. He later defended his wartime attitudes—which included contacts with German officials and collaborationist circles—as part of a strategy on behalf of French military networks to gather intelligence about Hitler's plans for France. Although this claim was likely true, his private correspondence and writings show that he genuinely wished France would go on to renew its decayed political institutions under a German-led reorganization of Europe.[10]

De Jouvenel became increasingly pessimistic about the occupation, and about state power in general. Beginning in the summer of 1942, he supported the French resistance, fleeing to Switzerland in September 1943 to avoid arrest by German authorities. While in exile, he wrote his magnum opus On Power (published in 1945) and caught the attention of neoliberal academics such as Friedrich Hayek and Wilhelm Röpke, leading him to become a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, alongside Hayek, Röpke, Jacques Rueff, and Milton Friedman.[11]

He was among the very few French intellectuals to pay respectful attention to the economic theory and welfare economics that emerged during the first half of the 20th century in Austria, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. However, he was against government-enforced redistribution in his work The Ethics of Redistribution.

Dennis Hale of Boston College has co-edited two volumes of essays by de Jouvenel.[12]

Later in his life, de Jouvenel's views shifted back to the left. In 1960, he complained to Milton Friedman that the Mont Pelerin Society had "turned increasingly to a Manichaeism according to which the state can do no good and private enterprise can do no wrong."[13] He was sympathetic to the student protests of 1968 and critical of the Vietnam War.[14] He also expressed support for the Socialist François Mitterrand.[13]

Zeev Sternhell published a book, Ni Droite, ni Gauche ("Neither Right nor Left"), accusing de Jouvenel of having had fascist sympathies in the 1930s and 1940s. De Jouvenel sued in 1983, claiming nine counts of libel, two of which the court upheld. However, Sternhell was neither required to publish a retraction nor to strike any passages from future printings of his book.[15]

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