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Notes -
Aren't futurists supposed to be optimistic? Like, isn't that pretty much a requirement for the job?
Well you won't find any futurists on futurism.com...
Or alternately, they're the opposite kind of futurist, the one who bemoans all developments. There's a media tendency for fear and negativity, fear sells after all.
Plus a social trend against technology since the 1960s: just read the title of a book like 'Tom Swift and his Atomic Earth Blaster' (1954) and you can tell it was a whole other world. Today Tom Swift would be the villain. Maybe like how in Fahrenheit 451 firemen of the future are just in charge of starting fires, futurists of today bemoan technology. Now it directly affects them after all.
There are huge cadres of sci-fi authors who bemoan LLMs and I suspect this is because it's finally their lunch that's being eaten, writers of novels can sense they're on the chopping block soon. They're still a few tiers above the journalists of course.
1968-69 seems to have been the breaking point, with the endless Vietnam war and the rise of the counterculture, "The Population Bomb" and the environmentalist movement. New speculative fiction (the "New Wave") suddenly became a lot more pessimistic and a lot less fun to read. Air and water pollution was supposed to be on the verge of killing all the plants and wild animals. In contrast, I see deer in my backyard every day now (when they were an extraordinarily rare sight until the turn of the millennium), and even foxes occasionally. In the lower-density areas nearby, there have even been black bears. And the vegetation grows quickly enough that it's become a real nuisance, blocking even the view of the sky from indoors!
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