Superforecasters
They are government-backed, scientifically grounded future predictors. But in an age of endless doomsday headlines, does knowing the future help or leave us all screaming into the void? Harriet Hall finds out
Back at the tail end of the 90s, I sat in front of the telly on New Year’s Eve in my parents’ living room. I was 10 years old and a pair of cardboard glasses – the first year they had zeros as eye holes – was perched on the bridge of my nose. Jamiroquai and Travis were playing on Jools’ Annual Hootenanny and I watched as Jay Kay careened around the stage.Would Virtual Insanity be the last song that I ever heard?
The Millennium Bug – the theory that all computer systems would crash at midnight on 1 January 2000, leading to global catastrophe, sort of made sense. Computers had been coded in the 1960s using two digits to denote a year – 97, 98, 99 and so forth – but had not accounted for the turn of the millennium. So ‘00’ indicated not 2000, but 1900. Flipping back a hundred years could really mess things up, so money (a lot) was spent to prevent chaos and come the new year, we held our collective breath…
Nothing. I awoke the next day to the same world as the one I’d fallen asleep in. While many dismissed the Millennium Bug as at best a myth, and at worst a hoax, others maintain that we had simply prepared appropriately (millions were spent to reprogramme computers). Had experts and forecasters averted disaster? Or did the danger never exist in the first place?
If we had a similar scare today, how would we hear about it? On the news? Via TikTok? As we seek reassurance during what feel like increasingly precarious times, we’re turning to self-identifying future predictors, like those mentioned above, more than ever. Call them soothsayers of sorts.
The prophecies of Nostradamus topped the Sunday Times Bestseller list at the tail end of 2022 after one of the 16th century seer’s predictions appeared to foretell the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s death. Meanwhile, The Simpsons hasbeen credited with an eerie ability to predict the future. Homer and Marge et al all lived through the Trump presidency, several Super Bowl results and the discovery of the Higgs boson particle years before these events happened. Then there’s the increase in pound-shop prophets – videos set to eerie music popping up on your TikTok FYP insisting that the person behind the account is a time traveller who has come back to warn you that aliens are set to take over/financial crisis is looming/ your manicurist is trying to kill you (delete as necessary). Not to mention the psychics and tarot card readers making big bucks off your uncertainty.
But looking ahead doesn’t have to be all mystics and crystal balls (though, personally, I do enjoy a bit of tarot by the full moon). There’s a whole host of peop
