If bad predictions are a failure of imagination, then
look at this one for a whopper….
"Inventions have
long-since reached their limit--and I see no hope for further
developments." Julius Frontinus (Rome
Not only is this statement by Julius Frontinus a great
candidate for being as wrong as you can be, it is evidence of one of the most
astoundingly erroneous predictions and poor forecasting I've ever seen. Bear in
mind too that the person who said this was actually an engineer.
It is interesting to see some of the many other bad predictions made
here,
often by people who understood the field in which the mistaken prediction took
place. When Einstein said "Imagination is the preview of life's coming attractions" it seems this is the kind of failure of imagination he had in mind.
