We Can't Predict the Future

This post refers to articles from Technical Communication Quarterly, Technical communication from 1950-1998: Where are we now? (Staples, Katherine) and Technical communication in the 21st century: where are we going? (Killingsworth, M. Jimmie). Interestingly, Both authors refer to a time in history when people were surprised at an outcome. Staples talks about the G.I. Bill that was supposed to support the jobless after WWII and prevent what happened after WWI. People used it to go to college in droves - like normal people, lower income people, for the first time. Killingsworth said in 1999 that people believed the "Modern Language Association's prediction that based on projected population increases among people of college age by the late 1990s, we would experience great growth in English faculties to accommodate increased enrollments; the job crisis would be over." But in 2000 it wasn't over. The same thing is happening today. The federal interest rate is at a record low and still jobs are not rebounding the way the experts expected. All this means that we don't really know what will happen. We can't predict the future, and according to Killingsworth, we shouldn't. I'm not sure if this means we should be supportive, that predictions are costly and dangerous, or that we should be more careful when we make predictions.