In 1955, Fortune magazine commissioned a collection of mid-century thought leaders to envision the next 25 years of progress in America. Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, president of the AFL-CIO George Meany, and others offered their versions of “The Fabulous Future: America in 1980”—which gives some sense of the tone. America’s future, and by extension the world’s, was fabulous indeed, despite occasionally expressed quibbles about conformity, global communism, and the softening of our manly fiber. One article was different. It was by John von Neumann (1903–57), the astounding polymath who had come from Hungary to Princeton in the 1930s and over the following two decades reshaped mathematics, physics, and computer science. It was called “Can We Survive Technology?”
For von Neumann, the world of 1955 was in a state of “rapidly maturing crisis”—new military technology making old modes of defense obsolete, the world already a degree warmer thanks to burning fossil fuels (back then it wasn’t controversial to bring this up), and our demands as a species running up against the finite size of the earth. The section titles include “Dangers—Present and Coming” and “Awful and More Awful.” Von Neumann summed it up: “In the years between now and 1980 the crisis will probably develop far beyond all earlier patterns. When or how it will end—or to what state of affairs it will yield—nobody can say.“
