prescient / prescience
adjective / noun

- knowing or suggesting correctly what will happen in the future

- the ability to know or correctly suggest what will happen in the future

The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary

—
WORD ORIGIN

Via French, “prescient” is from the Latin praescientia “fore knowledge”, from praescire, meaning to know in advance (prae = before + scire = to know). Scire is related to “science”.

—
SEEING INTO THE FUTURE?

The modern world has its share of prescient individuals in business, government and academia who rely on experience, instinct and the ability to spot trends to suggest what will happen in the future; and throughout history, religious prophets, visionary scholars, astrologers have tried or pretended to predict the future.

One of the most interesting and notable was Nostradamus, the 16th century French Renaissance seer and physician. Nostradamus published an extensive collection of prophecies in 1555 (Le Propheties) that attracted a great deal of attention. Although many scholars ridiculed his “fortune-telling”, which he wrote in four-line poems called quatrains, he nevertheless generated an enthusiastic following who give him credit for predicting many major world events.

More recently, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932)  and George Orwell’s “1984” (1949) accurately anticipated reproductive technologies and totalitarian surveillance.

—
SYNONYMS

- having knowledge of events before they take place:

anticipating, augural, clairvoyant, Delphian, divinatory, extrasensory, far-seeing, farsighted, foreknowing, foreseeing, foreshadowing, foresighted, foresightful, foretelling, forethoughtful, forewarning, forward-looking, forward-thinking, having second sight, having sixth sense, long-sighted, long-term, longsighted, oracular, portending, portentous, predicting, predictive, presaging, PRESCIENT, prognostic, prognosticating, prognosticative, prophetic, prophetical, second-sighted, sibyllic, soothsaying, visionary, with a sixth sense, with foresight, with second sight

—
SMUGGLE OWAD into an English conversation, say something like:

“The novels of Huxley and Orwell turned out to be surprisingly PRESCIENT. Will the same be true of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as presaged by Arthur C. Clarke in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’?"

—
HERZLICHEN DANK to all readers helping me keep OWAD alive with single or monthly donations at:

https://donorbox.org/please-become-a-friend-of-owad-3

and,

Paul Smith, IBAN: DE75 7316 0000 0002 5477 40