I’m unsure, unless the author is of especially high renown.
If there was two dozen “What life will be like in 100 years” articles published per year in decently sized newspapers we will have 240 such articles to choose from this decade. Surely we would only see the most accurate of these predictions, and that is survival bias.
Of course, maybe there was not a large variance between predictions, or everyone is accurate to a similar level of degree. In that case some other method of selecting which old predictions we read will be at play, perhaps based on which publications were better archived or random chance.
It depends if we're judging the overall predictions of everyone, or this specific author's predictions. I always tend to look at it at the author-level, because otherwise the infinite monkeys theorem applies anyway.
I think this author should be given credit for the accuracy. He can't control what everyone else is writing and how accurate or inaccurate they were. He can only control his own predictions, and they were very good.
I don’t think we can look at this at the author level. Imagine if we had 1 million different authors making predictions, certainly some of them in the population will be very accurate and in retrospect they’ll look like geniuses.
If there was two dozen “What life will be like in 100 years” articles published per year in decently sized newspapers we will have 240 such articles to choose from this decade. Surely we would only see the most accurate of these predictions, and that is survival bias.
Of course, maybe there was not a large variance between predictions, or everyone is accurate to a similar level of degree. In that case some other method of selecting which old predictions we read will be at play, perhaps based on which publications were better archived or random chance.