There’s an old saying: The genius sees what happens, but the plodder sees what he expects to happen. - John Brunner

The future is inherently perfectly knowable. All the faculty takes to develop is the proper kind of exercise and meditation.

Best if the driver didn't have to get hurt. Though having been fool enough to volunteer for army service, of course, and worse still, having been fool enough to accept orders unquestioningly from a machine...
But everybody did that. Everybody, all the time. Otherwise none of this would have been possible.
Similarly, none of it would have had to happen.

And what was this man Diablo like as a person, anyhow? As a public figure, anybody in communications of any kind had a preconceived image of him, a brilliant, savage, wholly destructive propagandist whose canned programs were seized with cries of delight in Africa and Asia. But that was essentially irrelevant. Back in the pioneering days of the media, almost immediately after the crude and primitive radio era dominated by Dr. Goebbels, that instinctive genius of the borderline period Joe McCarthy had allegedly greeted a former acquaintance at a party, having secured his dismissal from his job, the loss of most of his friends and the acquisition of several million new enemies, with the cry, “Haven’t seen much of you lately — you been avoiding me?