If history teaches us anything, it's that change doesn't follow set patterns and is rarely predictable. I grew up being a fan of both science fiction and of history, and when I was in high school I used to love speculating about the future based on what I thought I'd "learned" from history. But after more than 10 years of studying history full-time, I've developed much more of an appreciation for just how complex, varied, and unpredictable the changes that make up "history" were. I think the only thing we can say with certainty about the future is that it will surprise us.

Not the answer you're looking for, I know, but I think it's the only one that anyone who truly understands what "history" is can give. Often, we don't really even understand what happened in the past, and a lot of what we think of as "history" is a massive over-simplification, a story that we've written to make sense of something that in reality was so complex, so chaotic, that we can never really hope to fully understand it.

So using history to "predict" the future is an enterprise that is almost certainly doomed to fail - we can concoct little stories about "history repeating" and pretend that they'll predict the future all we want, but when push comes to shove we're just telling stories, and almost certain to be wrong in our predictions.

If you want that sort of future predicting analysis then you'll need to head on over to Marxist History. Marx believed in something called "dialectical materialism", basically that history was shaped by the interactions of various material forces. Marx believed that if you could generalize and understand the material forces in the current world you could predict (very generally) the future. For example Marx analyzes industrial capitalism and comes to the conclusion that it will have disastrous cyclical boom/bust cycles, and also that it will have an effect of disintegrating old class structures to the point where all people will be part of eather the working class or the ownership class. Marx predicted that once the majority of people realized they where in the same social class (workers) they would unite to overthrow the tiny ownership class and create a new sort of society.

All very general I know, but when predicting the future you can not be specific. The best you can hope for is to spot large trends.

I'll answer this in a different way to the other comments here. Not because they aren't valid -- they certainly are -- but there's also another way in which historians are interested in the future, which is an object of study.

Historians have long pondered, of course, the notion of the 'past', then of the 'present', and also of 'modernism' and 'progress' (see especially Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History: http://books.openedition.org/ceup/819). How those of the past imagined (projected scenes from future times) and conceived of (how they thought about and defined it) the 'future' is therefore yet another step on that temporal/epistemic analysis. And indeed, the future is entangled in so many different levels of thought, from forming the core of eugenics projects, to reforming calendars (e.g. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=F68gAwAAQBAJ) or in developing colonial practices (e.g. http://www.historianhouse.us/History_605/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Nelson-Making-Men.pdf).