How Not to Predict the Future

When you spend a lot of time thinking about emerging technology, you begin to notice certain things that are naturally just assumed to be true about the future, as if everyone just knows them. These ideas are so widespread and infrequently challenged that they come to seem inevitable.

These are also things that a lot of people really want to be true. What a coincidence.

So we take for granted that electric cars are the future, and the internal combustion engine is on the way out. That we're going to power everything with renewable energy, especially solar, and oil is a dinosaur (so to speak). And when self-driving cars are perfected, which will be any day now, they are going to put millions of blue-collar workers out of a job. But at least they will free up huge amounts of space inside cities, where we'll be able to replace ugly streets and parking lots with parks and playgrounds and affordable housing.

I hate to be the one to break it to you that a lot of these predictions are based on dubious assumptions and a dubious methodology. They survive and become widely accepted, not because they have been rigorously proven, but because they are "too good to check."

The field of meteorology has given us a very useful term for this: "wishcasting." It started with the observation that weathermen disproportionately predict sunny weather on the 4th of July and snow on Christmas Day. Their forecasts are influenced, not just by the evidence, but by what they (or their audience) want to hear....

From Michael Crichton’s lecture at Caltech “Aliens cause global warmin’”.

“Let’s think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horse****?

Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses? But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport.

And in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn’t know what an atom was.

They didn’t know its structure.
They also didn’t know what a radio was,
or an airport,
or a movie,
or a television,
or a computer,
or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet. interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS. None of this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn’t know what you are talking about.

Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it’s even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They’re bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment’s thought knows it.”

Very good article. I think the science fiction author Ray Bradbury was very good at not only predicting future technology, but the effects it would cause, including negative effects.

Maybe self-driving cars won't lead people to want longer commutes or to own bigger cars. Maybe they will gravitate toward small, shared, electric vehicles. The actual result will undoubted be a mix of these things, but we don't yet know in what direction that mix will be tilted. And we won't know for decades.

"Futurists" these days are the ones with the fingers on the scales. They create the "future" by regulating the present away, and allowing only what they want to be in the future. Like Obama supporting solar and wind while putting national monuments over the gas and oil.

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