I'm certainly not a futurist. Oh - there are some things I can predict with reasonable accuracy: that one of my ferrets will beg for a banana next week and next year, when an eclipse will happen somewhere, roughly when the Sun goes into its red giant stage... The easy stuff. Throw in people and culture and all bets are off. I've made some informed predictions that were heavily dependent on technologies I knew a lot about that seem precent now, but if I'm honest and look at my old lab notebooks.. well.. I'm batting 200 at best.1
Since then I've learned a bit more. New business ideas can appear and develop rapidly, sometimes in a year or two. Big technology leaps usually depend on basic research and are less frequent appearing at twenty to forty year intervals. They're often difficult to notice early on and are accompanied by widely negative and positive projections. Then there is culture. We - our basic needs, desires and dreams - evolve at a very slow rate. Typically thousands of years. Understanding this is critically important to thinking about the future. I like to identify what preoccupies people and where future conflict is likely.
My model of the near term - say up to twenty year - future involves four areas. There are probably more.
° what is technically possible (understanding the combination of multiple technologies and a bit of the basics is important.)
° what is economically feasible and what are the externalities
° regulations and standards
° people, culture and social acceptance
There's a forest and trees problem. You have to understand why a certain product or service is popular to see if it's something fundamental or if it's just a manifestation of the possible. A few years ago people were running around playing Pokemon Go. Many got excited about augmented reality games and saw this as the future. In fact it was a fad that quickly died out. It was made possible when the quality and user cost of wireless networks and smartphones got to a point where enough people had them to allow a novel experience. The underlying importance was the convergence of a good enough network and smartphones.
When a wheel is invented you have to sort out what is a bicycle and what is a hula hoop. We have a lot of hula hoops.
About ten years ago a few of the titans of Silicon Valley pronounced privacy dead. Lots of people agreed. I'm guessing almost none of them had any understanding of what privacy is and how it has developed over the past two hundred years. It's very complex but anyone making decisions needs to understand the history and conflict and why modern notions are still unsettled. Now we see two huge chastened firms claiming to go all in on privacy (I don't trust one and only partly trust the others). I'll go out on a limb and claim it will still be a major issue at least two decades out.. probably more.
A few words on externalities, but it can get involved. You can think of great projects that make enormous financial sense on longer time scales that are problematic. Dealing with climate change and proper sanitation are two excellent examples. Technology exists to solve both, but the people who benefit most are not those who invest.
Prediction is difficult. It takes a smart multi-disciplinary team and a rigorous process. You need to understand the past. There can be good success with the bicycle and hula hoop class questions. Identifying new wheels are likely to be a once in a career issue if you're lucky. All of these things are well above my pay grade. I'm continuously reminded how simple physics is.
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1 In 1992 using, Moore's law and the notion that the Internet and wireless were so desirable that hundreds of billions in infrastructure investment would happen, I suggested in 2017 people would hold a piece of glass in their hand and have have a video connection with a friend halfway around the world and that "call" would effective be free. The hardest part, in my mind, was the battery. There were a few other seemingly clever calls, but more than a few duds. At least there's the realization that I, along with many colleagues, did better than the very expensive futurists the company hired,
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