4 ms·

It is interesting to see how back then people were watching the future as a continuity of their time. That is why I am very septic about predictions of the fut

by dimtion 11y ago

It is interesting to see how back then people were watching the future as a continuity of their time. That is why I am very septic about predictions of the future, even if some become true alone, it is quite impossible to grasp how a future society might look as a whole.

akjetma 11y ago
This is tangential, but... We had a futurist from Intel visit our small startup about two years ago for a future planning/predicting exercise. I think we were not the correct audience for these exercises though, due to the small size of our company. What I learned from the exercise was that companies as large and influential as Intel don't have to follow market trends or predict "how things will be" because they are not subjects of some natural market--they _define_ the market. It seemed crazy to me to have exercises planning 20+ years into the future, but Intel necessarily has to do this due to the size of the ship they're piloting.
- caseysoftware 11y ago
  That's a really good point. I think of earlier incarnations of Microsoft the same way. Bill Gates' stated Vision decades ago was "a computer on every desktop" and he helped (led?) us there to the point where we now take it for granted. The sheer audaciousness of the original Vision is amazing considering the cost, size, etc of what computers were then. Whatever the (often valid) criticism is today, they helped define and expand our industry in a way that shouldn't be overlooked. Not many companies hope to do that, let alone accomplish it.
  - onewaystreet 11y ago
    But on the other hand Bill Gates and Microsoft were blindsided by the Internet.
    - mistermann 11y ago
      I don't know if blindsighted is the word. Sure, they certainly weren't on the forefront, and at the time to us in the industry it seemed like they were waaaaay late to the game, but at least for me in retrospect they weren't really that late, and I don't think it made a lick of difference did it? Missing the boat on the importance of Google and the iPhone, now those were huuuuge mistakes. Was Gates still running the show then?
      - ams6110 11y ago
        If Microsoft had been earlier, Google might (probably) have never existed.
    - jandrese 11y ago
      Bill Gates wrote a book in 1995 entitled "The Road Ahead" that barely mentioned the Internet and especially the World Wide Web. Microsoft was definitely behind the ball on the Internet revolution.
      - marincounty 11y ago
        I'll get hammered for this, but as a young man, I remember Al Gore talking about the Internet. Yes, there were people before him, but he had the stage, and the audience. He started people--people with money, and connections to look into this crazy university tool. He made the mistake of say he invented the Internet. It's was a bad, egotistical statement, but he got us talking about it. Actually, I don't even think we would be talking about global warming if it wasen't for Al Gore. I didn't like the man when I was younger for horrid reasons; like I thought he was a spoiled, rich politician who really didn't care, and was using these topics to gain political points. I was completely wrong! I wish he would run for office again. I know I would give him a vote.
        mikekchar 11y ago
        Perspective is a funny thing. I'm trying to work out the timing, but my buddy and I were running a UUCP network in Manitoba, Canada round about 1988. UUNet had just connected to the internet backbone and we chatted with them briefly about connecting up with them. They said as long as we paid for a T1 from Toronto, they would let us work with them. I'm pretty sure this was before AlterNet, so it would have had to have been prior to 1990. IIRC, the cost to us would have been about $30K per month and we considered the option of starting up a commercial ISP. In the end we decided not to, but at the time I was absolutely convinced we could have made it a viable business. When Al Gore hit my radar, I thought he was completely irrelevant. In retrospect, I'm sure that's not true because some of the legislation that he pushed through paved the way for commercial traffic. But believe me, it was coming whether he did anything or not. He may have accelerated the process slightly, but probably not too much. His major contribution may actually have been to maintain US dominance of the internet for a couple more decades. Canada was already gearing up for it and I remember friends setting up fledgling ISPs in about 1993 (right when CANARIE had finished being set up). Personally, I don't have any real thoughts about Al Gore one way or another. I can see he was very influential, but from my perspective he was mostly just riding the wave as opposed to creating it.
- stephenboyd 11y ago
  Intel has maintained itself well, but they missed a huge opportunity in the rise of smartphones and tablets.
  - stephenboyd 11y ago
    I just got curious about this and looked for an explanation. Intel does a lot of forecasting and their predicted data was flawed. This article explains it succinctly: http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/16/intel-chips-could-have-powered-first-iphone-ceo-otelini-says http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/16/intel-chips-could-... Intel CEO Paul Otellini on the iPhone negotiations: "At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."
themodelplumber 11y ago
I think it's in the beginning of Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth by R. Buckminster Fuller, where he says that he determined that he could predict advances around 25 years out and still be reasonably accurate. After that, no bet. But people would still tell him he was a century ahead of his time. Anyway, same idea.
- malka 11y ago
  I really wish we have psychohistory as a science someday.
hugh4 11y ago
I don't know, I thought he did a remarkably good job of looking at the existing trends (automation, motorisation, flight) and figuring out what they might be useful for with continued development.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
The future is sometimes surprising, sometimes very much so, and that is one big source of prediction error. It would take a transcendent genius to have imagined the full potential of computers back in 1900, for example, let alone everything else. Additionally, predictions of the future often lean either toward optimistic or pessimistic, rather than in between. But this is more complicated than it seems because a big part of the underlying mechanism is comfort. People make optimistic predictions that seem comfortable to them, and they make pessimistic predictions based on what seems uncomfortable. But comfort is not immutable, it changes depending on familiarity. The internet is uncomfortable to some and comfortable to others, as was the automobile and the telephone. When trains and automobiles first came about they were scary to a lot of people, partly for legitimate reasons and partly for not. Eventually most people became comfortable with such things. But even so, there's no new technology that doesn't come with down-sides, and it can often be difficult to imagine people of the future accepting new kinds of problems, sometimes even very severe problems. Nothing is perfect though, and people often have a blind spot for the problems of the things they are currently familiar and comfortable with and they don't see how getting rid of those problems makes the new problems more than worth the trade. Imagining multiple cycles of trade-offs and trade-ups from technology to technology is a very difficult thing to do. And too, as you say, the impact of technology on society and then society on technology is even more difficult to grasp. This goes along with pg's essay about "what you can't say". If you can't say such things now you certainly can't talk about them in the context of the future.

by dimtion 11y ago

akjetma 11y ago

This is tangential, but... We had a futurist from Intel visit our small startup about two years ago for a future planning/predicting exercise. I think we were not the correct audience for these exercises though, due to the small size of our company. What I learned from the exercise was that companies as large and influential as Intel don't have to follow market trends or predict "how things will be" because they are not subjects of some natural market--they _define_ the market. It seemed crazy to me to have exercises planning 20+ years into the future, but Intel necessarily has to do this due to the size of the ship they're piloting.

caseysoftware 11y ago
That's a really good point. I think of earlier incarnations of Microsoft the same way. Bill Gates' stated Vision decades ago was "a computer on every desktop" and he helped (led?) us there to the point where we now take it for granted. The sheer audaciousness of the original Vision is amazing considering the cost, size, etc of what computers were then. Whatever the (often valid) criticism is today, they helped define and expand our industry in a way that shouldn't be overlooked. Not many companies hope to do that, let alone accomplish it.
- onewaystreet 11y ago
  But on the other hand Bill Gates and Microsoft were blindsided by the Internet.
  - mistermann 11y ago
    I don't know if blindsighted is the word. Sure, they certainly weren't on the forefront, and at the time to us in the industry it seemed like they were waaaaay late to the game, but at least for me in retrospect they weren't really that late, and I don't think it made a lick of difference did it? Missing the boat on the importance of Google and the iPhone, now those were huuuuge mistakes. Was Gates still running the show then?
    - ams6110 11y ago
      If Microsoft had been earlier, Google might (probably) have never existed.
  - jandrese 11y ago
    Bill Gates wrote a book in 1995 entitled "The Road Ahead" that barely mentioned the Internet and especially the World Wide Web. Microsoft was definitely behind the ball on the Internet revolution.
    - marincounty 11y ago
      I'll get hammered for this, but as a young man, I remember Al Gore talking about the Internet. Yes, there were people before him, but he had the stage, and the audience. He started people--people with money, and connections to look into this crazy university tool. He made the mistake of say he invented the Internet. It's was a bad, egotistical statement, but he got us talking about it. Actually, I don't even think we would be talking about global warming if it wasen't for Al Gore. I didn't like the man when I was younger for horrid reasons; like I thought he was a spoiled, rich politician who really didn't care, and was using these topics to gain political points. I was completely wrong! I wish he would run for office again. I know I would give him a vote.
      - mikekchar 11y ago
        Perspective is a funny thing. I'm trying to work out the timing, but my buddy and I were running a UUCP network in Manitoba, Canada round about 1988. UUNet had just connected to the internet backbone and we chatted with them briefly about connecting up with them. They said as long as we paid for a T1 from Toronto, they would let us work with them. I'm pretty sure this was before AlterNet, so it would have had to have been prior to 1990. IIRC, the cost to us would have been about $30K per month and we considered the option of starting up a commercial ISP. In the end we decided not to, but at the time I was absolutely convinced we could have made it a viable business. When Al Gore hit my radar, I thought he was completely irrelevant. In retrospect, I'm sure that's not true because some of the legislation that he pushed through paved the way for commercial traffic. But believe me, it was coming whether he did anything or not. He may have accelerated the process slightly, but probably not too much. His major contribution may actually have been to maintain US dominance of the internet for a couple more decades. Canada was already gearing up for it and I remember friends setting up fledgling ISPs in about 1993 (right when CANARIE had finished being set up). Personally, I don't have any real thoughts about Al Gore one way or another. I can see he was very influential, but from my perspective he was mostly just riding the wave as opposed to creating it.
stephenboyd 11y ago
Intel has maintained itself well, but they missed a huge opportunity in the rise of smartphones and tablets.
- stephenboyd 11y ago
  I just got curious about this and looked for an explanation. Intel does a lot of forecasting and their predicted data was flawed. This article explains it succinctly: http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/16/intel-chips-could-have-powered-first-iphone-ceo-otelini-says http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/16/intel-chips-could-... Intel CEO Paul Otellini on the iPhone negotiations: "At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."

themodelplumber 11y ago

I think it's in the beginning of Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth by R. Buckminster Fuller, where he says that he determined that he could predict advances around 25 years out and still be reasonably accurate. After that, no bet. But people would still tell him he was a century ahead of his time. Anyway, same idea.

malka 11y ago
I really wish we have psychohistory as a science someday.

hugh4 11y ago

I don't know, I thought he did a remarkably good job of looking at the existing trends (automation, motorisation, flight) and figuring out what they might be useful for with continued development.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

The future is sometimes surprising, sometimes very much so, and that is one big source of prediction error. It would take a transcendent genius to have imagined the full potential of computers back in 1900, for example, let alone everything else. Additionally, predictions of the future often lean either toward optimistic or pessimistic, rather than in between. But this is more complicated than it seems because a big part of the underlying mechanism is comfort. People make optimistic predictions that seem comfortable to them, and they make pessimistic predictions based on what seems uncomfortable. But comfort is not immutable, it changes depending on familiarity. The internet is uncomfortable to some and comfortable to others, as was the automobile and the telephone. When trains and automobiles first came about they were scary to a lot of people, partly for legitimate reasons and partly for not. Eventually most people became comfortable with such things. But even so, there's no new technology that doesn't come with down-sides, and it can often be difficult to imagine people of the future accepting new kinds of problems, sometimes even very severe problems. Nothing is perfect though, and people often have a blind spot for the problems of the things they are currently familiar and comfortable with and they don't see how getting rid of those problems makes the new problems more than worth the trade. Imagining multiple cycles of trade-offs and trade-ups from technology to technology is a very difficult thing to do. And too, as you say, the impact of technology on society and then society on technology is even more difficult to grasp. This goes along with pg's essay about "what you can't say". If you can't say such things now you certainly can't talk about them in the context of the future.