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Ask HN: Effective Methods for Predicting Technology?
A recent interview with the CTO of OpenAI, Greg Bockman, made a fascinating point: new technology is hard to predict (“imagine predicting Uber and smartphones in the 50s”).
And yet good science fiction writers routinely do just that. I think in particular of Forster’s “The Machine Stops.”
What are effective methods for predicting future technology?
- lm28469 8y ago> yet good science fiction writers routinely do just that. I see two things going on here. - Science fiction influencing engineers / scientists. - Selection bias, how many sci-fo books/movies are completely wrong ? If you produce 100 000 scenarios surely some of them will be more or less comparable to reality. Did back to the future predict self lacing shoes ? Or did Nike invent self lacing shoes because of back to the future ? &c.
- onion2k 8y agoAnd yet good science fiction writers routinely do just that. I think in particular of Forster’s “The Machine Stops.” This is survivorship bias. Between them all scifi authors predict everything they can imagine, and a few of them happen to get close enough to what happens that they look accurate, and people conveniently forget all the ones who were wildly off the mark.