Woa. Hold on. I'm talking about "the future" in the context of history. You can predict the future state of some systems, e.g. we can make fairly accurate weath

Woa. Hold on. I'm talking about "the future" in the context of history. You can predict the future state of some systems, e.g. we can make fairly accurate weather predictions, from past observations of weather events, for sure. As far as I can tell that's what the authors are trying to do. But if you want to know when the next big technological leap will happen then you won't learn that by looking at what happened last time: last time is not this time, that's my point.