Predictions from the Past, Hope for the Futurist
Nobody can deny the huge impact that technology has had on many areas of work, play, and family. Entire industries have been born, prospered, and died all within in a few years (remember Blockbuster?). These days, the only thing that may be surprising is how small the impact has been had on a few nooks and crannies of the economy and life. But hang on a decade, will you? 3D printers, drones and immersive displays are just getting started.
The hype sometimes reminds me of when I was a kid and the European-themed Busch Gardens amusement park opened in Williamsburg, Virginia. The rides were said to be amazing. As a 14-year old, I took a special interest in its progress. When my friend Tony went with his family, I was eager to hear his report. He said, “My Dad says nobody will ever need to go to Europe anymore. They have everything at Busch Gardens—the Eiffel Tower, Picadilly Circus, even a Bavarian beer garden—and it’s better.”
Don’t get me wrong, I can’t wait to work on all the new stuff. In fact, the other day I was discussing the Internet of Things applied to cows with some colleagues. I just expect Europe to still be in business when I’m done building the Internet of Cows.
Blockbuster lives the short life of a firefly, while Busch Gardens and European tourism survive. Is there any way to predict things like this? A hundred years ago, planes, electricity, and automobiles were just starting to spread. Other technologies like steam engines and railroads were practically old hat. People of the era had plenty of imagination, and some of them made some fairly accurate predictions. You can look at these French postcards or these, or these German ones or this American article, all from around that time to see a wide range of predictions, almost all related to technology. If you look past the steam punk aesthetic it’s really surprising to see how many things they got right. The conclusion is that our collective imaginations can take us pretty far if some trends, like human flight, are already in place.
A Weekend on the Moon?
Weekend on the Moon?
We can also look at these predictions and see a few enormous errors, even if that doesn’t seem fair. For example, there’s the forecasted political union of Nicaragua and the U.S.A.. Nobody expected the Sandinistas or the current House Republicans, I guess. Then there’s the weekend trip to the moon, or the chimney sweep with his own helicopter. They got the technology right, but the costs are way off.
Certain biases look very pronounced. Perhaps we still have them too. What are they?
It’s hard to predict fashion.
Nobody is wearing skinny jeans in those images, although the men seem to have beards. We all predict a future in which we will all be wearing the same clothes we have on now.
It’s also hard to predict politics and social change.
Maybe that’s why nobody predicted things like Hitler or Twitter. Perhaps the success of Twitter and the failure of almost every famous economist has by now turned futurists away from predictions about social change. While I definitely predict the Internet of Cows, I refuse to say what they will do with it.
Futurists tend to neglect energy prices.
Can you even guess how many tons of coal it takes to go to the moon for the weekend? Well I’m too busy to calculate it too, but surely it would have ruled that one out. Take note Richard Branson. This might come as a shock, but energy prices have not really changed dramatically over the last hundred years. That’s right, gasoline prices have stayed almost within a factor of two during the period, in real terms of course. On the other hand, nobody predicted nuclear weapons until a few years later. The price of high energy weapons fell off the table, but the cost of making this energy safe remains extremely high, so it hasn’t brought much benefit so far. Memo to futurists: Factor in current energy prices, or tell us where the cheap energy is coming from.
People are very optimistic when estimating the difficulties.
Robot haircuts? Maybe soon, but you go first please. Too dangerous for me. Yes, we had the predicted flying bombers by the time WWII came around, but they were deathtraps. Not only laymen have this problem, experts practically specialize in it. Machines are amazing at calculating bank statements and have been for over forty years. They are also really good at collecting tolls and routing pictures of cats around the world. They can land airplanes, but they only started beating chess grandmasters consistently in the past few years. It’s only obvious in retrospect. Nobody knows quite when machines will beat Go masters or give good haircuts. Of course this is all about software. In this field, we seem to have a hard time understanding what computers can and can’t do even now. The boundary between easy and hard, solved and unsolved problems is very ill-defined. For example, one of my former colleagues recently developed a computer program that was able to beat humans at answering this simple question about a photo: Is there a paper shredder here? It turns out he needed Deep Learning and weeks of processing to train it and we can’t ask the program any other questions besides “Shredder there?”. Would you guess it would be that hard?
Not too much off the top!
A Future for Futurists
My advice to futurists is this: Avoid predictions based on crazy low energy prices. Stay away from politics, society, and fashion. I would include Blockbuster shares here. Base your predictions on technology trends that are firmly in place but not fully exploited. And if it takes a lot of work to accomplish the prediction, so much the better. We’ll get there and you will look prescient in the end.
Perhaps in a future post, I will take some inspiration from those old French postcards and try my hand at some forecasts in the field of machine learning and computer science. Some trends are in place that should make it “easy” to see some of the things that will likely emerge. With any luck, I will avoid predicting perpetual motion.
Tim Sears July 24, 2014