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Table of contents

Child pages

How to Predict the Future

1. Identify a trend



2. Identify potential barriers to that trend

...

• The goal is to try to use some deductive reasoning to figure out what constraints in the world would need to be overcome.
• Example: Underwater cities are something predicted, but their cost relative to living on the surface is so great that no one has ever done it.
• Example: Flying cars are expensive relative to 

My Predictions of the Future

- self-driving cars will become very common

- education will be made available to 99% of children in the world; they'll have a laptop and will be able to learn english and useful skills over the internet w/ movies and fun games

a bunch of my predictions are things that are already happening, and I'm just predicting what the end result of these trends will look like.

- apparently transportation will become extremely expensive, possibly making the world of the future much more city-oriented / densely populated (ie people will not be spread out all over the place as much as nowadays). [source: oil 101]

- if transportation becomes extremely expensive, there may be a new move toward local manufacturing, or an ease of wage laws so that cheap labor can be brought in from abroad. idk, i'll need to think about this.

- education will become fun, extremely cheap, and of much more similar & higher quality for everyone. people will be learning via computer games.

- english will become even more prevalent in other countries (eg developing countries). this will result in more competition for jobs between americans and foreigners.

- people are going to be fully entering the workforce earlier, like age 12 or before; it's too wasteful to have people doing nothing until they're 21/22. competition from other countries will force people to educate themselves more efficiently.

- general prediction: things will become faster, easier, and less stressful

- it seems cameras and microphones are getting smaller, with better quality, and cheaper. it seems that in the future cameras will be placed in many more places and people may be more concerned about their privacy than they are now. i need to find that quote of someone famous saying that the next big wave was the reduction in price of detectors of all kinds (cameras, audio, etc.). I think it may have been that HLS professor...

Others' Predictions

• The Expanse (TV show)

Others' Advice on Predicting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurology

William Gibson
The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.

[Nathan: This is such a brilliant observation. For example, you can "travel into the past" by going to live with tribes in the Amazon. The question I'm immediately led to ask is, "How can we determine which innovations / variations are going to spread to the rest of the world and which will fizzle out?"]


Mark Cuban on predicting the future
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnLCEELm ... ed#t=6m11s
- Learn the technology that's out there; learn what it can do now and what it may be able to do in the near future
- Put yourself in the shoes of various businesses; how would you do things differently if you were in their shoes?
- Use the past as a source of analogies; for example, when evaluating whether businesses could use high-definition screens, Cuban acknowledged that they were currently very expensive ($10,000) but also saw that PCs had once been very expensive but had rapidly become cheap enough to become widely used.

How Predictions Go Wrong

Failing to Anticipate a Different Type of Solution to a Problem

Examples:
- Henry Ford's famous quote: "If you ask people what they want, they'll say 'a faster horse'." In other words, people often don't imagine a radically new way of doing things (eg using cars instead of horses).
- Peter Thiel's famous quote: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." And Andreesen (I think?) pointed out that the REASON people wanted flying cars was to get places faster, but in fact we were able to come up with a much better solution, which eliminates the need to travel in the first place. Our stuff is delivered to our door instead of us needing to go out to buy it. We can visit relatives via video calls instead of needing to physically go visit them.



Failing to Anticipate a Barrier

Failing to anticipate a barrier from a person/group that has an interest in that prediction not coming true

Examples:
- People anticipating a crisis after the '08 crash failed to anticipate that the US government would be able to prevent it.
- People backing Barack Obama in '08 expected a change in how government worked but failed to anticipate Republicans in Congress blocking every initiative.


Failing to anticipate a barrier in the laws of physics

Examples:
- Francis Bacon failed to anticipate that a law of physics would make it impossible to have machines of perpetual motion.
- Space movies / books (Star Trek, Star Wars, alien invasion movies) may have failed to anticipate that the laws of physics may make it impossible to travel across the universe very quickly.
- Back to the Future II failed to anticipate that the laws of physics may make antigravity impossible (hoverboards, hovercars)


Failing to anticipate a cost-benefit barrier (where the cost of developing / using an invention is much higher than the benefit)

Examples:
- Woz: "We thought computers were going to be used for all these weird things--strange geeky things like controlling the lights in your house--and that turned out not to be the case." Nathan: While this is starting to happen now (eg movement-detection lights at 1776), it isn't widespread because flipping a lightswitch often isn't such a high-cost activity that it is worth paying for computer-controlled lights.