Prediction is hard…
…especially about the future. (Usually attributed to Niels Bohr)
I’m at the first conference of the Center for Responsible Technology, and while we’re waiting to kick off, there are slides playing of failed predictions from the past. Today’s favorite:
Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons - Popular Mechanics, 1949.
Others: in 1901, Wilbur Wright told his brother that man-made flight would not be possible for another 50 years; Science Digest thought in 1948 that it would take another 200 years to land on the moon; some others stressing that when we think something’s impossible we’re usually wrong.
The slide needs another entry: AI founder John McCarthy told me that when he convened the original Dartmouth conference they thought they’d have artificial intelligence wrapped up on about six months.
wg
September 10th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
It’s also often attributed to Yogi Berra in the early 60s. Tomorrow I’m going to see a presentation (by BCS) about IT in 2057… I certainly hope I’m around to see how their predictions turn out.
That’s the secret of predicting the future. Don’t do the short range stuff.
September 10th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
I suspect Berra of popular theft.
The other problem about predicting the future is that the predictions so often display the prejudices of the person/society making them. eg, Vannevar Bush foresaw something very like the WEb, but thought of its as a personal, not interconnected, library on *microfilm*, which people would collect by wearing still cameras on their heads. Or Ian Pearson, whose predictions seem to include ideas about women that seem to me socially well out-of-date (or that should be).
IN many ways, short-range is easier - you can extrapolate from stuff you already know is going on. Long-range is harder because small errors in the near future add up to huge ones further out.
wg
September 10th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
I think of sci-fi writers ranging from Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov in the old days (my days) to Gibson, Stevenson and Richard Morgan these days and think that a lot of good futurology came out of those minds. And I think that the social predictions of Ursula K. LeGuin was pretty prophetic as well. It’s harder nowadays–reality is moving so quickly that sci-fi writers have a tough time keeping up.
September 10th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
What I find really interesting is changes in past predictions of the future, e.g. what people thought we’d be doing in 2000 in 1950 vs. 1970 vs. 1990. For example, we may not all be wearing Dan Dare two-way TV watches but most people these days do carry a mobile phone. We don’t drive hovercars, holiday on the moon, nor do we eat pills instead of meals - or at least not all of us do, most of the time! With hindsight, it seems pretty obvious why this is the case but has this made us more cautious in our predictions, or even a bit wiser?
Nanotech is another one of those things that threatens scary world-ending scenarios - grey goo instead of nuclear war - and various flavours of utopia - e.g. the level of direct control over matter implied in Iain M. Banks’ ‘Culture’ novels - but that may end up (in the short-to-medium term at least) providing the mundane requirements - e.g. large quantities of very pure substances - essential to truly disruptive technologies - e.g. room temperature superconductors. There are in any case much greater economic/social drivers for the latter than intelligent nanobots or bush robot universal constructors - which, despite being much cooler, are also much more tricky to pull off.
And if we haven’t done something major to sort out energy, then things are likely to get really messy well before 2057…
I’m glad that there is at least something called the Center for Responsible Technology working in this area, but am somewhat dubious as to how successful it will be. There’ll always be someone pushing the envelope in the name of ‘pure science’. It’s the mad scientist who wants to rule the world (or run the internet) that you *really* have to look out for!
I reckon the best way to predict the future is actually to look at human beings, not technology. The best and worst will come from what we’re willing to do to/for each other. New means will always present themselves - often unpredictably. For my money, one of the beat far futurologists is Freeman Dyson (he of the Dyson sphere, offering - at levels of tech wa-a-ay beyond us - not only a way to dig yourself out of the mother of all energy crises, but maybe a way to detect distant civilisations right now…)
[Tom, please do post about the BCS thing. ‘IT in 2057′ should be good for a laugh at least.]
September 10th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
I’d like to hear about the BCS thing, too.
As for CRN, they’re trying to look into the future and see the problems ahead. Not really about grey goo at all - more about legal and policy challenges. MOre in next post.
wg