Why We Suck at Predicting the Future

[Cross-posted from Numinous Nonsense]

Never is about 18 months long. - Buff Duff

Duff and I were discussing various trends yesterday while hanging out at “the office.” At that point he mentioned how in the past he had routinely thought things would not happen (such as his adoption of cellular technology or the wide adoption of wi-fi), and that he had routinely been wrong (by about 18 months). In other words, he would say, “Wireless technology will never be widespread” and around 18 months or so later it had become just that.

Ray Kurzweil, who I mention incessantly, has a helpful distinction when it comes to most trends (at least those related to information growth) that explains the common person’s inability to accurately grasp future possibilities.

Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the “intuitive linear” view of history rather than the “historical exponential” view. My models show that we are doubling the paradigm-shift rate every decade … we won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measure by today’s rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century

One who has adopted the intuitive linear model will likely assume—knowingly or unknowingly—that the next x number of years (in terms of the rate of progress) will look like the last x number of years. Someone using the historical exponential view rather then simply making that blanket assumption actually looks at the historical data and notices mathematical trends. From this foundation one can then make much more accurate assumption about future trends. Because, as Kurzweil points out information technology trends are exponential, so we can expect the next 5 years to be exponentially different then the last 5 years. This of course is why, as Duff rightly pointed out, never is about 18 months long. And that holds true even for those of us who are well informed but still operating from an intuitive linear model of the future.