Predicting the future is hard. I suck at it. However, I suck less at it than damn near everyone else I encounter IRL or on the interwebs. Rare indeed is the week that goes by without someone making the most common mistake I see made when those trapped in the now try their hands at futurism.
That mistake is pretty much unavoidable for those without infinite amounts of time and memory but, envisioning potential future realities as a spectrum rather than an event might help but at some level the mistake is (apparently) unavoidable. The mistake of which I speak is to pick a predicted product, service or event and envision it in the current social, cultural and technological idiom.
An obvious example of this mistake is displayed every time the subject of self-driving vehicles comes up. Those in the discussion invariably talk about all those folk (usually including themselves) who will never give up the control and freedom of owning and manually operating their own vehicle. I get that. I've been a gearhead for a long time. I like driving a car and riding a motorcycle. But I also understand various aspects of capitalism. So I point out that once the insurance companies understand they will pay out less if the cars drive themselves - and they are already collecting that empirical data - insurance costs will put legally operating your own vehicle on public streets out of reach for most of us. Essentially, the insurance companies will change the economic paradigm which will lead to changes in the cultural paradigm.
It was also commonly made in discussion about electric vehicles. When I point out that there were no gas stations in existence anywhere in the world when the Model T hit the market, the claims that we do not have the necessary infrastructure to "refuel" EVs the way we can internal combustion vehicles are shown to be ridiculous on their face.
A less obvious mistake has roots in the inability of folk to understand/visualize exponential growth. A particularly vexing example of this can be seen in the commentary of those who were suspicious of the COVID vaccine(s) because they were developed so fast. So even though there have been major advances in computers and more, "they" believe that vaccine development should take just as long as it did when the research was being written out longhand in candle light. That the development was happening in a rapidly changing technological paradigm is ignored because apparently, "winning" the argument is more important than being correct or being healthy.
The truth of the matter is that there have been huge advances in computing, physics, chemistry, biology and medicine. AI that was delivering inexplicable and unreliable results a year ago is being used in mission critical applications now. Essentially the entire technological paradigm has changed but those who choose to be in denial refuse to even try to consider all the other changes. "They" stupidly compare the speed of a specific event like COVID vaccine development to the development time for vaccines before we even had computers in common usage let alone the internet and AI and genomic research.
All of this lack of understanding is generally promulgated with uninformed statements about when the technology will be ready for mass consumption. We hear that in a decade or two the tech will be ready. I have heard that we are 50 years from trucks driving themselves even though they are already operating on the roads.
Everybody and everything exists within a given context. Even though we are frequently told that "change is the only constant in the Universe", we act as though the context is not dynamic at all. The actuality is that the rate of change is increasing in every hard science area of study. If you want to be a better futurist, you must understand that the change is happening all around. Telescopes and microscopes, particle colliders and tokamaks, battery tech and solar panels, computer memory and throughput speeds, battery chemistry and pharmaceutical development, all of that and more are changing far more rapidly than most of us seem to be aware of. The technological paradigm is constantly shifting and advancing. The tech paradigm induces changes in the social and cultural paradigms. Whatever happens tomorrow or next week needs to be considered in the current paradigm or the probable future paradigm rather than any past paradigm if the analysis is to mean anything at all.
We desperately need leadership that understands the nature of change. While the nuts and bolts of politics may be as they were 20+ years ago, the issues politics are addressing are in a state of accelerating change. I'm not an ageist, I swear I'm not. But a 75+ year old that cannot set the time on their microwave may not be the best choice to make the rules that will govern various technologies. We must either do better or we will watch the rest of the world leave us behind.
