Bad predictions cost us in wasted investment and careers.  If we look at the pattern of bad predictions we can perhaps see how to do better.  (source:  Herb Brody, "Great Expectations: Why Technological Predictions Go Awry" Albert H. Teich, Technology and the Future, sixth edition (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993).)

• The people who are hoping to profit from a new technology often make the most misleading predictions.  They necessarily want to promote what they are doing, but repeatedly claiming a breakthrough when the problems of commercialization are not yet solved is probably harmful even for them in the long run.  Eg. high-temperature superconductors, nuclear fusion.
• Even if the technology works (eg. robots) people may not want to buy it.  Who do you ask--the vendors?  Obviously biassed.  But consumers, even businesses buying factory equipment, may be biassed too because they don't realize how attitudes towards the technology will shift (eg. fax machine).
• it also depends on how you use the technology--in 1991 Brody is writing about cd-roms vs. bigger hard disks, but the cd-rom finally has taken off in areas with a great emphasis on graphics.
• can existing technologies improve to compete with new technologies?--eg. cameras that store images in digital form vs. improvements in silver-halide film.
• consumers are unwilling to spend money on small improvements, particularly if they seem inconvenient.  You also need the whole system, such as stores to rent videotapes or videodisks.
• truly innovative technologies often take 10 to 25 years to enter widespread use.  
  Brody's 1991 list of popular predictions: neural-network computers, shirt-pocket telephones, hypermedia, computer-generated virtual realities, intelligent highway systems .

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Futurist Architecture

Other issues:

 

• Predictions: MIT's 1991 Predictions for 2020 or Future Predictions, Forecasts, and Speculations for the Coming Third Millennium , Medical predictions for 2020
  
• Bill Joy (chief scientist at Sun Microsystems), Why the Future Doesn't Need Us
•   Past Bad Predictions eg. "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." --Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943, more past predictions.
  

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• The goal is to persuade people to believe the prediction and take some action (eg. buy my product)
• a prediction (or forecast) can be a self-fulfilling prophecy--convince people that something is going to happen and it will
  
•  Are people yet convinced enough about the predictions of global warming to take some action? (eg. pass laws to limit carbon dioxide emissions)

• In the 1970s a Harvard professor predicted the weather more accurately than the weather bureau simply by predicting each day that the weather would be the same as the day before.
• Problem is, when things follow a trend that isn't very interesting--what is useful but much harder to do is predicting when the trend will change
• hardest is when a radically new way of using a technology comes along, such as the radical shift to the personal computer
• people in big companies often miss new possibilities, it is outsiders who come up with something really new
  

• increasing ease of use
  • the first computers were extremely difficult to use--programmed with wires and switches
    
  • higher level programing languages
  • applications
  • point and click
  • voice recognition or figuring out what someone is trying to do?
• hardware becomes smaller, cheaper, and more capable (Moore's Law : the number of transistors that can be fit on a chip doubles every 18 months, with the result that the speed of computers doubles or the price drops by half  (Moore's Law Illustrated) .)
  • semiconductors
  • integrated circuits
  • new forms of memory storage
  • how far can this trend go?
• development of new ways for computers to handle information
  • calculations
  • data bases
  • hypertext
  • search engines--Google
    
  • some better way of organizing information? Search Engine Watch
• interconnection
  • ARPANET
  • the internet connects universities
  • wide public access to the internet
  • integration of telephone, television, and internet (sometimes called telematics)

• 1970 Tama New Town (Japan) experiment--this was a new development of apartment buildings outside of Tokyo which was provided with facimile mail, interactive computer classrooms, community produced programing
• 1972 HBO is the first extra-charge cable channel
• 1976 CeeFax --a British system to make information available via television
• 1977 Qube , experimental 2-way interactive cable television installed in 30,000 homes in Columbus, Ohio.  Eventually the project was declared a failure and shut down in 1983.
• 1987 Minitel (France)--eliminate the phone book and give everyone a terminal.  Goal--to made the public more comfortable with computers.  To the surprise of the government telephone company it was quickly used mostly for chat.  more on Minitel
• 1979 Prestel (England)--data base maintained by the post office and available via phone lines, anyone could enter data for a fee.  It became an internet service provider and then closed.
• these experiments have been slow to spread--why?
• interactive television is one of those technologies that doesn't yet have its killer ap (the application of a technology that convinces people to buy it)

What might computers do for us in the future?  Would you want to:

• do a degree entirely via internet (see for example Online Courses )?
• Eliminate cash ( the future of money ,  Cashless Society )?
• have access to e-mail wherever you are? Wearable Computers , image
• vote directly on issues?  See Electronic Democracy .

 more cartoons

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Some feasible technologies don't catch on:

picture phone at 1964 World's Fair

• in the 1960s and 1970s AT&T (which then had a telephone monopoly in the U.S.) thought that picture telephones would be the next big thing.  Consumers weren't interested.
• the supersonic transport (commercial airplanes going faster than the speed of sound) hasn't been successful--the U.S. decided not to build on and the French-English Concorde is now out of use

Even successful major innovations can be very slow to catch on--Nye gives as examples the telegraph, telephone, phonograph and personal computer

The best technology doesn't always win--the classic example of this is Betamax

• when VCRs were first introduced there were two competing tape formats, Betamax and VHS
• Betamax is generally considered to have been technologically superior, though some disagree
• Sony didn't license its Betamax system to other manufacturers
• as a result VHS won out and Betamax disappeared

"Far from being deterministic, techologies are unpredictable."