This blog entry from Walter Derzko is very interesting because I have always believed that nobody - not even the best in their fields - can predict the future with 100% accuracy. Nobody, for example, saw the coming of age of MySpace, Facebook and Twitter - and how Google could monetize their services. My belief is that we cannot foresee the future - but by observing what is happening now and why and how these things are happening, evolving, and expanding, we could catch a glimpse of what may and could be in the future. The driving forces behind such shifts are far more important than the actual technology that will empower these shifts.
Mr. Derzko summarizes some of the common sources of errors that we (and including me) are guilt of when we look at new technology. Below are his takes on the common errors that cloud our judgment when we look at new technologies (and I quote verbatim from his blog):
- The early hype error. In the stort term, marketers, promoters and eager inventors seem to overestimate the impacts of any new technology and in the long term underestimate such impacts and consequences (see the Gartner Hype curves)
- The replacement hype error - the belief that new technology will replace the existing incumbent technology & that this will happen relatively fast. In reality competing technologies often coexist over a long period of time (i.e. Radio & TV)
- The enhancement error-The belief that new technology will only solve old problems & supplement existing technological systems. Instead new technologies, especially platform or core technologies often lay the groundwork for entirely new systems and new resulting systemic problems. (ie the electric motor for the railway, the car for the roadway infrastructure, the PC for the Internet, nanotech & biotech for our bodies "intra-structure" (the Human Genome project, the HapMap & SNP's), the impacts of which we do not fully understand yet.
- The panacea error-The mistaken belief that new technology will function as a panacea for various social problems
- The patterning and sense-making error-The difficulty of seeing new important links between seemingly unrelated and different fields of technology, especially in cases where this novel combination of fields is precisely what will offer major accelerated development opportunities
- The social impacts error-Often people who have tried to predict the future have become bogged down in the actual technology and neglected the economic and social aspects.
- The prisoners of our times error-That without realizing it, people tend to be prisoners of the spirit of their times ( Zeitgeist), erroneously believing that the big issues of today will also be the big issues of tomorrow
- The decision criteria error-The belief that only rational economic considerations are the only factors behind that choice of one technology over another. However, for many people, seemingly irrational considerations determine such choices
- The information gap error-The information on which science and technology (S&T) foresight studies are based on is often insufficient. Technology development is not linear, transparent or fully predictable, with surprise development coming out of left field such as the secret work that is done in the military or a new startup working in stealth mode before it goes public with a breakthrough. Entrepreneurs have to deal with many unknowns -complexity, uncertainty, equivocality, ambiguity, the trap of dichotomous thinking or dichotomy, contradiction or paradox and infoglut.
I think anyone and everyone who is interested in what's going to happen in the future should take heed.
