Great quote the other day from someone in an audience: “I love listening to futurists, they are always interesting. And they are always wrong.” Fortunately this wasn’t about me. I was billing myself as a writer on this occasion but I take the point. Part of the problem is that futurists seem to believe in only one future. The one they have picked. Yesterday the future was rather bleak. Improbably bleak. But I don’t believe that there is ever one future.

The future is highly uncertain and therefore there must be more than one future. Moreover, we have the power to invent the future we want. As Barrack Obama said a few days ago” “We do not fear the future, we shape the future.” The other problem futurists seem to suffer from is that they get ahead of themselves. Quite often their ‘what’ is quite accurate but their ‘when” is usually way off. Their timing stinks and once again I think that’s because they assume a singular future. They assume, for example, that all newspapers will be e-papers in the future or that all music will be digital. But the word rarely works like that. It’s a marginal world out there and hardly anything is ever 100%. More often than not more than one proposition is true and it can take a very long time indeed — half a generation or more — for one idea to replace another.