Why technology forecasting goes wrong

Lovely set of pieces in Slate on the Future of the Future. One article in particular caught my eye, which is an analysis of 81 technology articles and press releases going back to the 1990s in which things are said about what will be true in 5-10 years. As the article points out, one especially common mistake is to confuse the invention of something with its widespread adoption and use.

The full set of articles can be found here.

The re-invention of public libraries

It’s funny. The moment someone declares something as dead, chances are that whatever it is (vinyl records, fountain pens, paper books, watches, dumb-phones, bespoke tailoring, cinema, polaroid cameras, postcards, beer, butter, cider, cycling, Russia …) it reappears, often with renewed vim and vigour. I think public libraries are a good example.

Excellent article on this subject from the Guardian newspaper (thanks Corrina over in Sydney).

Future Predictions for 2050 (or before, but who can say?)

Here’s a list of some of the entries I removed from my final Mega trends & Technologies map for a variety of reasons.

Gyroscopic inertial thrust engines (reactionless drive)
Electrification of Africa
Rise of Christianity in East Asia
Cascades of rage
Search for novelty
Crisis of meaning
Growth of transgender agenda
Fake news
Peak soil
Growth of women in work & education
Identity chips implanted at birth
A company less than a year old with a billion users
Energy bills bundled with other services
Apple launches the iCar
Use of Marmite to soothe Middle Eastern conflict (de Bono)
Shopping ‘bots that negotiate price with retailers.
Five dimensional memory glass for data storage
Lighter than air solids
Companies fined for having fat workers
Body hacking for sensory augmentation
Internet-connected toothbrushes
Internet connected animals
Neuromorphic computing
Cloud seeding using lasers
Emphasis on self-reliance
Tech-free work spaces
Neurologically driven vehicles
Routine manipulation of embryos in vitro
Markets not fully factoring in debt
Home-based healthcare
Glacier farming
Lab grown meat in supermarkets
Longevity resorts/hotels
EU disintegration (trust me, when not if)
Rise of the vegetarians
Polarisation between snacking and social eating
Longevity foods
Price point polarisation
Real-time car insurance (by the minute/mile)
Floating data dashboards
Backdating of vehicles (to make them look old)
Most vehicles electric in some form
Growth of new transport corridors
Sunscreen pills
Preemptive interventions based on genome
Memory pills
Male birth control pills
Search for intrinsic value
Growth of criminal economy
Low growth era
Real-time tax payments (no annual tax returns)
Micro-scale energy harvesting
Increasing self-absorption
Everyone has an online reputation score
Growth of urban mega-regions
Open banking
Digital only banks
Popularity of colour pink (denial)
Popularity of colour silver (protection)
Fragmentation of national identities
Renaissance of craft
Declining urban air quality
Rise of the 4th Reich (I know! This belongs to a friend of mine).
Financial globalisation
Crop pollination robots
Fully autonomous battlefield robots
Warfare merges with gaming
Rise of non-Western art
Clean slate digital identities
Full immersion VR suits
Artificial kidneys
Apple becomes first trillion-dollar company
Dream imaging and recording via fMRI
US energy independence
Ability to locate anything anywhere anytime
Libraries of human emotions
Mass sentimentalism
Pollution absorbing paint
Rising importance of food and water security
Disenfranchisement of men
Children growing up too fast
Adults behaving like children
People regularly living to 100-years-of-age
Growth of air filtering & quality monitoring
Fully autonomous farms
Virtual drugs
People as pets (employees kept on for legal reasons only)
Voting via mobile devices
White smells
Glucose-measuring contact lenses
Printable batteries
Re-emergence of European fascism
Fully biodegradable mobile phones/electronic devices
App chemistry
Digital (downloadable) smells
Epidermal electronics
Glasses that interpret human emotions
Tension between privacy & personalisation
The human race splits between the organic and the enhanced

Map of Global Mega Trends

Here you go then. Use this link to get to a high resolution version. A3, A1 and rather wonderful AO sized copies on paper are available upon request (no charge except for print, post and a cardbaord tube). See you in the future.

Map

So here is a little background and commentary to my 2017 Mega Trends & Technologies map. This map began as an idea way back in 2015, but it wasn’t until early 2016 that I started to draw various outlines of what the map might look like.Eventually I settled on a look based on an earlier map I created in 2010. The initial thinking was very much about what the individual lines might represent and then obviously what to put on the lines and in particular the connection points (which took ages).

The mega trends were the first thing to get worked out. I had a gut feel about this already, but researched various publications to extend my thinking. These sources included work done by the MOD GST folks (Global Strategic Trends to 2040), the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) report on 2030, the OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2016, Shell Scenarios and various reports by PWC, EY, KPMG and McKinsey. The main mega trends (about ten) broadly link with the mega trends contained within these reports, although I added a quite a few of my own to stir things up.

The final list of mega trends on the map (31 of them) are thus: population growth, urbanisation, rise of Africa, automation, globalisation, Easternisation, localisation (the same size as globalisation quite deliberately), climate change, falling fertility, societal ageing, competition for resources, growth of the global middle class, rising inequality, tribalism, ambiguity, individualism, volatility, complexity, personalisation, too much information, convenience, virtualisation, debt, connectivity, acceleration of change, uncertainty, desire for permanence, decline of trust, anxiety, simplicity, and digital self-actualisation.

I had a big think about what should be in the middle of the map. In the end it was a connectivity, closely aligned with globalisation, acceleration of change, anxiety and volatility. Individualism was almost in the centre, but I had a long debate with myself about whether this was quite the right word. The NIC has Individual Empowerment as a mega trend, and this was tempting, as was Solipsism. In the end it was just plain individualism.

The lines radiating into or out of the centre (depending on how you read it) ended up being fairly familiar. They are society, work, economy, money, food, technology, retail, environment, media, transport, politics, energy, education, health, security and values. That last one was a last minute addition. Originally it was religion, then it became death (!) and then identity. I would have liked more time on this and may extend the line in any future versions.

The icons on the map are ‘mega trends’, ‘now’ (which means a current trend) and ‘next’ (meaning a future idea, innovation, event or trend). I also added ‘counter-trends’, ‘partial ruins’ (things that are dying out or in a state of decay), ‘dangerous currents’ and ‘places of interest’. Broadly ‘now’ (call it 2017-2020) is in the middle of the map and the future (‘next’) radiates outwards. All of the entries are serious and there’s a solid argument behind each and every one, but some are also intended to provoke, For example, the idea of wearables that display the predicted death date of the user is simply an extension of what’s going on now with a bit of gamification and exaggeration thrown in.

At the bottom of the map there are a series of global game changers. These are broadly mega risks (x-risks) and by their nature rather negative. It would be interesting to do the map again and have this section about hugely impactful positive events, but that’s really quite hard to think of that many (like trying to think of utopian rather than dystopian sci-fi). BTW, I had ‘Donald Trump really is President’ as a global risk in this section ages ago, but obviously had to take him off when this really happened! (See image).

So what’s the map for? It’s really just what’s in my head right now (May 2017). Hopefully it will spark some debate and make people think, especially about where we, as a world, might be heading. If you like the map you might enjoy a couple of other important sources, namely two of my books Future Files and especially Digital Vs. Human. Thank you for reading.

PS – There’s a lovely mistake on the map that I might just keep on. I added Cult of Artificial Stupidity as a place of interest – but I added it twice.

Finally (but probably not) here’s a link to some of the things that never made it onto the map or were taken off (i.e. trends and future predictions)

Coming next week….

Still a few errors to remove. The mood modelling idea came from my book Digital Vs. Human

Mood recognition machines are especially interesting in this context. On a prosaic level, an ability to read an individual’s mood could be used to test products or personalise advertising. But you could also use such technology to judge the mood of a group, a corporation, or even an entire nation. On the positive side, governments might use real-time mood monitoring to increase general happiness. On the negative side, they could be tempted to identify dissatisfaction or opposition in real-time. What if, for instance, digital cameras with mood-recognition software were used to identify towns where opposition politicians were popular — and targeted them for elimination?