How To Predict The Future

Author: Brad Feld URL: https://feld.com/archives/2012/06/how-to-predict-the-future/ One-line: Forecast the timing of non-linear technology disruptions by projecting the smooth, linear hardware trend underneath them — and look at the hardware, not the software.

Highlights

Verbatim excerpts Kyle captured, in source order.

• William Hertling, author of the award-winning Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears and A.I. Apocalypse, near-term science-fiction novels about realistic ways strong AI might emerge
• Pretty much everyone would like a sure-fire way to predict the future. Maybe you’re thinking about startups to invest in, or making decisions about where to place resources in your company. Maybe you just care about what things will be like in 10, 20, or 30 years.
• Without really understanding the concept, it turns out that what I was doing was using linear trends (advancements that proceed smoothly over time), to predict the timing of non-linear events (technology disruptions) by calculating when the underlying hardware would enable a breakthrough. This is what I mean by “forget about trying to predict advancements in software and just look at the hardware trend”.
• I don’t disagree, but the world is a big place full of talented people. Open source and crowdsourcing principles are well understood: When you get enough talented people working on a problem, especially in an open way, progress comes quickly.
• Wikipedia was a tremendous invention in the process of knowledge curation, and it was dependent, in turn, on the invention of wikis. But it’s hard to say, even with hindsight, that we could have predicted Wikipedia, let alone forecast when it would occur.
• A common objection is that linear trends won’t continue to increase exponentially because we’ll run into a fundamental limitation: e.g. for computer processing speeds, we’ll run into the manufacturing limits for silicon, or the heat dissipation limit, or the signal propagation limit, etc.
• There are two ways I like to use this technique. The first is as a seed for brainstorming. By projecting out linear trends and having a solid understanding of where technology is going, it frees up creativity to generate ideas about what could happen with that technology.
• What OS will they run? From what app store will I get my neural apps? Who will sell the advertising space in our brains? What else can we do with uber-powerful computers about the size of a penny?
• Calculate the annual increase in a technology trend, forecast the linear trend out, and then map future disruptions to the trend.
• Not everything in life is subject to exponential improvements.
• But it’s necessary to distinguish genuine hard limits (e.g. amount of land left to be settled) from the appearance of limits (e.g. manufacturing limits for computer processors).

How it connects

• Brad Feld — author.
• Forecasting — the article’s core method: linear trends to time non-linear events.
• Historical Futurism — predicting the shape and timing of future technology.
• William Hertling — sci-fi novelist whose near-term AI fiction prompts the piece.