Predicting the Future

A recurring theme in Kyle’s wiki about the difficulty of forecasting technology and the value of scoring old predictions against what actually happened. In What You Don’t Know About The Headphone Jack, Perell’s 2016 forecasts (driverless cars, VR headsets replacing daily video, cord-cutting toward streaming) become a prediction scorecard — Kyle’s hindsight grades land only one of three, illustrating how hard prediction is.

Where this appears

• What You Don’t Know About The Headphone Jack — the essay’s forward-looking forecasts used as a hindsight artifact for grading tech predictions.

From Roam

• The inevitable by Kevin Kelly
• WTF: What the future and why it’s up to us by Tim Oreilly
• The everything store
  • How are you going to avoid the narrative fallacy? We like things to fit in the narrative and make sense of the details
• Futureology?
• https://www.reddit.com/r/futureology/
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_science_fiction_themes
• [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional%5D(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)))
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction
• look at trends and remain unattached to the status quo
• long term thinking - how will things change with scale/network effects
• eBay failure - didn’t understand network effects
• unprofitably was fine because of scale
• went into anything internet-related (aws, tv content)
• Did Jeff Bezos actually predict the future or did he merely jump on an opportunity?
• The Everything Store paints Bezos as having early conversations with his employer about an online store that sells everything.
• How accurate is “The Everything Store”? - Did Brad Stone fall into the narrative fallacy?
• Many founding stories of companies have been repackaged to fit a narrative - like Stance Socks and potentially the milkshake “jobs to be done” story.
• Potential Topics
• cryptocurrency
• Political direction - will America always be a democracy? If not what will be different about our political structure.
• AI
• Retail
• picking the right race vs the right horse
• Investment in the idea of search engines is different than picking the correct “horse” Yahoo was a great short-term investment but not in the long run.
• Where to look is the first question.
• Clayton Christianson when looking to start an investment firm based on a theory of innovative disruption started by asking which industries are historically entrenched/uninnovative?
• Find topics to debate about the future by looking at what VCs are looking at and trying to find trends.
• Could our democracy fall apart? if so how would we replace it?
• Look at changes in social society - what happens if we start organizing society differently?
• Book: Too like the lightning by Adam Palmer - children grouped/raised by attributes
• It would be interesting to look at changes other than technology.
• Will human nature remain constant? Will societal structures remain constant?
• Societies have already changed from agriculture to information based - what’s next?
• Stuff to look up
• [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional%5D(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)))
• wtf what’s the future and why it’s up to us
• the inevitable kevin kelly
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/