There’s no shortage of confident futurists. Unfortunately, based on results, we’re not particularly good at predicting the future.
Why is Predicting the Future Important?
Predicting the future has become increasingly vital as the pace of change in human societies accelerates. Without accurate forecasts, the negative consequences of unforeseen challenges can escalate.
Some global trends offer optimism: Incomes are rising (despite persistent disparities), poverty is steadily declining, people are living longer, wars are fewer and shorter, and the gender gap in education and income is narrowing.
However, many global trends are deeply concerning: Climate disasters, aging populations, increasing pandemic outbreaks, and ongoing geopolitical instability paired with more lethal technologies are just a few of the alarming issues.
Four Reasons We’re Bad at Predicting the Future
1. Human Nature Is Resistant to Change
Despite our desire to believe we are rational beings making decisions based on facts and science, it turns out that people are primarily driven by emotions, not reason.
At first sight, history seems to provide evidence that people can change. For instance, in the United States, a restrictive form of democracy was adopted in 1787, slavery was abolished in 1866, and most women gained the right to vote in 1920. However, these societal changes remain controversial even today.
Many people still vote for blustering, deceptive demagogues rather than democratic candidates. Wage slavery and prison slavery persist. Right-wing commentators continue to question whether women should even have the right to vote.
As the saying goes, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”.
Pundits often focus on cultural changes, overestimating how people’s fundamental psychological and emotional responses to experiences and issues evolve over time.
2. Technology Changes Everything—Faster and Faster
Alan Kay once said, “Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.”
“We are enveloped by rapidly changing technology and we fixate on what is new. What was new quickly becomes taken for granted and largely invisible. As David Weinberger remarks: “Technology sinks below our consciousness like the eye blinks our brain filters out.”
Although technology in the form of human tools has existed for over three million years and we’ve had books for over half a millennium, the first history of technology wasn’t written until 1954.”
The invisibility of most technology and the escalating pace of innovations make it very difficult to predict how they will impact our lives.
Seth Godin illustrates this as follows:
“In a bad 1950s science fiction movie, you might see flying jetpacks, invisibility cloaks and ray guns.
What we got instead is a device that fits in our pocket. It allows us to connect to more than a billion people. It knows where we are and where we’re going. It has all of our contacts, the sum total of all published knowledge, an artificially intelligent computer that can understand and speak in our language, one of the best cameras ever developed, a video camera with editor, a universal translator and a system that can measure our heart rate. We can look up real time pricing and inventory data, listen to trained actors read us audiobooks and identify any song, any plant or any bird. We can see the reviews from our community of nearby restaurants or even the reputation of a doctor or lawyer. It can track the location of our loved ones and call us a chauffeured vehicle at the touch of a button.
And of course, we use it to have arguments. And to watch very short stupid videos.”
—Seth Godin, Living in the future
True, some people, like Isaac Asimov, have accurately predicted specific futures, but we tend to remember their successes and overlook the many incorrect predictions.
3. We Struggle to Predict the Speed of Change
Even when people successfully predict future developments, they rarely get the timing right.
happen.
Here are three examples:
Solar energy
In 1978, I started a solar manufacturing company, convinced that solar energy would become an important energy source. For five years we thrived building solar hot water heating systems, selling and installing them around New England. When Ronald Reagan became president he abolished the existing solar tax credits and the solar industry disappeared for twenty years.
In 2024, solar energy will provide about 4% of the electricity needs of the entire United States and is expected to supply an increasingly larger share.
We were right, but it took over forty years. Who knew it would take so long? No one!
Fusion power
Research into generating power from nuclear fusion reactions began in the 1940s. The goal of creating a sustained, net-power-producing fusion reactor has been around for fifty years, but fusion continues to remain “10, 20, or 30 years away”, depending on who you ask.
Meeting process
I have been designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation-rich conferences for over thirty years, and evangelizing the advantages of this approach since 2009. While the meeting industry is slowly realizing the importance of facilitating connection at events, traditional conferences still dominate. Whether my approaches will ever become mainstream remains uncertain.
There are many other examples
For example, predicting when the COVID pandemic will be over, the length and severity of wars, and the speed of acceptance of gay marriage in the United States come immediately to mind. You can doubtless think of more.
4. Technology Changes Our Lives in Unpredictable Ways
Futurists’ jobs are made even harder by what Kevin Kelly, in his thought-provoking book What Technology Wants, points out: The technology we create changes humans in ways that we couldn’t imagine.
As Winston Churchill put it:
“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
In the early 1990s, I was one of the first users of the commercial internet. I was an IT consultant at the time and my enthusiastic conviction that the internet would change everything fell on deaf ears. Several CEOs told me later they wished they’d listened to me. Seth Godin supplies examples above of how the internet has indeed changed everything in unexpected ways.
How many of the social impacts of cars were predicted when they began to be mass-produced a century ago?
Or the impacts of developments in religion, law, political systems, medicine, and education on our lives?
Can we predict the future?
In my opinion, anyone who confidently predicts the future is guilty of hubris. Unfortunately, that won’t stop people from trying.