Worst and Best Predictions on Technology

prostoalex writes "Dow Jones News asked several mahor scientists and technologists about their worst and best predictions of the future. The story, republished at Yahoo! Finance Singapore quotes Lester Thurow, Professor of management and economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management; Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab; Glover Ferguson, Chief scientist, Accenture; Alan Nugent, Chief technology officer, Novell; Peter Cochrane, Director, ConceptLabs; Michael Earl, Dean, Templeton College, University of Oxford. There seems to be a common agreement on having overrated the ability of machines to talk back to users and vice versa."

Comments

Its Clarke's 1st Law

[InfoVore]

You are close. What you are refering to is known as Clarke's 1st Law. Arthur C. Clarke (scientist, futurist, and one of the great Science Fiction authors of all time) came up with 3 laws:

Clarke's 1st Law

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Clarke's 2nd Law

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

Clarke's 3rd Law

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.