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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."
Make a subject where the users can enter their predictions about the future - then we return in ten years and check it out :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I wish the article had presented a bit more background on these guys predictions than "Here's the worst, here's the best, here's the current". That really doesn't let me gauge whether these guys are making good predictions or not.
/.? For the past week I've had a timeout on about 1 in three connections to /., both from work and from home.
Consider Slashdot posts: You might say that my highest rated post is 5, my lowest -1, and my most recent is 3. But, does that give you any real feel for whether you want to read my posts? Now, if you said that my mean post value was 3.5, my mode was 4, and that only 10% of my posts are rated less than 2 (NOTE: all figures are made up - I don't keep that close track on my moderations) then you might be able to judge better.
Simillarly, when judging someone's ability to predict where things are going, I'd like to know what their ratio of hits to misses are. If somebody is right no more often than they are wrong, then I can weight their prediction accordingly.
That's one of the problems I had with Tomorrowland at Disney - it's nothing but a bunch of predictions from the past. I'd rather they have done a "Yesterday's Tomorrow" - for every decade show what people thought the future was going to look like, along with a reality check. Show the things they got wrong (flying cars), the things they got right (television), and the things they completely missed (computers).
OT: is anybody else having problems getting to
www.eFax.com are spammers
Thurow is an economist, not a scientist or engineer, which is why his predictions about biotech are particularly bad. The science is on the edge of a lot of new understanding and breakthroughs, but that will only put us up against the really interesting and hard problems. As if we would be able to find genes that more or less directly influence something as subtle as IQ.
I find the predictions about the future importance of web services and the junk about "insight" to be particularly inane. On the first, nobody should forget that GM and Ford are still about the only companies that represent a percentage of the U.S. economy. Manufacture of physical goods (and commodities production, etc.) will continue to be the drivers of economies.
In my opinion, the most important trend is a favorite of this forum. The growth factors that have been working for Free software are fundamentally exponential, even if the constant factor is small. If it isn't killed off by legal/social influence of current big players, and I don't think this is likely if it is even possible, then the exponential term will eventually dominate.
When this plays out, the companies that make their reputations by being the best at efficiently building and servicing products that are mostly designed in the "Creative Commons". People will pay for quality in goods and services, and there will always be value in good execution. Customers do not value "insight" as described in one prediction. They find this sort of thing invasive and manipulative, and you won't be able to keep it secret.
It was when I was chasing down some secondary links from the GNUradio interview that I came across the stuff about the value of a network increasing at greater than linear rates. You get O(N) for broadcast networks, O(N^2) in peer to peer networks, but the exponential (O(2^N)) comes in when you have group forming networks (GFN).
When you think about it, this is what drives the GPL software phenominon. Every project fork or new initiative forms a new group or groups in the network, and every project is a nucleus for new group formation. The only way this could be stopped is to destroy to possibility of the group forming that leads to the exponential growth. While this might be possible, our robust institutions that support free speech make this very difficult if not impossible.
So my prediction is that Linux on the desktop will overtake Windows in the next ten years, and the RIAa and MPAA will finally lose out to the best interests of the actual artists they claim to support. Also, derivitives of GNUradio will be core technology in establishing cooperative wireless mesh networks. This is the only prediction of any of the pundits in the article that will come true.