Not A Blog™

On September 24, 2006, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a survey they conducted of 700 futurists and industry experts asking them to predict where future technology was headed. It has been condensed into a summary PDF which, I assume, is freely distributable. For ease acquisition, I have hosted it locally, here. Read it if you’re so inclined, however I pulled the relevant quotes out of context here in this article.

What caught my eye was the comparison to science fiction. Essentially the claim was that “futurists think the future will be like science fiction” which is, for lack of a stronger word, absurd. In fact, the entire study is at best useless and at worst, a waste of time. But it’s kind of funny in a ranting-about-it sort of way, so I hope it is at least not a complete waste of time. Just be sure to go do something productive afterwards, so it will balance out your temporal squander.

The first thing that jumps out is almost exactly the same thing I was busting on in my article on predictive markets. They gave the experts (a word which should probably be in sneer quotes) a series of scenarios and asked them whether they agreed or disagreed. Problems? Many.

1) Who’s making up these scenarios, anyway? Aside from whether or not they could be considered qualified to do so, it leads to the following question: were they science fiction readers? If so, no wonder “futurists predict the future will be like science fiction”! It’s not like the surveyees had any choice; the worst they could do is disagree. But just disagreeing with everything on the table doesn’t convey any information about what you might actually think. It just means you don’t think these particular things, which tells no one anything useful.

2) The biggest split between on any one scenario is a whopping 58% agree, 38% disagree. Most of the agree/disagrees were within ten percentage points of each other. Evenly split, in other words. Again, this tells us nothing! It’s just telling us what people think about events which have been picked for consideration by a random collection of people united under a pretentious title. The same arguments apply: what about stuff you can’t imagine because it hasn’t been invented yet? Evidence of this is anywhere you care to look. Like Star Trek. This show is supposed to be hundreds of years in the future, but they’re all carrying around kludgy blinking things which make the bulkiest PDA ever built look stylishly thin.

3) There’s an overabundance of weasel words. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I use weasel words. However, I’m also not publishing my work as anything remotely authoritative. (Perhaps I should start.) If you’re advertising yourself as an organization which studies and reports on internet trends, you should probably be making an effort to avoid ambiguity.

For example, one of the scenarios talks about transparency and says, in part:

Transparency builds a better world, even at the expense of privacy: as sensing, storage, and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals’ public and private lives will become increasingly “transparent” globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. [….]

Good AND bad results? No! Everyone knows only bad results could come from such an action. Give me a break. Of course there’s going to be good and bad results. In fairness, the scenario goes on to say that the good will outweigh the bad, so at least you had something to agree or disagree on, but even so, why even bother mentioning things will have good and bad results? That’s, basically, the definition of life.

And then there’s the statement “Transparency builds a better world, even at the expense of privacy”. Even at the expense of privacy? Yeah, no kidding Sherlock. You can’t have both more transparency and more privacy. They’re opposites.

Then there’s:

Respondents say building network capacity and technological knowledge should be top priority.

No, I think what you meant to say, Pew Internet, was “Respondents say building network capacity and technological knowledge should be top priority out of the four choices provided.” The choices are of a narrow scope. For example, no one suggested that maybe we should use funding to educate internet users on how their usage of the internet affects the economy. Maybe that’s a good idea, maybe it’s not. Either way, it doesn’t matter because it wasn’t a choice! What about building redundancy into the network rather then building current capacity? No one knows what the tech gurus think about this! It wasn’t a choice!

Ah, but the best part of the whole study is the “revealing quotations” and “predictions” to answers “that were submitted to open-ended questions in the survey.” (Note: those weren’t sneer quotes, that was actually they wording used in the report. But it sure looks funny and serves to insult their position, doesn’t it? Objective accomplished.) These are unbelievably non-insightful.

There is a strong likelihood that virtual reality will become less virtual and more reality for many.

What? What does this even mean? Is Barry Chudakov, principal of The Chudakov Company—to whom this quote is attributed—saying that “virtual reality” will become more affordable and ubiquitous to everyone, or is he saying that virtual reality will become more realistic in its presentation? If it’s the former, that’s an awfully obtuse way of saying what you’re trying to convey. But if it’s the latter, then he’s just an idiot. If it’s not reality, it’s virtual reality by definition. It doesn’t matter how potentially real it could become. If it’s a computer simulation, it’s virtual reality.

Before 2020, every newborn child in industrialized countries will be implanted with an RFID or similar chip.

I’m going to go ahead an call no on this one. Maybe a country will mandate this. But all industrialized countries? And ten years? Not going to happen.

Profit motives will impede data flow

—the hell!? What kind of prediction is this? It’s happening now. This is not a prediction; this is belaboring the obvious.

There will be a bigger push for […] international cooperation.

I’m fairly certain this has been happening since the beginning of civilization. This makes it somewhat broad for a prediction, methinks.

But what really bring the lunacy of this report into sharp relief is the same sort of report done fifteen years ago. This sort of “foretelling the future” has been going on since the future and conscious awareness existed simultaneously, which is to say: as long as humans have been around. (Which is why saying this is part 8 trillion may actually be a tad conservative.)

How many of you remember the laughable phrase “the information superhighway”. This was the buzzword of the early nineties and sounds today like, well, a dumb buzzword from the early nineties. Incidentally, “buzzword” was also a dumb buzzword from the early nineties, so I’ll stop using it. And I’ll stop digressing. What I mean to say is, in the nineties the internet was imagined to be a literal giant highway—and the overextended metaphors borne of this notion are, to say the least, completely ridiculous. Examples? Naturally. [From Imagining the Internet]

With public-access Internet sites, anyone with a personal computer and a modem can become an Internet user. This is the equivalent of being able to buy an automobile and go driving without having to take a driver’s education course, pass a test or become licensed…

Of course the internet is nothing like this at all, but since everyone imagined the internet as a highway, oh sure: it was an easy explanation for the ignorant layman.

And then there’s this gem from 1995:

Here’s what I think—you’ll go online, nothing really interesting will happen for one or two years, and you’ll write off interactivity as a failure.

Ah, instant classic.

Okay, I think you all get the point by now. The thing to take away from all this prediction stuff is the following:

It’s all wrong.

I don’t care how expert your experts are, when it comes to the future, everybody is wrong always. It never goes where anyone thinks it will. In this case, I think the study could actually be more harmful than helpful because you’re going to end up with people who think—by virtue of the fact that the study contained “experts” and was put out by an “apparently respectable organization” who does “research” that there’s something to it. There’s nothing to it. The only thing these sorts of studies are good for is to make fun of later. I’m just getting a jump on things by making fun of it now—and by doing so, hopefully I’ll keep other people from also thinking this has some sort of value.

It is possible to look at trends and predict things a certain number of years down the road—perhaps two—but any further than that and you’ll look like an idiot. One exception to this rule is to become a science fiction author, at which point it doesn’t matter because then you’re not predicting the future at all, you’re giving warnings.

-Ted