Predictions? No Future In 'em

The Age

Tuesday August 19, 2008

Graeme Philipson

Why do we overestimate technology's benefits for the short term - yet underestimate it in the long run?

WE ARE swimming in a sea of uncertainty. Information technology is changing our lives, but those changes are impossible to predict.

Lots of people make a living out of predicting, or attempting to predict, the future. They get it wrong, time and again. And being an expert in the field is no indicator of relative success - indeed, very often the opposite is the case.

Many "experts" are so immersed in their specialities that they lack the wider view necessary to pick trends coming from nowhere. They also often have a substantial stake in a particular technology or way of thinking, and they can't see beyond it.

History abounds with instructive examples: William Thompson (later Lord Kelvin) was president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in the late 19thcentury. In 1895, less than a decade before the Wright brothers took off, he said that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible (but then he also said that radio had no future and that X-rays would prove to be a hoax).

When Boeing built the 10-seater 247 in 1933, it predicted that a larger plane would never be built. Charlie Chaplin thought that movies were a fad, and people would return to watching plays and stage shows. Napoleon thought steamships impossible.

There are plenty of examples from the computer industry. Thomas J.Watson snr, the founder of IBM, famously predicted that there was a world market for, maybe, five computers. Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, said he couldn't see any reason why anybody would want a computer in their home (Digital was once the industry's second largest company. No more).

Bill Gates said that Microsoft would never build a 32-bit operating system. And he also said, back in the 1980s, that "640kilobytes should be enough for anybody", referring to PCRAM. Entry-level notebooks now have a thousand times more than that.

Another thing to bear in mind - and this is true of all fields of human activity - is that there is no relationship between the strength with which a view is expressed and the likelihood that that view is correct. Indeed, the strongest views are very often held by those whose reasons for holding them are most suspect.

What is it about the future that makes it so hard to predict? And why is it especially difficult in the IT industry, when the underlying technology evolves at a reasonably predictable pace?

We know that there are a number of fundamental laws behind technology development. The best known is Moore's Law, which basically predicts that processing power doubles every two years or so.

Moore's Law has proved remarkably consistent in the 40 years since it was first proposed. There are other laws governing things such as data storage capacity and bandwidth, all of which are reasonably consistent and which allow us to tell where the technology is headed.

The problem is, all these technology growth trends are exponential. They grow very quickly. While the simple numbers behind the growth may be easy to understand, what is impossible to comprehend is the effect of these technological changes.

When many fast-evolving simple trends intersect, they do so in unpredictable ways. When they do so they cause quantum shifts in the way technology is used and in the way technology is perceived.

This is such a common phenomenon that there are a number of terms to describe it: tipping point, critical mass, snowball effect, inflection point and paradigm shift. These occur when regular trends interact with each other to cause irregular effects. Add to that the disruption that can be caused by one bright idea at the right time and by the right person, and the mix becomes volatile.

The best example in the IT industry is the explosive growth of the internet in the early 1990s. A number of trends combined to move the net from an academic tool to the plaything of the masses in just a couple of years.

By the late 1980s, Moore's Law had ensured that PCs, after a slow start a decade earlier, had become a fixture in offices and in a reasonable percentage of homes. Improvements in telecommunications saw the introduction of modems and the start of the widespread use of corporate email.

Then, in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, a way of making the internet easy to navigate by giving pages names and the ability to jump between them using hyperlinks.

And in 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina invented Mosaic, the first usable web browser.

All the elements were in place. In 1993 the first pizza was ordered on the net. In 1994 Amazon.com was founded, and the number of websites grew by thousands of per cent a year.

It was the classic technology boom.

The internet revolution changed the world in just a few years, yet no-one had predicted it - just as has happened so many times throughout history.

A combination of light but powerful internal combustion engines and advances in aeronautics saw man take to the skies in the early 20th century. The development of decent machine tools and a better understanding of chemistry and physics brought in the steam engine and the industrial revolution. Ditto radio, atomic warfare and energy, space travel, and the recent development of electronic social networking.

All of these things came out of the blue, and were often regarded as impossible before they came into being.

And all have changed the world.

It is, therefore, impossible to predict what changes may by wrought in the next decade or two. It is fun to postulate, but history shows us that we should not discount the impossible.

One of my favourite sayings comes from the late American futurist Roy Amara: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."

Our minds evolve in a linear fashion, but the technology and its effects are exponential. The key to coming to terms with the future is to reconcile the two.

graeme@philipson.info

© 2008 The Age

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