Forcasting the Future

I love those silly polls where you answer a few questions and they tell you what your superpower or enlightenment level or whatever the meme of the moment is, so you can use it as a pick-up line. Sometimes I take it a few times tweaking my answers to see if it changes the response.

It was not at one of these internet polls that I discovered my "super-power." I used a process of extrapolation to access my passionate strengths. I love to drive fast and "beat the clock". I'm constantly analyzing the past for patterns and understanding to apply to the future. I've know my future - sometimes specifically and sometimes in more vague conceptual blocks. These things led me to believe, if I had a superpower, it would be time travel. I already travel to the past, project/dream the future and play with the present.

That made me wonder, could I time travel for things beyond moi? And that's when I learned about future forecasting. I realized this was a fairly simple science at conference with Don Norman at the Palace of Fine Arts. It's basically past historical research, paying attention to current/not so current trends, technology and the direction in which it's moving (and where) and then extrapolation (one of my personal techniques).

Of course, you don't always end up with the actual reality from the extrapolation. It's part science, part art, part experience. So I would have loved to attend last night's talk with 25 year forecaster Paul Saffo. Luckily Stewart Brand send along his notes this morning. You can read them by clicking on the link....

Stewart Brand's Notes from SALT's talk:

Reflecting on his 25 years as a forecaster, Paul Saffo pointed out that a forecaster's job is not to predict outcomes, but to map the "cone of uncertainty" on a subject.  Where are the edges of what might happen?  (Uncertainty is cone-shaped because it expands as you project further into the future--- next decade has more surprises in store than next week.)

Rule: Wild cards sensitize us to surprise, and they push the edges of the cone out further.  You can call weird imaginings a wild card and not be ridiculed.  Science fiction is brilliant at this, and often predictive, because it plants idea bombs in teenagers which they make real 15 years later.

Rule: Change is never linear.  Our expectations are linear, but new technologies come in "S" curves, so we routinely overestimate short-term change and underestimate long-term change.  "Never mistake a clear view for a short distance."

"Inflection points are tiptoeing past us all the time."  He saw one at the DARPA Grand Challenge race for robot cars in the Mojave Desert in 2004 and 2005.  In 2004 no cars finished the race, and only four got off the starting line. In 2005, all 23 cars started and five finished.

Rule: Look for indicators- things that don't fit. At the same time the robot cars were triumphing in the desert, 108 human-driven cars piled into one another in the fog on a nearby freeway.  A survey of owners of Roomba robot vacuum cleaners showed that 2/3 of owners give the machine a personal name, and 1/3 take it with them on vacations.

Rule: Look back twice as far.  Every decade lately there's a new technology that sets the landscape.  In the 1980s, microprocessors made a processing decade that culminated in personal computers.  In the 1990s it was the laser that made for communication bandwidth and an access decade culminating in the World Wide Web.  In the 2000s cheap sensors are making an interaction decade culminating in a robot takeoff.  The Web will soon be made largely of machines communicating with each other.

Rule: Cherish failure.  Preferably other people's.  We fail our way into the future.  Silicon Valley is brilliant at this.  Since new technologies take 20 years to have an overnight success, for an easy win look for a field that has been failing for 20 years and build on that.

Rule: Be indifferent.  Don't confuse the desired with the likely.  Christian end-time enthusiasts have been wrong for 2,000 years.

Rule: Assume you are wrong.  And forecast often.

Rule: Embrace uncertainty.

Saffo ended with a photo he took of a jar by the cash register in a coffee shop in San Francisco.  The handwritten note on the jar read, "If you fear change, leave it in here."

Comments

[TwistedCat]

my dad's job, before he retired, involved a lot of forecasting. i believe his actual title was Materials Management and Inventory Control Forecaster and Consultant (or something).

i'm told it involves a lot of statistics.

he used to give a conference every august. growing up, i sat in on it many times. i remember his bar graph at used an alka seltzer box and i remember he actually had a widget made for the class... he likes props.

as far as i can tell, the only other influence it may have had on me was that i buy replacements before i run out of the ones i have. it confuses me when people run out of toilet paper.