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Comment by chromaton | Hacker News Reader

"Life X years in the future" has been a popular topic for books and other media for some time now.

The predictors are usually quite wrong. However, in a few cases, they seem to hit the nail right on the head (cell phones). What I'd like to do is reverse engineer the insights or mindset the people who made accurate predictions so that they could be emulated.

At the same time, I want to identify the prejudices or logic errors of the people who are wrong (anti-gravity belts) to help avoid making the same mistakes.

Does anyone have any insight as to why some predictions turn out right? Is it just luck, or is there some greater principle that can help us find out what's ahead?

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I would not be surprised if the technological predictions come about from a solid understanding and application of physics. It makes sense that the Bell Labs director would have had a clear sight of what was possible in networking off into the realm of the internet. Similarly, somebody applying physics knowledge would not make the mistake of supposing gravity belts or suppressed lightning or man-made hurricanes. Meanwhile, some calculations about the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere by fuel combustion could tell you something concrete about how its chemistry will change.

Socially, it's less clear. It will probably work well to assume that culture is highly mutable, but human nature isn't.

I think a lot of what people get wrong in these predictions is the social element. Dad's telecommuting to work in the study and smoking Lucky Strikes while Mom - aproned and barefoot - cooks in the kitchen, that sort of thing.

What this misses - aside from the basic incorrectness itself - is that shifts in social perception and overall conscientiousness are major drivers of innovation. So, look at the intersection of what's feasible (with improvements in materials, design, miniaturization, understanding of the human body, etc) and what's wanted (convenience in daily life, improvement of self-image, etc) and you can get things like e-cigarettes, self-driving cars, boner pills, hair loss treatment, yadda yadda.

That's what I was thinking too.

When I think about failed predictions, the flying car almost immediately comes to mind. You could see them regularly on 50s-60s pop-science and SF magazines covers.

Back then there was the idea that flying machines would soon become affordable on an individual level, and that most people would want to buy their own helicopter or small plane. Quite a few SF novels assumed it was a definite possibility, with the inevitable abandon of cities.

And it made a lot of sense at the time. I remember reading City by Clifford Simak as a kid, which is based on this premise, and thinking that it would soon come. The concept was very tempting.

Simak was a terrible predictor (if "prediction" is even what he was trying to do, vs just writing science fantasy), but his "pastoral scifi" is such a treat to read even today.

It's possible that he was predicting, and that those ideas were common at that time - Clarke's Childhood's End came out just one year after City (1953) and also features personal flying transport and lots of rural life (even though cities still exist).

Here's an old Nautilus article talking about exactly your point about the social element: http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/why-futurism-has-a-cultural-b...

Well you pointed out one biggie: the known laws of physics. Anti-gravity may be possible, but there is no theory to explain it, and so it’s hard to predict in a positive way. By contrast advances in materials science, miniaturization, novel sources of energy, are more fruitful.

It can also help to look at the state of current laboratory research. Look at where transistors were a ~100 years ago, and then now. Look at materials with great promise on the lab, but which may take similar timescales to become commonplace. It’s not the new discoveries, but the new means of bringing old discoveries to mass market which often defines tech.

But then the question becomes 'literally anti-gravity', or more likely, 'personal flying devices'. Certainly not the same thing but, for the most part, the same effect.

When it comes to flying devices for the individual I think the thing we learned about all is just how little we want people raining down on us from the sky. Not to mention the difficulties of air traffic control with a few hundred million people in the air. So ask yourself if FlyingtechX can really solve that?

Literal antigravity is almost a requirement for safe personal flying devices though.

Literal antigravity that doesn't take an enormous amount of energy or do anything hard to control even.

The closest thing we have to a real jetpack runs on nearly pure hydrogen peroxide. For about 30 seconds.

My vote is on quantum levitation. Wings, jetpacks and mini-helicopters are all already hitting the limitations of their physics and still far away from anything you would casually carry around.

Room temp superconductors would be the key for that I think, but yeah, I’m with you on this.

Transistors weren't anywhere 100 years ago. The first practical, working transistor was in 1947. The theoretical foundation (quantum mechanics) wasn't particularly solid until the 1920s. So to get from where we were 100 years ago to where we are today, there were both changes in the known laws of physics, and also practical advances.

Tangentially related: I read a book on Project Gutenberg titled A.D. 2000, clearly written by an army engineer from the 19th century. There's no plot to speak of, but it's about a guy who desires to travel into the future. The process for traveling in the future basically involved filling a room full of ozone and encasing one in a sort of coffin to place one in a persistent state of unaging sleep. Funnily, part of the process involved shoving asbestos rags in one's nose and mouth.

The style of dress was just minor differences from what one wore in the late 1800's (e.g. black knee-high stockings instead of white). Some long-distance travel involved zeppelins. Newspapers were nationalized, with print being transmitted through a massive array of typewriters connected by the telegraph system (i.e. pressing a key on a connected typewriter in, say, Boston would send a signal to automatically press a key on a typewriter in, say, Los Angeles).

Of course, global peace was secured, social welfare programs were widely expanded, environmentalism was strong. There was also a description of a massive underground vacuum-tube system of transportation which reminded me of hyperloop.

Ultimately, I wouldn't recommend the text for any sort of story; there are two very lengthy chapters devoted to describing the technical specs of a submarine. But it's an interesting curiosity.

This Freakonomics podcast on forecasting may be interesting:

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-be-less-terrible-at-p...

I wanted to post this exact reply and saw you had already posted it. Highly recommended, I think about this podcast episode a lot.

> However, in a few cases, they seem to hit the nail right on the head

> Does anyone have any insight as to why some predictions turn out right? Is it just luck, or is there some greater principle that can help us find out what's ahead?

Individuals don't make a lot of forecasts/predictions, but society at a whole does. People who read into these forecasts get "informed" about the potential future, and perhaps even inspired (ie. a self full-filling prophecy; I'm not arguing that's the default though).

The default is as follows: if "one" (see above) makes a lot of forecasts, the likelihood one of them hits the nail on the head increases.

Luck is when a beginner with a crossbow hits the bullseye with one shot. Its just that if you shoot with a shotgun, you're gonna hit something, somewhere. But we're ignoring all the fails here, the misses. They're not relevant so they get ignored. History does essentially the same. The winners write history, and this is an example of that.

We should also not forget that a detailed, technical prediction by say a scientist is something different than say a suit who's trying to just sell their book with a bunch of rough predictions. Ie. not all forecasts/predictions are equal.

Of course, the near hits benefit from the plethora of predictions. “Theories” that essentially produce ranges of predictions across many/most possible outcomes contain no information. Not to discredit you. I look for similar trends, but it’s best to be humble about predictions.

Perhaps when multiple routes present themselves toward a new technology, its emergence becomes imminent. By this reasoning I would predict space travel becoming more routine (with multiple companies like Space X and Blue Origin working toward this goal), quantum computing is realized (lots of ideas on how to make it happen with lots of companies working on it), and self driving cars (lots of companies working on it, it may take a decade).

I recently had a very similar thought. I feel like you could use NLP to analyze the type of language associated with predictions that turned out to be correct vs those that were wrong.

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