My Fearless Predictions: Don’t Believe Them

         Where is the stock market heading? Will it snow a lot next winter? What’s the next big breakthrough in technology?

 

         Well, don’t ask me. Or anyone else, for that matter.

 

         After publishing forecasts for years myself, I don’t believe in trying to divine the future anymore.

 

         As a technology writer, I got some things right, including the future of the Internet, digital TV and the coming of cell phone towers. But I failed to foresee drones or phones that could surf the Internet. And I thought the year 2000 computer bug would bring worldwide disaster.

 

         And just look at soothsayers’ wreckage from the past: predictions of the 1948 and 2016 elections. Recessions that took most of us by surprise in 2001 and 2008. The stock market crash in 1929. Tornadoes just last month.

         My grade school textbook told us that we would all be flying airplanes to work by about 1970. We would run out of oil in 1955.

 

         If that is not enough, here are some of the bold predictions from the past:

*Airplanes are an interesting toy but of no military value—Marshall Foch, French general in 1911.

*“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”—Thomas Watson, IBM chairman, in 1943.

*“We don’t like the sound of the Beatles, and guitar music is on the way out.”—Decca Records, 1962.

*Technological advancements will lead to a 15-hour work week by 2030.—John Maynard Keynes, economist, 1930.

*By 1997, the moon will be colonized and used as a launching point for further exploration of the solar system. — Physicist John Rinehart, in 1957.

*“I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.”—Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of the Ethernet, in 1995.

Do you remember the predictions of the paperless office? I went to a demonstration of this idea in the 1980s. Well, what happened? Why do I still need a printer?

I do think global warming is catastrophic, but I don’t think we can predict when the worst will occur.

And who predicted artificial intelligence? (I used AI tools to get some of examples. Hope they’re right!)