This was supposed to be my 2014 predictions column but the volume of correspondence following my call for predictions last week was such that I suspect it will be the first of three prediction columns with my actual predictions occupying columns two and three. This column is about the broader subject of how to predict.
I’ve written at least once before on How to Predict the Future. Do a search on that string and an old PBS column will float to the surface. All of that still applies but in this column I want to look somewhat deeper at the motivations and methods of predictors whether they actually know what they are doing or not.
Last week I asked for reader predictions, offering the options of putting those predictions in the comments below that column or sending them to me privately by e-mail. There were a total of 167 comments when last I looked and just over 70 prediction e-mail messages for a total of about 240 ideas! That volume of interest alone justifies this closer look at the prediction process. People are really interested in predicting.
Having never made such a call to readers before I didn’t know quite what to expect. I was gratified by the enthusiastic response, but what surprised me was the qualitative difference between the public and private predictions. To put it simply, the private predictions were, with a few notable exceptions (yours of course), crap.
If I had an expectation (remember my Mom was dying and I wasn’t at all thinking straight) it would be that the private predictions would be better considered and somehow more important. Nope. They were for the most part banal, some of them even smart-ass, and showed less effort overall than the public predictions.
Maybe I should have expected this. Readers have always tended to feel comfortable with me. After all I’ve always been here. So why not blurt out some joke or halfway thought-out piece of nonsense? I just didn’t expect it.
What this shows, I think, is the culture and influence of the social network. This column isn’t frigging LinkedIn, but the same names and nicknames tend to appear week after week, so to say something in public many of you have a considerable investment in being perceived one way or another by what is a very stable — and knowledgable — audience.
Now to the nature of your predictions. My favorite of all — favorite to the point of awe — was the person who predicted there would be a Black Swan in 2014. That could be true of any or all years, of course, but in the couple of decades I’ve been writing these prediction columns I’ve never thought to try it, so my hat is off to that writer.
A Black Swan, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a totally unexpected and unpredicted event — the entry of not just a new player or product in the market, but a whole new product class or service type. Black Swans create new industries and doom old ones, but beyond saying that they’ll come along every once in awhile they are very difficult to predict. But 2014 not only could have a Black Swan, I think there’s a better-then-average chance that it will have one. We’re due.
Most other predictions have to do with starts, stops, and changes of direction. Blackberry will turn around or Blackberry will fall into an abyss in 2014 (or fall further into the abyss, I suppose). These predictions are easy to make but if you are going to do them I’d like some supporting logic, please. Why do you feel this will happen? And, even more important, what resulting changes will happen should your prediction be correct? Give us some context and make it interesting.
Amateur prognosticators have the greatest problem with timing. It’s pretty easy to see that something is inevitable, like the impact of 3D printing on traditional manufacturing, but it is hard to say with certainty that 2014 is the year everything will change.
Progress always takes longer than we expect.
So 2014 will be a very interesting year for additive manufacturing technologies like 3D printing, but I seriously doubt that this is the year when the mass market game is changed or even mildly affected. The same can be said for Virtual Reality goggles, which seem poised for a comeback, but not this year. Even Google Glass, which is in beta use by tens of thousands, won’t mean much in 2014.
If you really think some technical advance like these is going to have significant market impact in 2014, the best advice I can give you is to change that date to 2016 and see me in two years.
I’ll be filing two columns of predictions today and tomorrow which I know you will criticize soundly and for good reason. There’s nothing that makes my predictions any better than yours, after all, unless mine are accompanied by better explanations. We’ll see.
If I really knew what I was doing here — if I really had a vision for the future that wasn’t for the most part derivative — I’d be proposing a short list of Black Swans. God I wish I could do that. I wish you had done it.
You only need to be right about one Black Swan to change everything.
I’m a little late to the predictions, but here’s my black swan – Amazon will – somehow – purchase the USPS. They desperately need their own distribution system (especially with 1. The success of Prime, and 2. The FUBAR of FedEx and UPS over Christmas), and it seems like the US government isn’t really interested in doing right by the USPS anymore.
Tyler, from your keyboard to Amazon’s eyes – that would be a great deal for us all 😉
That IS a terrific idea. Wouldn’t the political issues be the biggest challenges, though? Whether the perception of the typical USPS worker is fair or not, that perception is of someone that would not be desirable by UPS. Many USPS workers could have difficulty adjusting from being in a fairly secure/protected public sector job to a competitive “continually demonstrate your value” private sector job, and it seems that Congress would almost demand job security for current USPS employees as a condition of allowing such a sale to occur.
“That IS a terrific idea” Uh, why? Amazon jobs in its DC’s are terrible-updated 19th C Dickensian horror. Have you even READ about them?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/01/week-amazon-insider-feature-treatment-employees-work
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/brutal-conditions-in-amazons-warehouses-2013-8
Would you want your children to work here?
Finally, regarding your dim view of USPS – this government entity provides more value, at low/reasonable prices, than any other.
No wonder Congress wants to kill it.
this one I like. about the only way I see to get an actual business strategy and reactions to market in the USPS, another of those bastard-child “quasi-governmental corporations” so beloved in the 80s, is to get a real business moving the mail.
The USPS is prohibited by law from selling lots of things ( pencils, pens, paper, envelopes, etc ) and unable to shutdown Post Office locations based on profitability(hence why you will often see multiple locations a few miles apart).
I can’t see Amazon buying a business intentionally hobbled by such laws.
Remember the FAA and the air traffic controllers strike during the Reagan administration? That led to private ATC companies that provided ATC for smaller airports. I think that Amazon might be able to do the same regarding mail. Most likely the government will keep the USPS in place for larger, central distribution hubs, the impetus is definitely there to phase out USPS control of smaller, i.e., rural and small town operations. Honestly, most people don’t need mail delivery everyday – I know I don’t. Amazon could pare that down to a profitable schedule, and we wouldn’t have to deal with grumpy, burned-out USPS window clerks.
Apple will come out with a games platform for the Apple TV and it won’t make any difference to anything. I mean it’ll be a huge hit, but owning the living room simply doesn’t matter anymore. Tge living room used to be where we gathered round The Screen, but nowadays we have our own screens on and iOhone, iPad or Android device and if we happen to use it in the living room it’s just incidental. Apple doesn’t just own the living to already, through mobile devices it owns everywhere. Apple TV as a platform will just be icing on the cake, if they even bother devoting the resources to it this year as against any other. There’s no hurry.
Go for it!
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Bring on your predictions. We’re ready.
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The best thing you do is make us, your readers think. Even if we don’t agree with you, putting some more thought into something is usually a good thing.
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Thank you. Now bring it on.
Bob,
It takes someone with serious insights resulting from numerous contacts with the movers, shakers, and innovators to make any meaningful predictions. I’m counting on you to be that person.
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This is the first I have heard about having to back up the predictions from your readers. How about this for a backup? I drank too much booze over New Year’s and permanently elevated my predicting ability. So there! (Burp!)
My prediction is about mobile devices. Phones and tablets have more than enough speed, storage and great screens. The manufacturers have exhausted all the value-added features already, so there will be a race to the bottom in price. The new price point for a very nice 7″ tablet from major vendors for Christmas 2014 is $99.
An app (and related technology) will appear that will eventually lead to the end of the legislative branch of government. For instance, an app that lets everyone in a small rural community vote on city ordinances rather than an elected city council. As support I give two examples. One is a recent proposal by a California activist who proposes to increase the CA legislature to 12,000 districts, each with it’s own representative. They all would not go to the state capital, but rather meet in committees and vote online. Another example is a California Democrat who proposed to allow Members of Congress to vote from home. His system also calls for a secure online voting system.
The point is that if you can create a secure voting system to insure that each elected member of the legislative branch is who they say they are, then why do you need the middleman? Why not just let the citizens form committees, draft legislation (via a wiki type of system) and then vote themselves. At that point, who needs an elected legislator? (Oh and if you don’t like the wiki process for drafting legislation because you think Wikipedia’s quality sucks, then I suppose you think the Affordable Healthcare Act should be nominated for a Pulitzer.)
I’m not saying an app will come along in 2014 to do away with Congress (even though, given their disfunction, that would be nice). But what I am saying is that a “small town voting” app will be created that gets the ball rolling.
Legislature is extremely difficult to read and understand. I think the first app you would need to create would be a translation app.
How do you think these convoluted codices of laws are managed now? I’ve seen the product name XMetaL often enough in downloads from THOMAS to suggest someone has developed a suitable object model for marking up legislation.
The mechanisms are well-developed (and I’ll again offer the Bitcoin infrastructure as one of the better, more versatile e-voting systems); the barriers are chiefly cultural. The West is, after all, built on 15 centuries of paternalism, pervasive hierarchy, team spirit and drive to conquest. Even if enough people could be sold on the advantages of collective governance in the common interest, it’s not certain that such a system would necessarily converge on that common interest. I think it more likely, in fact, that absentee predators who profit from divide-et-impera would work hard to reinstate it by pandering to the supremacy of self-interest and sabotaging the commons — that playbook has been well-tested over the past few centuries. How to inoculate against it?
I certainly hope this never comes true.
The founding fathers knew what they were doing. Representative government protects us from Mob Rule.
As stated in one of my favorite movie quotes, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.” (Men In Black, 1997)
How do you recognize a “Black Swan”? Is it something completely unknown or something that is just a complete opposite of mainstream thinking?
by its nature black swan cannot be predicted so there is a kind of paradox in this request. However….it made me think and I think that the black swan will rise on the crossroads between technological abilities and some rather determined individuals and/or governments/social movements.
So, the basic lego bricks for this unfathomable swan are:
Technological
* Further proliferation of M2M (up to a point that there are SOPs – standard operation procedures that are done automatically by machines without human intervention
* Further cloud penetration of mission critical systems – or better yet the concept of cloud based architecture for mission critical systems adopted by organizations that should not be in the cloud in the first place (utilities?)
* Further reliance on virtual payment systems and unregulated currencies
* Unknown “stuff” developed by NSA and similar organizations to deepen its penetration
Social
* Further social unrest based on the uneven allocation of wealth (99% against the 1%)
* Middle east frustration with the western policies in general (Iran) and US policies in particular (the situation in Iraq and insecure feeling of neglect in Saudi Arabia)
* A possible rise of the notion that “Edward Snowden was not activist enough and something real need to be done for people to understand….)
* A growing feeling that “the government as we know it does not work and I will prove it to you”
* A growing feeling that the Internet is no longer a free, unregulated place but rather a corporate controlled domain.
Based on the above the black swan can be some disrupting activity (may be by accident or something that goes out of control), initiated by individual or group that will create a major breakdown in national infrastructure which will spill over to global infrastructure (communication and eventually internet) – for example a total internet blackout which may start in a local backdoor exploit to some internet servers or circumvention of traffic that goes out of control, which interact with some utility network, communication breakdowns and major cellular shutdown. I can only assume that a series of these events may trigger some military SOP that can escalate to…whatever.
Another black swan can start as a phishing/credit card major theft, disrupting some internal banking communication, combined with major backup flop, to have financial records erased.
Another black swan event can start as a coordinated effort by terrorist groups/individuals to hack GPS communication, combined with major cellular shutdown. imagine that.
What I am saying that the notion of technology based black swan is quite near since systems are constantly moving towards interconnection, over complexity, automation and eventually a single point of failure. Now, 30, 40, 50 years ago, these incidents may have had a local damage with no spillover effect, but now I expect that we have no ability to see the possible outcomes.
The general notion of the prediction here is generally positive but the black swan I expect will not be nice at all.
and it all can just start by some stupid chain of seemly unconnected events.
Missed posting under the predictions column. So doing it here.
– Robotics. Lego and Google will join (Goolego) to produce a robotics kit designed for high schoolers. Google will establish a national competition around said kit. They will push it hard and integrate it into everything. Android all the way.
– Lego will start selling 3D plastic used for 3D printing in THEIR 3D printer. Obviously start selling a 3D printer… they must cannibalize their own business or others will.
– A consumer 3D printer that easily (and cheaply) prints circuits will be developed.
– A new high density digital storage medium will come on the scene. non-volatile, a little faster, and much longer lived than NAND FLASH.
Nontech (but utilizing tech) predictions
– A wayward individual will partially destroy the Dome of the Rock… thus setting off a middle eastern chaos that will only end by a nuclear device being deployed. Results of which shock everyone into reality. (This is my only negative prediction – generally I’m a pretty positive person).
– Goldman Sachs will be indicted and forced to plead guilty to actions for their role with Greece leading up to the financial meltdown. (this is not a negative prediction)
– North Koreans will revolt and change leadership. The government will not change from communism though. Relations with South Korea will improve. The border between the two will open.
The self-driving car is basically finished, but liability issues and the high cost of sensor hardware will keep it out of the ordinary consumer market for a while longer. I predict Google will partner with Tesla to build a fleet of self-driving electric cars (maybe a modified Model S) that will be “loaned” to employees for commuting. This will allow Google to extend its free commute perk to areas of lower density where buses are not practical, and Tesla to just sell a lot of cars. Very quickly, other cash-flush tech giants like Apple and Facebook will sign on to buy their own fleets. By the end of 2015, there will be at least 10,000 such vehicles rolling on Bay Area roads. There will be a mad land rush to build subsided charging stations. There will be several crashes that will be covered extensively by the media. To show they are “on board” politicians will make favorable changes to liability statutes that will go too far and need to be trimmed back later on. BMW will be the first to sell self-driving IC vehicle to the general public. Ford will be the first American manufacturer. It will all be very messy and exciting.
Trying to predict the future can be fun, but it is rarely accurate.
The primary reason: bad predictions are rarely penalized.
http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/14/new-freakonomics-radio-podcast-the-folly-of-prediction/
Okay I’ll try to take this in the spirit of searching for that holodeck-on-the-hill instead of “guys your predictions sucked, so try again.”
Obvious trends are mobile and cloud, social networks seem to have plateaued.
Obama just approved a map-the-brain project to map our neurons. I haven’t crunched the numbers but if we have 86 billion neurons and we’re at about 3 billion transistors in the latest chip, then Moore’s Law says we double via:
2013 3 billion
2016 12 billion
2019 48 billion
2021 96 billion
So within a decade we could get a transistor network that could simulate our brains pretty effectively, but that’s out for 2014.
How about the pervasive use of cameras in our society (home security cameras, webcams, smartphone cameras, etc.) leads to the development of a “Creepy Crawlers” society that starts acquiring all the video data it can with bots. To be as creepy as possible, the crawlers have to have local groups that crawl physically local areas and partition the collection into these localities. Drones might also be used to routinely fly over/by and record.
What to do with all this collected video data? How about a new “Google Maps-style” view where based on where you are, you can see into the past with the nearest video data. Kind of a street view meets YouTube mashup.
So who does this disintermediate? To attract video data, a cloud service offers free storage for all posted videos and an API for some new way to stream video into the cloud. Couple this with a wearable camera and “your life, uploaded” it will be. The free video storage service elbows into YouTube’s arena, new actors and actresses upload staged content and crossover into network television area.
Well, it could happen.
The World needs:
1) superconductivity at room temperature,
2) nuclear fusion reactors the size of a 4 cylinders engine,
3) … a new planet ? biological microprocessors ? real-life nano-technology ?
The rest is frills. IT included (anyway, hope to continue making a living out of IT)
Good 2014 to all of you !
4) … a healthy dose of common sense ?
Okay, since this is no holds barred, here’s my crack at the “Black Swan:”
In today’s 24/7 video’d / surveiled / data-collected / voyeuristic / reality-TV’d society, there is NO privacy anymore and you cannot do anything outside of your house without a pretty good chance your every move and action is being recorded, identified and cataloged.
People will jump at an opportunity to be free from this. 2014’s “black swan” will be that someone invents some kind of invisibility-granting “cloaking device” that makes you, or your car, INVISIBLE to all photo surveillance / identification….or at least manages to sufficiently confuse all video / electronic equipment so that you and your presence cannot be accurately identified as you.
Whether it is a spray, something you wear, an electronic jamming device, or whatever…..this amazing invention will be something simple and cheap that basically makes you INVISIBLE to Big Brother…..and much of the public will flock to it in the tens of millions. Its inventor will become the richest person in the world.
Pipe dream, maybe….but imagine the implications if it COULD be done?
Prediction for the year after that: the government will attempt to outlaw this device.
The black swan will be a combined service plus hardware offering from a vendor from China. (Much like the usual combined offerings in mobile phones.) That black swan will make a big impact in mid-sized and small business.
Distributed Autonomous Corporations(DAC) are unmanned company that run without any human involvement under the control of an incorruptible set of business rules and they are decentralized. They are build on crypto protocols like bitcoin, they are transparent – (their books and business rules are auditable by all) they can’t be manipulated nor killed. They are in development right now by Invictus Innovation all is open source. This is my bet for the black swan.
Ohh and Invictus they are crowdsourcing money in a innovative way at a rate of 3 millions/month and the project it only out since November.The first DAC will be out in the next 3-4 month.
What device or service would a DAC provide? If unmanned, who would keep it working right? Linux is free and open source but not unmanned. There already are plenty of crypto-currencies coming out, so I guess I’m looking for another example.
“You may not have considered it, but Bitcoin can be viewed as an unmanned company – or a Distributed Autonomous Corporation (DAC) if you prefer.
Unlike passive currencies, Bitcoin derives much of its tangible value by performing a trustworthy confidential fiduciary service. Essentially, it keeps private books for customer “checking” accounts and will transfer credits between accounts upon receipt of a properly signed “check”. Stan Larimer
First DAC created it is called Bitshare and it will be a decentralized Bank & Exchange
Some examples of others Dac but there are already many more ideas out there :
Reputable Monikers, DAC – Manages rights to an identity namespace.
Robo Courier, DAC – A secure electronic courier service.
TradeBitShares, DAC – Robotically honorable banking and brokerage services.
Unmanned Escrow, DAC – Escrow services that conditionally transfer ownership rights.
Virtual Ventures, DAC – A crowd-sourced venture capital firm.
Autonomous Arbitrators, DAC – Incorruptible arbitration services.
DAC Installers R Us, DAC – Trustworthy auto-installation of consensus-based DAC updates.
SkyNet, DAC – A swarm of DACBOT satellites implementing a unbuggable new Internet.
One World Government, DAC – A government that can’t ignore its own constitution.
There are many more ideas out there this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you wanna know more there a lot of information on there website : http://invictus-innovations.com/ . And yes it is fully open source.
New site is coming soon this is a very young company only 2 month old and they got a lot of traction already.
FirefoxOS overtakes Windows Mobile, and even catches 30% of the market, touting complete openness while avoiding fragmentation.
If you ever see a black swan, and you don’t just happen to have a hundredweight or so of stale bread with you, get the Hell out of there. Swans are not pleasant birds. They can beat you to a pulp with their bare wings and will miss no opportunity to do so.
I’m surprised at how small people think.
I predict the human race will head either towards The Beginning or The End. Something during 2014 will be the tell. I also predict people will not be able to tell which is which.
“I’m surprised at how small people think.” Thinking small results in progress. Thinking big results big thoughts.
The Black Swan is advertising. 2014 is the year in which advertisers stop chasing page impressions and page views and go after loyal engaged readership instead.
9 out of 10 of Bob’s predictions in 2012 turned out to be wrong. So yeah, Bob’s predictions are crap too. (You read it here first!)
I knew my “predictions” wouldn’t be worth anything, but I lucked into getting the first post, so I had to take my 15 seconds in the spotlight with what I had to mind at the time.
The point is that if you can create a secure voting system to insure that each elected member of the legislative branch is who they say they are, then why do you need the middleman? Why not just let the citizens form committees, draft legislation (via a wiki type of system) and then vote themselves. At that point, who needs an elected legislator? (Oh and if you don’t like the wiki process for drafting legislation because you think Wikipedia’s quality sucks, then I suppose you think the Affordable Healthcare Act should be nominated for a Pulitzer.)
Back from vacation. Thanks for the props!
In 2014, there will be an announcement of a huge breakthrough in the operation of multi-valued logic circuitry and the ability to manufacture microprocessors, including memory, incorporating this MVL. The processing rate of these will be at several times that of the current cores using the same clock rate. One of the strengths of MVL is processing video, which allows an MVL computer to drive a small holographic display unit. The demonstration of this computer system will be early 2015.
This is also a bit late but here goes, a black swan or should I say a couple of black swans will emerge as the medical industry and electronics/tec industry start converging (steve jobs spoke about this in his biography) ei – google contract lenses https://www.theverge.com/2014/1/16/5317210 and others