Predicting The Future
from the what-a-job dept
How exactly does one get the job title "futurist"? And once you have it, why should anyone believe you? The BBC has an article all about the predictions of a UK futurist. A lot (of course) have to do with artificial intelligence and robots (he thinks robots will be able to pass school exams in 8 years or so). As the article points out, most of the predictions are in realm of "leisure" goods. The thing that I've noticed as I read the article is that none of the predictions are all that difficult to have come up with. Most are either taken from some popular SciFi idea that's been around for years, or he's just taken something that everyone's talking about now, and extrapolated out a few years. That's not such a hard job. And, notice that nowhere do they give any stats on how any of his older predictions have done. Easy job, no accountability. Sign me up!
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what did they say about the future in the past
It's a little harder, right now, to dig up what futurists were saying 10, 15 or 20 years ago. It'd just be interesting to see how wrong they were.
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Exams
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