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!
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
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.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Exams
[ link to this | view in thread ]