Why Are Technology Predictions Often Wrong?
We love to hype new technologies with great predictions. So why are they often wrong? It has nothing to do with economics.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates once said that a computer wouldn’t need more than 64Mb of RAM for a computer. IBM engineers imagined in the 1940’s that someday, computers would weigh as “little” as 1.5 tons. The year mobile devices would take over the internet was predicted for about a decade. Never happened and won’t. Why are almost all of these predictions wrong?
My theory is that it comes down to two primary factors; culture and imagination. Both are unpredictable variables in a time when we are enchanted by data and all the tools to analyse the vast flows of data.
If everything we humans do can be rendered down into algorithms and our behaviours and actions packaged up like ready to eat meals, then that is culture on a diet and a loss of hope for the human imagination.
Fortunately, humanity and our cultures, cannot be so reduced and our imaginations remain very intact. We may in fact, be entering a time of unleashing human imagination in quite fascinating and unexpected ways. And as we are also in a time of hyper speed cultural transmission, predicting most anything about a technology will…
