No Futurist can predict the future accurately 100% of the time. In fact, nowadays it seems the World Future Society is training its Futurist members to be somewhat vague in their statements, thus left up to interpretation, and also not to rock the boat of political correctness too much. Yes, that makes sense, I suppose. Still, even if folks like MegaTrends series’ author, John Naisbitt only gets it right half of the time, he’s still doing better than most everyone else – plus after selling nearly a million copies of his works, there are enough people reading these books out creating the very future he is projecting.
Oh yes, and then there are folks like Arthur C. Clarke, Calib Carr, and Ray Kurzweil with huge followings too. The reason so many of Arthur C. Clarke’s futurist science fiction technologies came to pass was because folks who read his books imagined it could be done and they went out and did it, the Iridium Satellite System is just one such example. With Calib Carr he wrote about a hand held DNA device, soon that technology will also be here.
Ray Kurzweil seems to know a thing or two about technology, and he’s busy putting together project teams and creating his futurist insights, after all he’s already created speech recognition and several other current technologies already in use – perhaps a good individual to put your money on, when he starts predicting the future Now then, this brings me to my main point here, something I learned a long time ago as I revolutionized the industry I was in before retirement, and that is this;
It is easy to predict the future, if you are the one who is doing the invention, creating, innovating, or marketing of that projected future.
Are you starting to see what I am driving at Sitting back and predicting trends is a lot of fun, heck I enjoy it to death, but the best futurists may not even call themselves futurists at all. They may consider themselves researchers, scientists, engineers, inventors, innovators, entrepreneurs, or even industrial capitalists. Yes, I know, I know, this article wouldn’t be complete without that famous quote from Yogi Berra The future ain’t what it used to be – yes, very true and a humbling statement indeed.
Moral of the story is be very careful whose futuristic predictions you take to heart. Indeed, I hope you will please consider all this and think on it. If you want to predict the future, stop procrastinating and start making it happen, then you’ll know in advance as it starts to unfold. If you have any comments, please shoot me an email.
