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Trying predictions

I have always believed future is too hard to predict. Not that it can't be predicted but the possibilities are so huge it is futile even to try predicting them. Especially, if the events are linked in some ways it becomes harder.

This post is deliberately divided into three parts. One carrying on from where other drops off.

Part 1: Seth Godin: Predictions

Seth had predicted everything correctly 6 year back, but of course he was joking. But who would have imagined these and much much more!

  1. Predict that the number of blogs will explode, to more than a hundred times as many as we have now. If you're an opinion leader, you'll have one.
  2. A virtually unknown politician, a black man who's father is from Africa, will be elected president, in a landslide. He'll take the office from George W. Bush, leaving with the lowest approval rating of any president in history.
  3. Fidel Castro will step down.
  4. People with AIDS will be living longer than ever before, but the disease won't be cured.
  5. Americans will watch more video online than on TV.
  6. An earthquake in Myanmar will kill more than 100,000 people and their government will do nothing.
  7. The economy will be in the middle of a once in a century meltdown.
  8. Apple will make a cell phone and dominate the MP3 market as well. And the music industry will be in tatters. Napster will fail.
Point: No one imagined this future. Its too deviant. Too random. Just doesn't fit any 'curve'.


Part 2: Stumbling on Happiness (Daniel Gilbert)

Gilbert's central thesis is that, through perception and cognitive biases, people imagine the future poorly, in particular what will make them happy. He argues that imagination fails in three ways:

  1. Imagination tends to add and remove details, but people do not realize that key details may be fabricated or missing from the imagined scenario.
  2. Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the present than they actually will be (or were).
  3. Imagination fails to realize that things will feel differently once they actually happen -- most notably, the psychological immune system will make bad things feel not so bad as they are imagined to feel.

The advice Gilbert offers is to use other people's experiences to predict the future, instead of imagining it. It is surprising how similar people are in much of their experiences, he says. He does not expect too many people to heed this advice, as our culture, accompanied by various thinking tendencies, is against this method of decision making.

Point: There is no point in imagining the future because imagination is based on imagined/experienced events

source Wikipedia


Part 3: Ken Robinson

I am reminded on Ken Robinson's talk in TED. He is an author, educationist, innovator and has been working on inculcating creativity in school education. The point he makes is very simple:

The children who are enrolling in schools today, are the ones we are preparing to take on 50 years later. But we have no idea what the world will look like 5 years from now or even 10 years from now. We are teaching them what we think is going to be the future - which is wrong. Instead we should just enable them or prepare them to face uncertainties. By being prepared for uncertainties, they will be much more adaptable to random events.


Point: Creativity is perhaps the only thing that will help. If we are not fluid enough then we are not fluid enough.


The best thing that we can do it to be AWARE and ADAPT to the opportunities that is thrown up by the winds of change. One thing for sure, it may NOT fit our view of the world, the way we imagined, but that surely the reward for being first-mover will be generous and worthwhile.

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