It’s the beginning of the new year. It’s that time of the year when you see many people trying to predict what will happen this year. When is COVID going to end? When are things going back to the way they were etc. etc. Some people have even taken a shot at predicting what will happen in the next ten years.

Over the year, I have become a little skeptical of these predictions, no matter how credible the source. The more I have read them, the more I have grown weary of - one, people’s ability to make any accurate predictions and two, the predictions themselves. Even as late as the end of 2019, no one predicted that the entire world would come to a screeching halt due to the pandemic. I know no one can foretell such a thing, but that’s precisely my point. It’s impossible to see it coming.

The problem with predicting the future is this. When asked to imagine the future, we tend to take the present as a baseline, then extrapolate using some projection model (linear, exponential, or otherwise) that makes sense to us, primarily driven by our wish or desire more than anything else. Most of such projections produce iterative changes. 

I don’t think the future works that way. Future is always a mix of few iterative changes and a few radical changes born out of a unique combination of factors that are impossible to predict in advance.

And even most experts in their own field of expertise find it challenging to see the radical changes that might happen; some can’t even see it as they are happening. The most famous example is that of the IBM president Thomas Watson who thought there would be a world market for maybe five computers; this was the market leader of the mainframe computers making this prediction in the 1950s. A more recent example would be that of Steve Ballmer’s reaction to the iPhone launch. He was the CEO of Microsoft, who had a competing product in the same segment at the time of the iPhone’s launch, and even he couldn’t see how the iPhone was going to change the world. And Intel, the market leader in computer chips, didn’t think mobile was a big enough market for it to invest significant effort into R&D.

It turns out, all of them were one hundred percent wrong. And these are not one-off, isolated incidents; the history of the world is filled with many such examples.

The other problem, of course, is that we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what unique circumstances shall lead to a radical change, either good or bad. The best example of it is COVID-19. No one can predict a thing like this. It’s truly what Nassim Taleb calls a Black Swan Event. Another example of this can be found in the movies from the 70s and the 80s about time-traveling into the future.

My favorite one is the Back To The Future trilogy, specifically Back to the Future Part II, where Marty McFly travels forward in time and lands in 2015. There are flying cars and 3D holograms, hoverboards that don’t work on water, doors without nobs, and intelligent clothes and footwear that adjust automatically to your body and dry automatically too (I’m bumped that they don’t exist today). All of them are iterative improvements. But the TVs are still CRT, no flat-screen TVs; computers are still desktop, no laptops; phones are still landline, no cell-phones.

No touch screens, no wireless devices, no internet. Basically, everything radical that happened in the last 20 years that couldn’t be predicted was missing.

PS - watch the next video too.

The bottom line is - there is hardly any value in predicting the iterative stuff because it is, well, iterative. And almost no one is capable of predicting the radical stuff because it’s impossible to do so.

That is why I find the whole business of predicting the future to be a futile endeavor. It’s probably best to liberate ourselves of the notion that we are capable of predicting anything meaningful.

Tell me if you disagree.

Best,
Kaddy

PS - I know it’s a little pessimistic view, but it’s one of the very few things I am pessimistic about.

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