The Next Big Things of Yesterday

August 23, 2011 3:52 PM

Megatrends That Weren't "From "the rise of the rest" to the resource wars, pontificating on the big trends that will shape the future of global politics and economics has become a big business. But history can be awfully unkind to pundits wielding crystal balls." Many people, events, organisations and Guardian political pundits have erred in the past, but perhaps their record will be better in the future.
posted by joannemullen (32 comments total)

Yeah, the Japan thing and the "endless boom" were pretty wrong, but this article ran out of steam really fast. Hating on Cliff Stoll? Seriously, Foreign Policy? Were there not more egregious predictions?
posted by GuyZero at 4:05 PM on August 23, 2011

«Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation.»
Karl Marx.

Yeah, I wouldn't get too cocky at calling that one out just yet.
posted by alasdair at 4:07 PM on August 23, 2011 [8 favorites]

The link under "people" has NSFW ads.
posted by vidur at 4:07 PM on August 23, 2011

Hindsight-tastic!

But yeah, not much to learn there really.
posted by alan2001 at 4:07 PM on August 23, 2011

This is the way the world ends: This is the way the world ends: This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.

Yeah - I'm still going with "bang."
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:10 PM on August 23, 2011

The other thing I find funny about the whole fear-of-Japan thing from the 80's is that it's kind of implied that just as Japan wasn't able to unseat America's economic might, China too will hit some road bump and American Manifest Destiny will continue to manifest itself indefinitely. Because right now it looks like the USA is warming right up to lose the next decade of economic growth just like Japan did. I think a lot of commentators took the wrong lesson from that failed prediction.
posted by GuyZero at 4:10 PM on August 23, 2011 [2 favorites]

The Hubbert peak one is downright inaccurate. The prediction that U.S. oil production would peak near to 1970. It did. His world production estimate was somewhere in the mid 2000's. If we don't see a massive surge in oil production sometime soon, he may have gotten that one right, too. The jury is still out.
posted by Zalzidrax at 4:11 PM on August 23, 2011 [9 favorites]

The record of 'experts' in prediction in world affairs is not much better than chance.

Tetlock's expert political judgement goes into detail. It's very much worth reading. The other point is that anyone who sees big patterns and makes big predictions is far less accurate that people who are ad hoc in their judgement.

Future Babble by Dan Gardner is a recent book that looks at the same material. It's also well worth a read.
posted by sien at 4:22 PM on August 23, 2011 [2 favorites]

Well gee, now I feel bad for you guys who didn't have a PicturePhone back in 1969. My dad's business was in the AT&T trial run, he got it for free. I figured everyone would have a PicturePhone soon.

I think Gene Roddenberry said something like "Nothing becomes obsolete so quickly as our conception of the future."
posted by charlie don't surf at 4:33 PM on August 23, 2011 [2 favorites]

Who was the jerk who first predicted flying cars? Because I want to kick them for raising that bright future, only for it not to appear.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 4:38 PM on August 23, 2011

Flying cars was always a horrible idea. Have you ever really watched the way people drive now? On the ground? Yeah - I can't wait to be flying around 100 feet or so above the ground at 100 MPH surrounded by morons texting each other and steering with their muffin tops.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:46 PM on August 23, 2011 [13 favorites]

It's not the one who first predicted flying cars you should kick. He or she was probably some scifi author who tossed it off as a minor detail in his story. The ones who should get kicked are the writers and editors at Popular Mechanics, Mechanix Illustrated, and all the other magazines who kept promising us that flying cars would be available really soon.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:46 PM on August 23, 2011 [1 favorite]

With smartphones, being able to video call whoever you like will become a reality eventually. However with not everyone owning a phone with a front-facing camera, and the lack of a standard (FaceTime vs. Skype vs. etc) it will be a few more years yet. 10?
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 6:06 PM on August 23, 2011

This is strange:

What peak-oil theorists have failed to take into account is both the discovery of new oil and new means of extracting difficult-to-recover reserves buried deep beneath the ocean or in tar sands in the Canadian tundra. In the last 20 years, global proven reserves have actually increased by more than 380 billion barrels.

Despite the fact that peak-oil theorists keep changing the date for when we will reach Hubbert's peak, from four decades ago to next year, their theory remains popular. The most prominent proponent in recent years was late Texas energy investor Matthew R. Simmons, who argued that Saudi Arabia's reserves are far lower than it has admitted and that a global oil shock is imminent. There are indeed questions about Saudi Arabia's reserves -- unlike other petrostates, the kingdom does not allow its fields to be independently audited -- but oil prices, while volatile, have not returned to their pre-recession heights.

Huh? Didn't global oil production peak in 2006 or so?

It's true that new oil feilds are discovered all the time, but the important thing to understand is that we discover less oil each year then we use and in fact the rate of global oil discovery actually peaked in the 1960s or something.

I mean look at this line:

In the last 20 years, global proven reserves have actually increased by more than 380 billion barrels.

That's nice, an average of 380/20 = 19 billion barrels a year discovered. Yet, oil consumption is 82,769,370.4 barrels a DAY, that's 30 billion barrels a year consumed.

I'm looking for actual year by year production statistics, I haven't found them yet but Apparently the IAEA agrees with me, oil production peaked in 2006. We haven't noticed so much because of the global downturn meant oil demand also dropped as well. (The report indicates they expect the amount of 'petroleum fuel' production to increase through 2035 due to natural gas, but natural gas isn't oil)
posted by delmoi at 7:33 PM on August 23, 2011 [6 favorites]

With smartphones, being able to video call whoever you like will become a reality eventually. However with not everyone owning a phone with a front-facing camera, and the lack of a standard (FaceTime vs. Skype vs. etc) it will be a few more years yet. 10?

It won't be too long before almost all cellphones have front facing cameras. And remember that in other countries people have had them even longer. It was U.S. carriers who (as usual) were holding things back in the U.S. After all, a front facing camera isn't any more technically challenging then a rear facing one. Carriers just didn't want to let people use the bandwidth.

But the reality is people just aren't that interested in video conferencing. It's great for people who are in love with each other, but that's about it.
posted by delmoi at 7:36 PM on August 23, 2011

Who was the jerk who first predicted flying cars? Because I want to kick them for raising that bright future, only for it not to appear.

First of all, how is a helicopter not a flying car?

Second of all, I actually think we may see real flying cars sooner then people expect. Why? Well the biggest problem with flying cars is the pilots. Put the millions of Americans who currently drive at the controls of a flying machine, and, well there would be a lot of carnage. But look at the automatic drive systems from Google and so on. Couldn't we use computer technology not only to pilot the cars but have them communicate with each other to coordinate just like real airplanes do with TCAS You could probably even give people enough control over the cars to make them feel as though they were in control and only correcting to avoid accidents. And of course if people didn't feel like manning the controls, they could just sit back and chill -- just like with the self-driving cars coming soon.

The only other problem in this scenario is fuel costs.
posted by delmoi at 7:46 PM on August 23, 2011 [2 favorites]

How much of this article is carefully crafted to support the first sentence - which doesn't really even require linking - in order to blur the situation?
posted by infini at 7:52 PM on August 23, 2011

"The ones who should get kicked are the writers and editors at Popular Mechanics, Mechanix Illustrated, and all the other magazines who kept promising us that flying cars would be available really soon."

Hey, it sold lots of magazines! They did their job.

Predicting the future is as irresistible as it is difficult. The one thing we can say for certain is that every prediction will be wrong in some way - the better predictions are just wrong less often. Some things are inevitable, like global warming, but difficult to pin down in particulars because they involve so many complex interactions. And some things (like the Japanese earthquake/tsunami) will literally come out of nowhere to become massively influential. A lot of things seem inevitable in hindsight (like the Internet), but weren't widely known about for a long time.

This is why the best predictions focus on general long term trends, instead of short term events. Eventually the oil will run out, the stock market will rise and fall many times, and new technologies that are just ideas now will someday transform our societies and totally alter the way we live our lives. But the only way to find out for sure what will happen is to stick around and see for yourself.
posted by Kevin Street at 7:56 PM on August 23, 2011

delmoi, computer controlled driving systems make a whole lot of sense. But innovations that reorganize our society to be simpler and more efficient never seem to catch on. It's like we've got some kind of need to increase the complexity in our lives, both individually and collectively, to ever higher levels. Maybe someday it will go the other way and people will feel confident enough to let the computer drive for them, but that probably won't be soon.
posted by Kevin Street at 8:05 PM on August 23, 2011

Sebastian Thrun, probably the foremost expert in the world on self-driving cars, on when we'll see self driving cars, this was done 3 years ago.
posted by sien at 9:46 PM on August 23, 2011

the future is always wrong
posted by philip-random at 10:38 PM on August 23, 2011 [1 favorite]

Obligatory 1993 AT&T ads. They were right about almost everything, except that voice-activated door thing. And the fact that any of these at all would be brought to us by AT&T.
posted by cthuljew at 1:31 AM on August 24, 2011 [2 favorites]

Give it more time..
posted by 3mendo at 2:00 AM on August 24, 2011

The only prediction I can make with any confidence is that when I go to use my mp3 player my headphones will be absurdly tangled.
posted by srboisvert at 8:34 AM on August 24, 2011 [1 favorite]

Well the biggest problem with flying cars is the pilots.

No, the biggest problem with flying cars is that they fly. It's fucking stupid to waste all that energy just to get your ass from your house to the store and back. In the air.

The biggest problem with terrestrial cars is the pilots. Drivers are idiots. Take them out of the loop. Tell your car where you want to go and then leave the controls alone. Let the car decide the route, acceleration, and speed based on what it knows about the kind of car it is and on continuous road, traffic, and weather sensing and reports about all routes to your destination. It will get you there faster and safer by working with rather than against all the other automated vehicles on the road. Just don't touch the controls.
posted by pracowity at 8:50 AM on August 24, 2011

I've tried that. It turns out, my car is actually a worse driver than I am. Go figure.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:00 AM on August 24, 2011

My car is old enough to drive itself, but it won't.
posted by Crabby Appleton at 9:10 AM on August 24, 2011

If cars drive themselves, would we still need auto insurance? Who's liable in an accident?
posted by amazingstill at 11:00 AM on August 24, 2011 [1 favorite]

Well the biggest problem with flying cars is the pilots.

No, it's the noise. Imagine your community with ten thousand mini-helicopters buzzing around all day all night ... even with mufflers. Same goes for rocket packs.

If cars drive themselves, would we still need auto insurance? Who's liable in an accident?

Steve Jobs, because Apple would definitely make this kind of car, automatic all the way.
posted by philip-random at 11:13 AM on August 24, 2011

Steve Jobs, because Apple would definitely make this kind of car, automatic all the way.

Do you not read the news? No, Apple would not make those cars.
posted by GuyZero at 11:15 AM on August 24, 2011

Thanks for the Tetlock pointer, sien.

Peak oil: I'm with delmoi and Zalzidrax. The data is still tricky (hello, Saudi reserves), and the IAE estimates aren't easily dismissed.
posted by doctornemo at 2:39 PM on August 24, 2011

If cars drive themselves, would we still need auto insurance? Who's liable in an accident?

If your apartment's bathroom springs a leak and the apartment downstairs gets flooded, who pays? If the escalator or elevator fails and someone gets hurt, who pays? If your dog escapes and bites someone, who pays?
posted by pracowity at 10:36 PM on August 25, 2011