Gazing Into the Crystal Ball

I was reading Arthur C. Clarke's three laws of prediction and thinking about their implications. The laws are:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clarke came up with the first of his laws in 1962, in his essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination," from the collection Profiles of the Future: An Enquiry into the Limits of the Possible.

The future is easy to get wrong. In fact, it's darn-near impossible to get right. To cite just one obvious example, Clarke envisioned that by the year 2001 we would be sending manned space missions to Jupiter and that we would have artificial intelligence on the level of HAL.

The first mis-prediction was certainly forgiveable: if you took NASA's space program and carried its progress on a linear trajectory from the Gemini program through the Apollo program and on into the 80s and 90s, of course we would be reaching the outer planets by now. What Clarke didn't foresee was the massive loss of public interest and funding.

The issue of HAL, however, is a more interesting philosophical and technological matter. It might seen reasonable to assume that with Moore's Law hard at work, we should have thinking robots by now. Why don't we? Well, it turns out that no matter how fast the processors and no matter how vast the memory storage, you still can't create consciousness out of silicon. Self-awareness seems to come from somewhere else, and we haven't figured it out yet. We can program computers to win at chess or figure out pi to the ten-billionth decimal place, but we can't program one to wonder what life is all about, to want something, to fear something, or to contemplate its own existence. We have smart phones, but we don't have C-3P0.

So I thought it would be appropriate to share my own wildly inaccurate prediction of the future here tonight. Laughable as it seems now, I honestly believed that in the era of instantly accessible Google, Wikipedia and automated spell check — not to mention IMDb for TV and movie references — everyone on the Internet would sound like a highly educated expert on every subject, all the time, and that it would be impossible to determine who was really smart and who was just cutting and pasting. Clearly, this was a wildly, spectacularly wrong guess. But looking back, doesn't it seem like a perfectly sensible assumption? With all that information so easily and instantly available, why would anyone take a chance at seeming ignorant? It's not like you even have to go to the trouble of getting your fat butt up out of your comfy chair and pulling a dictionary down off the shelf. All that vast information is so conveniently available with a keystroke or a finger swipe.

It still amazes me when people post things like, "lol wasnt their a movie in the 80's about a guy on a motorcycle who went back in tiem???" You. Are. On. The. Internet. RIGHT. NOW. Does it honestly not occur to you to look it up? I can tell you how old Fred Ward was when Timerider came out in 1982 (40). And can we talk about how hot Belinda Bauer is?

So I suppose they either (a) don't know how to do a Web search (unlikely), (b) are too lazy to do a Web search (getting warmer) or (c) just don't care (bingo).

The point of all this is, no matter how logical the reasoning behind your expectation, human nature consistently defies prognostication. My advice? Diversify your portfolio.