An interesting post from tech commentator Robert X. Cringely reveals how he predicted the death of the personal computer back in 1992, in his book Accidental Empires. He called the death for right about... now.Here, I agree John Geanokoplos, a professor of economics at Yale, that unconditional predictions are shots in the dark. Because there are so many unknowns, esp. at the macro level, that it's much more prudent to work on developing and tracking alternative future scenarios.
His logic, based on history, was that transformative information technologies take 30 years to essentially be digested by society. It took three decades before moveable type led to books. It took three decades before telephones truly began to permeate and transform our lives. Similarly, film was born in the last years of the 19th century but only took off in the 1920s, and TV was invented in the 1920s but didn’t really take off until the 1950s.
tags: s-curve, technology, method, prediction
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