
Ask HN: Effective Methods for Predicting Technology? - wildermuthn
A recent interview with the CTO of OpenAI, Greg Bockman, made a fascinating point: new technology is hard to predict (“imagine predicting Uber and smartphones in the 50s”).<p>And yet good science fiction writers routinely do just that. I think in particular of Forster’s “The Machine Stops.”<p>What are effective methods for predicting future technology?
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onion2k
_And yet good science fiction writers routinely do just that. I think in
particular of Forster’s “The Machine Stops.”_

This is survivorship bias. Between them all scifi authors predict _everything_
they can imagine, and a few of them happen to get close enough to what happens
that they look accurate, and people conveniently forget all the ones who were
wildly off the mark.

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lm28469
> yet good science fiction writers routinely do just that.

I see two things going on here.

\- Science fiction influencing engineers / scientists.

\- Selection bias, how many sci-fo books/movies are completely wrong ? If you
produce 100 000 scenarios surely some of them will be more or less comparable
to reality.

Did back to the future predict self lacing shoes ? Or did Nike invent self
lacing shoes because of back to the future ? &c.

