William Gibson: Forget predicting the future
William Gibson:
We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it's going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that - we have no idea at all now where we are going.
I distrust reports that tell me what will happen in education, technology, economy, and society in the next 25 years. Let's be honest. We don't have a clue. Predictions were easier to make when we could extrapolate periods of slow change to logical outcomes. But industries are now re-written overnight. Music, software, videos, mobile phones - pick a field...the development pace is so rapid that predictions which turn out to have merit may well have more to do with luck than insight.
Posted by gsiemens at August 7, 2007 2:54 PM
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