The predictable top ten predictions of 2013
Around this time of year, many commentators on technology (and probably other things) like to offer their "top ten predictions" for the coming year. I've recently skimmed through IEEE Spectrum's 2013 Tech to Watch and the top ten tech predictions of The Conversation's Mark Gregory.
I say "skimmed through" because I'm doubtful that it would be worth my time to examine such predictions in detail. For a start, it isn't clear to me how the commentators define "top ten". Do they mean their ten most confident predictions? Or, since this criterion would result in unhelpful predictions like "computers will represent numbers in binary", maybe they mean their ten most confident predictions of what will change? Or, do they mean the ten most profitable technologies? Or the ten most influential? Or the ten most interesting (which is surely subjective)?
I recently read Duncan Watts' Everything is Obvious, which, among many other things, makes the point that commentators making these sorts of predictions are rarely held to account for what they say. Commentators set out their predictions for the year in December or January, but, so far as I can tell, they're largely forgotten come February. The predictions have no obvious consequences for either their makers or their users, and, indeed, seem to amply satisfy Harry Frankfurt's rigourous definition of "bullshit" as speech made without any concern as to whether it is true or not.
Watts observes that, not only is it difficult to predict the fate of current trends, we don't even know what to predict. Perhaps, in this case, Spectrum's contributors can make some informed guesses about electric vehicles or computer displays that they happen to have heard about, but numerous technologies of the future are likely being developed in currently unheard-of lab experiments or software development houses where neither the IEEE nor anyone else knows to look.
To be fair to Spectrum, I don't think the editors necessarily mean to make any grand statements about what technology will or won't be popular or profitable or influential, but only to draw the reader's attention to some technology that the editors think is interesting. The writers do acknowledge the doubters and pitfalls of technology like Google Glasses, for example. I wonder if they and their fellow prognosticators ought to dispense with the "top ten 10" and the "predictions", and use a more modest "ten interesting things"? After all, that's what the editors do effectively when they put together an ordinary issue of Spectrum or The Conversation.
