WillJ's rules for predicting the future

[WillJ]

1. If something seems "futuristic," it will never happen.
examples: flying cars, people replacing themselves with robots

2. The stupider, more asinine something sounds, the more likely it is to be popular in the future.
example to watch for: rap songs performed entirely by parakeets

3. As technology progresses, humans themselves regress.
example to watch for: increased flatulence

4. When it comes to style, after you are done with your teenage and early-adult years, everything will be inexplicable to you. Therefore, when trying to predict style, the more inexplicable the prediction, the better.
example to watch for: wearing suits only fashionably acceptable if they're inside-out

5. A basic trend never lasts for more than ten years.
example: the Internet will not engulf the entire world

6. Humans will simply never die out. Ever.

----

Agree? Disagree? Anyone got any more rules?

 

[Babbler]

0. Odds are, you're wrong.

 

[Nylan]

If a technology is estimated to be invented by a certain year, it's either going to take a lot longer or no time at all.

 

[Truronian]

I'm still waiting for the return of barbershop.

 

[The Last Conformist]

I'd contend the 'Net is still going strong, despite being well more than a decade old.

7. The speed of acceptance of any new technology is directly proportional to its applicability to porn.

 

[Nylan]

I'd contend the 'Net is still going strong, despite being well more than a decade old.

Indeed the net is no trend. I suppose it will develop into a 3D multiverse where social interaction is much more real, and when you're in a site you are fully immersed in it and it's graphics, enhancing the feeling of the site as well as the message it conveys.

 

[Perfection]

8. You will always need more power.

 

[Winner]

1. If something seems "futuristic," it will never happen.
examples: flying cars, people replacing themselves with robots

2. The stupider, more asinine something sounds, the more likely it is to be popular in the future.
example to watch for: rap songs performed entirely by parakeets

3. As technology progresses, humans themselves regress.
example to watch for: increased flatulence

4. When it comes to style, after you are done with your teenage and early-adult years, everything will be inexplicable to you. Therefore, when trying to predict style, the more inexplicable the prediction, the better.
example to watch for: wearing suits only fashionably acceptable if they're inside-out

5. A basic trend never lasts for more than ten years.
example: the Internet will not engulf the entire world

6. Humans will simply never die out. Ever.

----

Agree? Disagree? Anyone got any more rules?

Number 6 scan: ) is wrong. There is absolutely no guarantee we will survive this century. Humanity as a species (Homo Sp. Sapiens) is about 200-300 thousand years old. Humanity, including the other human species, is less than 3 million years old. That's nothing but a tiny bit of time from the evolutionary point of view, there had been species 10 times older, which eventually died out. Sure, we can argue we're intelligent (sometimes I doubt it) therefore the rules don't apply on us like they apply on the other species, but the fact is there is no safeguard of our continued existence.

Winner's rules:

7. If something can be done, it will be done.
example: once we knew how to start a fission reaction, we developed the atomic bomb.

8. If a technology has a military application, it will be pursued.
example: genetics, robotics, nanotechnology - don't fool ourselves, everything will be abused for military purposes.

9. Human nature does not change.
example: technology did not affect the lust for power, wealth etc., it just changed the means how to get to it.

 

[Mirc]

10. Make it as unclear as possible. Make it so that as many things as possible fit with it, like "The sky is going to turn red, not blue". If a world war will come, if the person is going to be hurt, if he's going to start a strawberry business, or anything else that has any connection to the color "red", then what you said became true!

 

[Bozo Erectus]

11. Find out what happened in the past. It'll happen again, guaranteed.

 

[Jawz II]

Remeber back in the early 90s when everyone thought virtual reality was gonna be the next big thing?

Then when the internet became popular, everyone and their dad was falling over themselves to invest money in all those IT companies to sell us everything from groceries to clothing online! I'm not kidding you, I actually read an article about some experimental supermarket that you could shop in online, and they said that it was the way of the future.

Yeah, Im too lazy to even buy food, so Ill pay extra for some zit covered kid to pick out bad fruit and the wrong kind of ketchup for me, sounds like the future allright.

I could've told them why internet shopping would fail, and heres why:
Men dont shop, we buy stuff.
We buy them and get the hell out of there, probably because of all the emotional scars our mom left us with when they dragged us from store to store when we were kids.

Women shop, and for them shopping is more than looking at a .jpg of the said product, they have to see it for themselves, touch it, smell it, turn it around and repeat this procedure from every angle, compare prices, colors, sizes, you name it.

For them it's not the arrival, its the journey, theyre out on an adventure.

And shopping online just doesnt do it for them.

 

[Ayatollah So]

12. Never allow your predictions to come back to haunt you - see rules #0 and #10. You don't want people realizing how bad your predictive track record actually is. So don't write them down, or if you do, do it in some soon-forgotten place like a CFC thread.

 

[Brighteye]

People will rely on new technology before it's reliable.

People will push the limits of what can be done.

People will be wasteful.

People give value to novelty, even if it's worse on all other counts.

 

[scy12]

13) Always have sufficient evidence to support your predictions else they are not predictions but science fiction .

14) Technological innovation seems to come slowly on already known technologies by Companies so the scenario of today's devices being replaced soon is unrealistic. Furthermore it is unrealistic that only one style will become dominant (Clothing , Music , products ) when their are already countless different ones.

 

[Urederra]

12. Never allow your predictions to come back to haunt you - see rules #0 and #10. You don't want people realizing how bad your predictive track record actually is. So don't write them down, or if you do, do it in some soon-forgotten place like a CFC thread.

Or don't be naive and do what the "experts" did. Delfos oracle or Nostradamus tried to predict the future with ambiguous and general statements, so they can be interpreted in many ways.

EDIT: Sorry mIRC, I missed your point.

If you want to be more scientific, place your statemes in a far future. Never predict anything that you expect to happen while you are still alive. Don't do what Carl Sagan did, so you don't have to retract.

Sagan famously predicted on ABC's Nightline in 1991 that smoky oil fires in Kuwait (set by Saddam Hussein's army during the first Gulf War) would cause a worldwide ecological disaster of black clouds resulting in global cooling. Retired atmospheric physicist and climate change skeptic Fred Singer dismissed Sagan's prediction as nonsense, predicting that the smoke would dissipate in a matter of days.

(ummm.. somebody changed that paragraph. When I visited that wiki entry last month it said that Sagan had to retract his statement, after the smoke disspated and no global cooling was observed)

 

[Mirc]

Or don't be naive and do what the "experts" did. Delfos oracle or Nostradamus tried to predict the future with ambiguous and general statements, so they can be interpreted in many ways.

Exactly what I said, so I completely agree with that.

 

[EdwardTking]

Ed's 22 Predictions


1) The Canaries (Norwich City) will have another bad year.

2) The army will lose another division in Afghanistan or Iraq.

3) The Queen will send for the best doctors to attend in white coats to take Tony Blair away somewhere quiet after his staff give up trying to pretend that what he so glibly says can be mapped against any plausable reality.

4) Computers will not solve everything. They will solve things, but what
they solve will be so complicated that you cannot understand the problem.

5) The world will convert to NGN (next generation networks) which will become so complex they will stop working and be renamed No Good Networks.

6) Competing hedge funds will premptively and near simultaneously deploy AI hedge funds to wipe the other corporations out before they switch their's on. Scale testing will be skimped on; and the AIs will fail to anticipate the actions of other AIs. A combination of bugs in the AIs programming and entrophy will cause chaotic looping actions which will result in some corporations claiming astronomical payments that cannot possibly be met. The resulting cross default will at first look like a bonanza time for lawyers, until the penny drops that they will themselves almost certainly not get paid. The crash will irretrievably wreck global financial markets for a generation.

7) When people then realise that 4,500 year old resource trade tool loosely called 'money' is an entirely imaginary belief system, the world including your part of it will become very confused.

8) An awful lot of westerners will be unpleasantly surprised when they realise that they have only two travel options: walking or cycling; because they just won't be able to afford the fossil fuel based transport.

9) Globalism will be replaced by localism. It is not that EU or US governments won't exist, they will just refuse to try to do anything they think a state can do for itself. The state won't do anything that the county can do.

10) Scotland will become independent.

11) Climate change will result in mass starvation in China and elsewhere.

12) The most important politician will be your mayor and town work
planner who will decide whether you get electricity or whether you are
better conscripted to tricycling human poo to the farms this week.

13) Certain professions such as lawyer and salesman will dissappear.
Next generation's kids will aspire to be grand master recyclists.
Less able childrem will mine the rubbish tips for anything useful.

14) Capital punishment will be reintroduced, for bicycle thieves.
For minor crimes, the sentence will be hard labour on the treadmill generator.

15) Policepeople will look younger.

16) The ending of street lighting to save electricity will enable you to step outside your house and see the milky way on a summer's night.

17) The locally grown genetically engineered substitutes for unavailable imported coffee, chocolate or cocoa will never taste quite as good.

18) Being kind to an old person will mean shopping for them.

19) Being extraordinarily kind to an old person (favourite gran) will be
letting them sit on the back of your tandem while you do all the pedalling.

20) When you talk about the good old days when your father
could just decide on the day to go out in your father's car for
a pleasure trip; your grand-kids will laugh at you in utter disbelief.

21) When the youth get bored, they will call you a "profligate consumerist"
and form teams by the pond in the now so popular duck the grandad contest.

22) When you are about 95 and dying, some young person will tell
you that a fusion reactor has been built which generates more power
than it consumes and totally puzzled ask you what it means; and you
will reply 'now they tell me, to me not a lot sir, I won't last the week'
and take petty revenge on a world by dying saying nothing more.

 

[Perfection]

635) Lace 'em with words like "Web 2.0" and fill it up with obvious grandiose generalities and you can make like 10 million goddamned dollars on a book deal.