Taking a look at this logarithmic graph, we can see that Google is well on its way to making more money than Microsoft by the year 2014.
A world in which Microsoft isn’t King of the technological era? It’s almost unthinkable, but the extrapolation of quarterly earnings doesn’t lie. The graph below makes a similar prediction,
except this time it’s Apple taking the lead, and doing so by the year 2010. Obviously both of these graphs can’t be correct, and we’re inclined to trust the latter graph from 2007 than the former one from 2006. Why? Extrapolation, for all its usefulness, proves to be an extremely unreliable predictor over the long term. Luckily this doesn’t deter futurologists from using it as a way to predict the future.
Futurology is “the study of the future” and “[analyzes] the sources, patterns, and causes of change and stability in order to develop foresight and to map alternative futures.” Of course, people have been trying to predict the future for centuries, with little or no success. Futurologists however, take a slightly different approach.
They begin by extrapolating current trends to see what might become the trends of tomorrow. They then analyze social systems and create a set of possible scenarios that could occur. Why a set of possible scenarios? As we might expect in such a complex system, there are a variety of outcomes which futurologists label possible, probable, preferable, and wildcard futures. (Wildcards are highly improbable events with high impact.)
There are still some kinks to be worked out in Futurology. Futurologists’ experiments are often unrepeatable (such as World War I) and therefore not able to use the scientific method. Somewhat less scientific methods of Futurology include the “Future Workshop” and the “Future Wheel”. Additionally,
Futurists have a decidedly mixed reputation and a patchy track record at successful prediction. For reasons of convenience, they often extrapolate present technical and societal trends and assume they will develop at the same rate into the future; but technical progress and social upheavals, in reality, take place in fits and starts and in different areas at different rates.
All the same, if history really does repeat itself, is it too much of a stretch to think that we can extrapolate history into the future?
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