All three of yours are on my list, along with 7 others.
But that doesn't take away from your point. Predictions are hard. Unless you're predicting that Daniel will be a wise-ass. In which case, you're always 100% correct.
I was gonna suggest that you redo that piece on Nest Expressed, and I'm gonna double down on the request now that I had to close and reopen my browser after visiting the TopTenz site just now. I was first introduced to TopTenz fairly recently, I think, via Simon Whistler on YouTube, and had no idea they had been a thing for a while. I've been a bit out of the loop.
I am going to forgive Watson here, though (I think my concession in the article was fair and reasonable), but Olsen and Popular Mechanics are still gonna have their feet held to the fire. They really should have clarified if they meant only a particular type of computer, which is the retroactive claim being made.
And yeah, sentiment/directionality is more important than technical accuracy, regardless of where someone lands on all this.
I was paid for that TopTenz article back then and I believe that precludes me from publishing it elsewhere. Did the site fail to load or crashed? That's the only article I've ever written for them, so I actually wasn't sure if they're still around.
I think I was bombarded with like 10 popups that kind of overwhelmed my system for a sec. I closed my browser and opened it back up and it's all good now.
It's a good thing most predictions don't come true. In the prototype days of science fiction in the 19th century, many authors wore their politics on their sleeves and concocted utopians where white men solved their societies' problems easily and subjugated everyone else to their rule. I would be delighted to inform them that this did not happen (at least the former part).
I worked in the marketing department at an early cell provider and, after getting a sneak peek at would become SMS, we decided as a team it was silly and no one would ever type a message when they could just pick up their crazy new cellular phone and call 🤦🏼♀️
I understand SMS itself was simply leftover bandwidth nobody was using, and that explains how we ended up with the arbitrary character count and stuff like that.
Interesting article. I imagine if the singulatarians prove to be right, it’s going to be practically impossible to make predictions soon. Though that’s a big "if".
I try to avoid predictions...but I'm really disappointed we don't have flying cars!😂
Seriously, if you go back far enough you'll see all sorts of unexpected changes...like Stanley Steamer was the best-selling and biggest car company in the U.S. in the early 1900s and 1910s...because the internal combustion engine still required a crank to start and this was cumbersome and dangerous. The invention of the electric starter motor basically put the Stanley Motor Carriage Company out of business!
Who'd have thunk it?
And by the way...the best Yogi-ism is "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded!"😂
"I want to thank everybody for making this day necessary."
The big changes happen in really big leaps, or at least that's how it looks to history. There are tiny gradual changes secretly lining things up all the time, but you can't really see them from far away, and then all of a sudden, one technology enables like 3 dozen other ideas to be proven right or wrong, or acted on in some new way, and those new trails lead o a dozen new pathways each.
Read Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” He’s the guy who coined the term “Paradigm Shift.”
Institutions tend to work at reinforcing the existing paradigms; it takes people outside the institutions to look at the “anomalies” that accumulate over time; anomalies being the data that doesn’t fit the existing paradigm and is ignored by institutions. These people are reponsible for the advances. So it’s not the slow accretion of knowledge that drives scientific snd technological progress; it’s the accumulation of results that don’t fit the paradigm and thinkers who are unconstrained by the existing paradigm that create progress.
The paradox is that the very people who create the new paradigm find themselves being the ones reinforcing it…
There have been those special spots throughout our history, where somehow or other the institution has been fluid enough not to become institution-like, such as with Bell Labs or Menlo Park, right? I think those places kind of defied the odds by constantly churning and churning for new ideas and paradigms.
SIde note, I've read summaries of Kuhn's work and like his ideas.
True…and Kuhn was specifically referring to academia, though I think giant corporations like IBM and now Google, Apple, etc fall into a similar category. Also government institutions like NASA, NOAA, CDC. etc…
Yes, for sure. You have to have those disruptors who come around every few years, and then when they become institutionalized, you need disruptors for the disruptors! I think it's very true with academia AND with big companies - spot on.
Yeah…people forget that when Einstein published his papers on the photoelectric effect and special relativity he was working as a patent clerk, not as an academic. And most of the innovations in the early days of quantum theory came from grad students and recent grads…they created the existing paradigm.
A more recent and extreme example was the guy who showed that most ulcers are caused by bacterial infection…by drinking a bacterial culture, getting diagnosed with an ulcer, then treating it with antibiotics and documenting that it went away. He had not just the entire academic medical community dismissing him but also the large pharmaceutical companies.
I predict that in 110 years, humans will all be wearing slap-bracelet like devices that will morph to our skin tone to become nearly invisible and hold all of our intel. I know probably in less than 110 years… that’s just when my novel is set. (Basically, I want slap-bracelets to come back)
All of our intel: like all of our life experiences? Every piece of data we've ever encountered? I think about that a lot, and Substack is probably the closest I'm coming to this right now.
You pose a very interesting conundrum… I have it functioning like a smartphone (on the basic level), plus it opens doors, starts vehicles, controls lights/electromatic windows, etc, tracks biometric data (so the school lunch machine spits out a macronutrient appropriate meals for each student), school schedules/records/test scores, hologram-like camcalls and video playing… so it probably has medical records, gps location tracking records, and access to surveillance coverage. Oh, and people add blocking software and encrypted messaging/call features to stop others from listening. What am I missing???
Not sure, but I think all that's available today with 2024 tech. None of it is seamlessly integrated, nor do the components yet work flawlessly, but the guts are all there today. I think we might see what you're describing in 20 years or so.
FWIW (and perhaps not with much by way of relevancy), I like to draw a distinction between prediction and its sub-discipline of forecasting. I guess I am less of a frequentist as time goes on ;)
John, do you mind articulating what the difference is? I think the context could help any comment eavesdroppers (yes, I'm talking about you, person reading this without commenting - you are great! don't change a thing about yourself).
There’s a podcast with a Bayesian statistician and science writer and a recovering/recovered academic psychologist which is pretty excellent imho, so, in the name of publicity, I should reference it here (they are clever people and sound like they are having fun!). All the best, John
Very succinct! I just finished "The Man From the Future", so von Neumann's contributions to meteorology (and all kinds of similar systems) is very much on my mind.
It meandered a bit, the stuff about von Neumann himself... well hey, there was a lot of it! That guy had a very full life of academic contributions, to make the understatement of the century.
I would like to add myself to your list of illustrious technologist when I dumped all my Apple stock when they introduced the iPod because why would anybody ever wanna listen to music from a doohickey in their pocket? Bro, that's not even a computer
I only mention Google because it's like the one puck I could really see, and believed in fully, and yet didn't pull the trigger. Of course, I was punk and poor, so there was that too.
I remember Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. He came closest to predicting the sense of disconnection in a world of impermanence, but maybe that has always been happening.
I think the change is able to happen within a lifetime now, and for nearly everyone, whereas it used to take a few generations for new ideas to spread, like farming or writing. Now, if an idea is discovered, the whole world sees it right away.
I'm gonna go ahead and be the "Well, actually...." guy here and share this old article of mine where I not so much debunk as put in context some of these so-called "bad predictions": https://www.toptenz.net/top-10-famously-bad-predictions-experts-didnt-actually-make.php
All three of yours are on my list, along with 7 others.
But that doesn't take away from your point. Predictions are hard. Unless you're predicting that Daniel will be a wise-ass. In which case, you're always 100% correct.
I was gonna suggest that you redo that piece on Nest Expressed, and I'm gonna double down on the request now that I had to close and reopen my browser after visiting the TopTenz site just now. I was first introduced to TopTenz fairly recently, I think, via Simon Whistler on YouTube, and had no idea they had been a thing for a while. I've been a bit out of the loop.
I am going to forgive Watson here, though (I think my concession in the article was fair and reasonable), but Olsen and Popular Mechanics are still gonna have their feet held to the fire. They really should have clarified if they meant only a particular type of computer, which is the retroactive claim being made.
And yeah, sentiment/directionality is more important than technical accuracy, regardless of where someone lands on all this.
I was paid for that TopTenz article back then and I believe that precludes me from publishing it elsewhere. Did the site fail to load or crashed? That's the only article I've ever written for them, so I actually wasn't sure if they're still around.
I think I was bombarded with like 10 popups that kind of overwhelmed my system for a sec. I closed my browser and opened it back up and it's all good now.
They gotta earn back that kingly sum of 50 dollars I received somehow.
Kim Jung Un and Neo from the Matrix just hoisted like 0.001 cent from each of my eyeballs, so it's just about volume from here on out.
It's a good thing most predictions don't come true. In the prototype days of science fiction in the 19th century, many authors wore their politics on their sleeves and concocted utopians where white men solved their societies' problems easily and subjugated everyone else to their rule. I would be delighted to inform them that this did not happen (at least the former part).
Utopias of any sort are dangerous, but the ones that advocate for a preferred class are the grossest of all.
Yes goats are very capricious!
Always up to some mischievous caper!
I worked in the marketing department at an early cell provider and, after getting a sneak peek at would become SMS, we decided as a team it was silly and no one would ever type a message when they could just pick up their crazy new cellular phone and call 🤦🏼♀️
I understand SMS itself was simply leftover bandwidth nobody was using, and that explains how we ended up with the arbitrary character count and stuff like that.
Interesting article. I imagine if the singulatarians prove to be right, it’s going to be practically impossible to make predictions soon. Though that’s a big "if".
It's already pretty tough, so even if it's just kind of a slow acceleration upward from here, it's' gonna be rough on us poor (unaugmented) humans.
Agreed.
When I was a kid, we were promised flying cars by the Nineties.
Where is my flying car? I want my flying car, dammit!
I try to avoid predictions...but I'm really disappointed we don't have flying cars!😂
Seriously, if you go back far enough you'll see all sorts of unexpected changes...like Stanley Steamer was the best-selling and biggest car company in the U.S. in the early 1900s and 1910s...because the internal combustion engine still required a crank to start and this was cumbersome and dangerous. The invention of the electric starter motor basically put the Stanley Motor Carriage Company out of business!
Who'd have thunk it?
And by the way...the best Yogi-ism is "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded!"😂
Yogiisms are amazing! I grew up with them.
"I want to thank everybody for making this day necessary."
The big changes happen in really big leaps, or at least that's how it looks to history. There are tiny gradual changes secretly lining things up all the time, but you can't really see them from far away, and then all of a sudden, one technology enables like 3 dozen other ideas to be proven right or wrong, or acted on in some new way, and those new trails lead o a dozen new pathways each.
Read Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” He’s the guy who coined the term “Paradigm Shift.”
Institutions tend to work at reinforcing the existing paradigms; it takes people outside the institutions to look at the “anomalies” that accumulate over time; anomalies being the data that doesn’t fit the existing paradigm and is ignored by institutions. These people are reponsible for the advances. So it’s not the slow accretion of knowledge that drives scientific snd technological progress; it’s the accumulation of results that don’t fit the paradigm and thinkers who are unconstrained by the existing paradigm that create progress.
The paradox is that the very people who create the new paradigm find themselves being the ones reinforcing it…
There have been those special spots throughout our history, where somehow or other the institution has been fluid enough not to become institution-like, such as with Bell Labs or Menlo Park, right? I think those places kind of defied the odds by constantly churning and churning for new ideas and paradigms.
SIde note, I've read summaries of Kuhn's work and like his ideas.
True…and Kuhn was specifically referring to academia, though I think giant corporations like IBM and now Google, Apple, etc fall into a similar category. Also government institutions like NASA, NOAA, CDC. etc…
Yes, for sure. You have to have those disruptors who come around every few years, and then when they become institutionalized, you need disruptors for the disruptors! I think it's very true with academia AND with big companies - spot on.
Yeah…people forget that when Einstein published his papers on the photoelectric effect and special relativity he was working as a patent clerk, not as an academic. And most of the innovations in the early days of quantum theory came from grad students and recent grads…they created the existing paradigm.
A more recent and extreme example was the guy who showed that most ulcers are caused by bacterial infection…by drinking a bacterial culture, getting diagnosed with an ulcer, then treating it with antibiotics and documenting that it went away. He had not just the entire academic medical community dismissing him but also the large pharmaceutical companies.
I predict that in 110 years, humans will all be wearing slap-bracelet like devices that will morph to our skin tone to become nearly invisible and hold all of our intel. I know probably in less than 110 years… that’s just when my novel is set. (Basically, I want slap-bracelets to come back)
All of our intel: like all of our life experiences? Every piece of data we've ever encountered? I think about that a lot, and Substack is probably the closest I'm coming to this right now.
You pose a very interesting conundrum… I have it functioning like a smartphone (on the basic level), plus it opens doors, starts vehicles, controls lights/electromatic windows, etc, tracks biometric data (so the school lunch machine spits out a macronutrient appropriate meals for each student), school schedules/records/test scores, hologram-like camcalls and video playing… so it probably has medical records, gps location tracking records, and access to surveillance coverage. Oh, and people add blocking software and encrypted messaging/call features to stop others from listening. What am I missing???
Not sure, but I think all that's available today with 2024 tech. None of it is seamlessly integrated, nor do the components yet work flawlessly, but the guts are all there today. I think we might see what you're describing in 20 years or so.
FWIW (and perhaps not with much by way of relevancy), I like to draw a distinction between prediction and its sub-discipline of forecasting. I guess I am less of a frequentist as time goes on ;)
John, do you mind articulating what the difference is? I think the context could help any comment eavesdroppers (yes, I'm talking about you, person reading this without commenting - you are great! don't change a thing about yourself).
Slightly related (wrt forecasting, etc)
There’s a podcast with a Bayesian statistician and science writer and a recovering/recovered academic psychologist which is pretty excellent imho, so, in the name of publicity, I should reference it here (they are clever people and sound like they are having fun!). All the best, John
https://open.substack.com/pub/thestudiesshowpod
Glad to. The excellent Matthias Döring puts it succinctly imho (he’s a data scientist - I’m an amateur!)
https://www.datascienceblog.net/post/machine-learning/forecasting_vs_prediction/
Very succinct! I just finished "The Man From the Future", so von Neumann's contributions to meteorology (and all kinds of similar systems) is very much on my mind.
A good if extensive book.
It meandered a bit, the stuff about von Neumann himself... well hey, there was a lot of it! That guy had a very full life of academic contributions, to make the understatement of the century.
He was a very, very remarkable person. Cheers Andrew. All the best, John.
I would like to add myself to your list of illustrious technologist when I dumped all my Apple stock when they introduced the iPod because why would anybody ever wanna listen to music from a doohickey in their pocket? Bro, that's not even a computer
Ha! Remember the Google IPO? I remember when that happened and saying, "boy, that's a great investment!" and then not making it.
Same! Actually I was cynical, but I think that's because I was smack dab in the middle of the hype machine
I only mention Google because it's like the one puck I could really see, and believed in fully, and yet didn't pull the trigger. Of course, I was punk and poor, so there was that too.
Punk & Poor should be the name of some thing
I mean, it could easily be the title of something I write. I know a lot about both subjects.
I mean ... only if you write
Doh!
Also: "Dough!" Lots of it. Doh!
I remember Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. He came closest to predicting the sense of disconnection in a world of impermanence, but maybe that has always been happening.
I think the change is able to happen within a lifetime now, and for nearly everyone, whereas it used to take a few generations for new ideas to spread, like farming or writing. Now, if an idea is discovered, the whole world sees it right away.
My job was predictions of genetic codes to complex human disease. 60% accuracy was considered good work.
I mean, 27% accuracy is considered solid if you're trying to hit a baseball and you get paid millions each year, so 60% sounds really great!
Predictions are cheap. Must have skin in the game to be truthful. Wanna bet on it? :-)
This is a good place to use "follow the money."
A justified heuristic for sure.