Welcome to the Long Term

Futurists are often accused of excessive optimism about technology. I have been to a lot of parties at which people learn my profession and immediately ask, "Where's my flying car? " Major technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, genetic engineering, and robotics and automation have all been touted for decades as being just around the corner. Yet somehow they have failed to make the long-term impact futurists have predicted for them. Because we are immersed in technology trends, it is easy for futurists to forget about what I call the "social sink" associated with new technologies. In systems thinking, a sink is a place where something flowing through a system is delayed for a time until it accumulates enough to spill over into the rest of the system. Think of a hydroelectric dam: after it is built, the river water must fill the lake before the water can move across the dam to turn the turbine blades and create electricity. For a breakthrough technology to have a widespread impact, it must develop to a point that it can spill over into the wider society. That means someone has to be able to make the technology in significant quantities, enough people have to want to buy it, the government has to allow it to be sold, and businesses have to make money selling it. Until these challenges are solved, promising technologies can't enter--and change--the rest of our social system. So, generally, it is important to take predictions about our technology future with a bit of caution, accounting for the inevitable delays associated with the "social sink. " Except this time. This time pay attention. We're really serious this time. The lake is filled and the dam is overflowing, causing all sorts of change downstream. Incredible jumps in key technologies--automation, cognitive computing, virtual and augmented reality, and genetic engineering--over the last three years have left even foresight professionals a bit in future shock. Despite training, forecasting tools, and experience, the realities of the exponential change already wrought, and soon to be delivered, by these key technologies make it difficult to forecast either the short or long term. Futurists know that change happens in every sector of society, and these changes in individual domains interact with each other in ways that can amplify, mitigate, or delay their impacts on our lives. Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Weiner (1967) described this interaction and the waves of change it produces as "multifold trends"; to forecast change, they argued, these interactions between individual changes and trends must be understood in aggregate. There are times, however, when change in one area shakes the world, producing massive change across sectors: the rise of Communism and Fascism in the early 20th century, the Great Depression in the 1920s, the birth of the semiconductor, the rise of the Baby Boom generation, the development of the commercial Internet and later the smartphone, and the discovery of global climate change. It is true that many of these changes are themselves the result of interconnected trends--Did the mechanization enabled by the internal combustion engine provoke the growth of new political systems, resulting in the political cataclysms that led to two world wars? Was the Great Depression brought on by environmental changes? Would computation have advanced without World War II? --but it is no less true that once these new developments arose, they became the dominant forces of change in the world. It's technology's turn to create world-altering change once again, thanks to Amara's Law, which says that we tend to overestimate a technology's effect in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. To understand where we are now, it is important to understand why this law is so true. Different trends exhibit different change patterns: economic change is dominated by cycles, environmental trends by punctuated equilibrium, social change by generational waves. …