Talk:Futurology

From Future

Is there a reason the article starts with "by contrast", or is this a relic from a move? Engelhardt 01:56, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm quite skeptical of this, honestly. Single person futurology is very much outdated. It's basically impossible, because the sheer amount of data required for it to be even close to accurate is mind boggling. You have the right idea in setting up this wiki, yes, but the future is in prediction markets. Tha's the closest approximation we can come to any level accurate future prediction that we have right now. It's because a market is the sum of the knowledge of all its participants, making it a very powerful tool.

And as much as I love prediction markets, even those are oftentimes garbage. Ever heard of black swans? A black swan is a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. They're impossible to predict, and their role in history is undeniable. In hindsight they often seem obvious, leading to the delusion that they COULD have been predicted, but in reality the sheer randomness and complexity of their occurances is too powerful.

That's another thing that makes this 'science' impossible. Chaos, randomness, entropy. The future is not definitie, and it is not determined entirely by human actions. I'm not talking about a higher supernatural power here, I'm talking about blind chance. You can't predict which way the coin flip will go, and that coin flip could have a huge impact on history.

Let's take Guy Fawkes for example. Could anyone have 'seen' his plot to blow up Parliament coming? Even if you had perfect knowledge of the citizens of Britain (utterly impossible) and you knew about the plot, could you possibly have predicted the weather conditions that made his plot fail? Of course not. Weathermen can't even do that.

So, at best, this science is good for analyzing trends and broad outcomes. You may be able to say "It is probable that artificial intelligence will be discovered at some point in the next 100 years" or "neuroscience will acheive growing importance in the upcoming decade" but predicing inventions, events, or even broad patterns of history...I seriously doubt it. Just looking at what you have on your site, I can already see that I disagree with many things you say based on simple information. What's more, some of the people here seem pretty cocky. Reality check?