Posted by Adam Gordon on Jul 15, 2008 in 2015, 2025, all, emerging technologies, failed predictions, forecast filtering, horizon scanning, lifestyles & values, managing uncertainty, Perils of Prediction, politics of the future, social change, strategic foresight, technology change, trend tracking | 0 comments
In planning seminars and discussions about the future, a key topic is inevitably “technology change.” Participants will turn to each other, or perhaps to industry research or techno-tracking Web sites or “technology roadmaps” to consider technology changes in their industry and in the world at large, and how this may change the future.
So far so good. Tracking technology change is an important stage in scanning the external environment and anticipating sources or change and/or disruption. But no technology ever changed itself. History is littered with fabulous mind-bending, world-changing technologies that didn’t make it out of the lab. In fact, technologies only change because humans or human institutions want them to change AND (two separate hurdles here) they allow them to change.
Most people, most of the time, want technologies to change because they change for the better, improving products and services and/or making them cheaper. Companies want new technologies because improvements offer new sales options and (sometimes) industry competitive advantage, among other things. Societies express the desire for technology to go forward by stimulating and facilitating change in many ways (for example through government or industry funding of R&D or protecting intellectual property or making capital markets more transparent.)
Technology filtered by human choice
Once a technology breakthrough emerges, that’s hardly the end of the story. In fact it is still very much the beginning. New technologies of any importance are subject to public scrutiny and choices. Individually, or as a society, we ask ourselves, is this technology good for us? Debates happen, and power and politics and regulation takes its course, but one way or another technologies that most people like – mobile phone’s for example – will go forward while technologies such as GMOs will stall. Also, in a market economy, technologies are inescapably subject to consumer economics: those that raise user benefit (pass a buyer;s cost-benefit analysis) will be adopted. Those that don’t sit in the lab.
In other words, technology possibility is a matter of science and engineering, and the possibility frontier is expanding all the time, but the road from possibility to actuality is the rocky road of human ideas, preferences, and choices. Technology change means technology adoption, that is, it is a form of social change.
Why is this distinction important? Because one of the main reasons forecast fail is they see the technology possibility frontier as the future, underestimating the forces of social triage. There are two sites that I love that illustrate this wonderfully. Check out Paleo-Future (A Look into the Future that Never Was) and Modern Mechanics (Yesterday’s Tomorrow Today). Both are crammed with failed forecasts of this type. This is not to say that we cannot forecast usefully – much more to come on this in this journal – but it does give us pause in viewing many of today’s techno-inspired forecasts which make the same type of error. (Pics credit to the sites mentioned.)
