Knock It Off With the Tech Prediction Stories

At the end of each year, tech prognosticators will attempt to predict the upcoming year's hot products or trends. Others will summarize the year that just ended. Even more will discuss the year's major flops, many of which were predicted to be the next big thing.

Then comes one of my specialties: ridiculing the bad predictions.

If you look at the predictions made in 2016 about 2017, it was going to be the year of the self-driving truck, for example. I have yet to see one on the road. If you are not in Mountain View, California, you probably haven't either.

Some of the predictions are cyclical, which makes it easier to ridicule since you can point back in time and say "Hey, that was predicted in 1982. What happened?" Robots fit into this category. AI, too.

The wishful thinking predictions are always with us. These probably began with the idea of flying cars in the 1920s and 1930s. Now that computers can fly quadcopters, the flying car is just around the corner, right? Ask Elon.

A similar evergreen prediction is the desktop computer becoming an easy-to-use appliance rather than a complex machine running millions of lines of software code that is perpetually buggy and needs constant fixing. This appliance idea is not a prediction, it's a prayer.

The higher-end version of this prediction says that everything will be operating from the cloud. Thus the best machine you can buy is a Chromebook. But what about those rumors that Google will merge ChromeOS and Android?

Then there are the predictions about inventions and raw technologies such as nanotubes. When you read about some invention like graphene, for example, and its imagined impact on the tech scene in the form of a prediction, bet against it and wait a decade. Take the example of the invention of the transistor around 1947. It took a decade before the device would begin to appear in computers, replacing the pesky vacuum tubes. Ten years is a good yardstick for actual adoption of a unique invention.

A more recent example is the invention of electronic "ink" or e-ink invented in 1996 at MIT. The first commercialization was in 2007 with the E Ink Vizplex display. The Amazon Kindle appeared later that same year using the technology.

Once the technology is in place, then improvements and evolution can take place rapidly as we've witnessed with the hard disk. That's an interesting product category when it comes to yearly prophecies. I've never seen the obvious prediction that "hard disk capacity will DOUBLE this year." Yet, beginning in the early 1980s I've seen forecast after forecast telling us that this will be the last year we'll be using hard disks. Yet they are still here. They work, they're fast, and they are cheap. What more do you want from a technology?

I'd recommend a review of the predictions of 2017 here. You'll quickly see the patterns of malarkey. The one consistent prediction that stands out is the belief that by now we'd all be wearing virtual reality and augmented reality heads-up displays all the time. Har.

My yearly prediction is the only accurate one: by the end of next year expect to see a lot more predictions.