JOHAN STEYN: After 50 years the future is still shocking
The rate of technological change and innovation has made the role of futurists tricky
Predicting the future is akin to a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that is not there. The “black cat” analogy has been in use for more than two centuries and a variety of quotes have been attributed to Charles Darwin, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Oscar Wilde and others.
There are some trends predicting what the effect of automation and machine cognition are likely to be, but for a large part we really don’t have a clue. The rate of technological change and innovation has made the role of futurists a tricky one. I think they are there to help us imagine possibilities more than act as predictors of anticipated realities. ..
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