The 21 December 2010 issue of New Scientist Magazine (issue 279) has an Editorial called the future of futurology; It mentions Bruce de Mesquita’s work on predictioneering, which i covered on the Smart Economy Blog last year.
The Art of Predicting is becoming a Science.
"FUTUROLOGY has a chequered past. Croesus, king of Lydia, consulted the oracle at Delphi and was advised, "if King Croesus should cross the Halys river, a great empire would be destroyed".
Believing the oracle's divination to be favourable, Croesus attacked Persia in 547 BC. However, it was his own empire that ultimately crumbled.
Today's oracles seem no more reliable. Who five years ago was predicting that the world economy would now be on its knees? [Smart Economy blog did in 2006-WD]
Did anyone foresee an African American president of the US, or that swine flu, not bird flu, was to go pandemic? As the great quantum physicist Niels Bohr once remarked, "prediction is very difficult, especially about the future".
That is true, but only to an extent. Nobody knows what next week's lottery numbers will be, or which country will win the 2014 football World Cup. But the future is not a closed book, so long as you pick the right questions and methods.
The future isn't a closed book, so long as you pick the right questions and methods
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the self-styled "predictioneer", uses game theory to calculate the likely outcome of political negotiations. Complexity theorists, meanwhile, are increasingly confident that they can detect warning signs of imminent collapse in systems such as the global economy.
[N.B....Back in the 1970's and 80's,Cybernetic experts using sytem dynamics modeling in Kyiv and Moscow predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union by 1990 plus or minus one or two years-not a popular notion at the time, but key people did pay heed. Two years before the collapse of the FSU, Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs started to move their wealth off-shore in 1988-89. These predictions were spot on. Similar systems dynamics modeling shows that Putinism in Russian and president Yanukowych in Ukraine will suffer a similar faith as did the former Soviet Union--Walter Derzko]
Google even believes it can use all the personal data it continually harvests to guess what you'll do next.
Now New Scientist is playing the prediction game. We teamed up with Samuel Arbesman of Harvard University, who uses measures of scientific progress to predict the timing of new discoveries, to make some forecasts (see "In with the new: 2011 predictions, 2010 in review").
There's something inherently satisfying about using science to make predictions about science. It brings futurology closer than ever before to genuinely following the scientific method. Futurology is also useful: it helps focus the mind on, say, what to do next should Earth's twin be found in 2011 (see "2011 preview: Expect Earth's twin planet").
We've tried making predictions before, but hopefully our strike rate will be higher this time. Whatever the outcome, though, we confidently prophesy that the science of prediction is here to stay. Or, to put it another way, the future is not what it used to be."
Walter Derzko; Smart Economy. Toronto; Skype: Scenarioman1
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