What can past technology forecasts tell us about the future?

Past forecasts of technical innovations include lessons that can be used in making forecasts today. A review of Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener's "One Hundred Technical Innovations Very Likely in the Last Third of the Twentieth Century," published in their 1967 book, The Year 2000, A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, found that fewer than 50% were judged good and timely, having occurred in the twentieth century. However, when the forecasts were grouped into nine broad technological fields, there were wide variations in the judged accuracy of the forecasts. Forecasts in computers and communication stood out as about 80% correct, while forecasts in all other fields were judged to be less than about 50% correct. Sustained trends of increasing capabilities and declining costs of technologies used for computers and communication applications were apparent in 1967 and enabled accurate long-term forecasts. To improve our current forecasts, we should took for sustained and continuing trends in underlying technologies, where increasing capabilities enable more complex applications and declining costs drive a positive innovation loop, lowering the cost of innovation and enabling wider learning and contributions from more people, thus sustaining the technology trends. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.