He also provides a corollary: “if you don’t make recommendations, you won’t know what to be disappointed by.”
Let me offer a second corollary: “if you retrofit your predictions to insist they were right after all, you’ll never learn a single damn thing.”
I mention this because, as you might imagine, I run into a lot of incorrect predictions as I read through the WIRED archive. 90s WIRED was chock full of a very particular style of futurism — one that has, uh, not aged especially well.
In keeping with Davies’ Law, this presents a lovely opportunity. I’m rereading the entire magazine back catalog to understand how emerging technologies looked back then, take stock of where people thought the world was headed, and then draw some lessons from the resulting surprises.
The thing that sets me back on my heels, though, is that a lot of those old WIRED techno-optimists are still out there making predictions today. And, to hear them tell it, they were right all along.