July - August issue editorial by Thierry Heles, editor
Futurology is an inherently tricky but fascinating field – get it right and you are hailed a visionary, get it wrong and people will either forget or turn it into a joke. One of the former is science fiction author HG Wells’ prediction of aerial city bombardment in his future-history novel The Shape of Things to Come. One of the latter is a prediction by the New York Times in 1936 that “a rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere”.
Extrapolating future trends from past and present data is so difficult because one invention can have a fundamental impact. When Steve Jobs, late co-founder of consumer electronics group Apple, introduced the iPhone, it took the audience nearly a minute and a half to catch on to the fact that Apple had created an entirely new device and not, as Jobs misled them with his oratory skills,…
