Back to the future
They’re at it again, making predictions about what’s going to happen next in technology. Internet Week has an article Five Technologies That Could Change The Future. Nobody ever gets these predictions right but people love to keep trying.
The article does hint at the poor track record by beginning with the well-known aphorism, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” They attribute this remark to the physicist Niels Bohr. I met Bohr when I was a graduate student and I wonder if he really ever said this. Actually, I have seen this saying attributed to many people, including Mark Twain, John Maynard Keynes, John von Neumann, and Yogi Berra. Whoever said it first, I think it is an excellent and pithy comment about predictions. I have used it myself.
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Comments
Very interesting survey, Joel. The problem with the Web is that there is a positive feedback mechanism that multiplies a reference once it is cited. The attribution to Bohr has become by far the most popular although I have seen no actual reference to a source except for somebody (not Bohr) being interviewed on National Public Radio. The way the Web works, this citation will get more and more references until it is an accepted “fact”. Personally, I favor Mark Twain. It sounds like him but I have no evidence.
Bohr was a Dane who lectured in unintelligible mumbles ( I once sat in the front row of a lecture and still couldn’t understand him). If he said it in Danish there is no record of it according to the reference mentioned in the main entry. The Danes attribute it to a Danish humorist, Robert Storm Petersen.
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Just as a matter of interest, I entered 5 different search strings of the form “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” “y” into Google. Here are the results:
Hits
y = Bohr 935
y = Twain 118
y = Berra 92
y = Von Neuman 29
y = Keynes 18