Is it possible to predict the future

Even faced with their results, many experts never admitted systematic flaws in their judgment. When they missed wildly, it was a near miss; if just one little thing had gone differently, they would have nailed it. Some experts usually liberals saw Mikhail Gorbachev as an earnest reformer who would be able to change the Soviet Union and keep it intact for a while, and other experts usually conservatives felt that the Soviet Union was immune to reform and losing legitimacy.

Both sides were partly right and partly wrong. Gorbachev did bring real reform, opening the Soviet Union to the world and empowering citizens. But those reforms unleashed pent-up forces in the republics outside Russia, where the system had lost legitimacy. The forces blew the Soviet Union apart. Both camps of experts were blindsided by the swift demise of the U. One subgroup of scholars, however, did manage to see more of what was coming. Unlike Ehrlich and Simon, they were not vested in a single discipline.

They took from each argument and integrated apparently contradictory worldviews. They agreed that Gorbachev was a real reformer and that the Soviet Union had lost legitimacy outside Russia.

A few of those integrators saw that the end of the Soviet Union was close at hand and that real reforms would be the catalyst. The integrators outperformed their colleagues in pretty much every way, but especially trounced them on long-term predictions. Hedgehogs are deeply and tightly focused. Some have spent their career studying one problem. Like Ehrlich and Simon, they fashion tidy theories of how the world works based on observations through the single lens of their specialty.

Where hedgehogs represent narrowness, foxes embody breadth. Incredibly, the hedgehogs performed especially poorly on long-term predictions within their specialty. They got worse as they accumulated experience and credentials in their field. The more information they had to work with, the more easily they could fit any story into their worldview. One study compiled a decade of annual dollar-to-euro exchange-rate predictions made by 22 international banks: Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and others.

Each year, every bank predicted the end-of-year exchange rate. The banks missed every single change of direction in the exchange rate. In six of the 10 years, the true exchange rate fell outside the entire range of all 22 bank forecasts.

In , IARPA launched a four-year prediction tournament in which five researcher-led teams competed. Each team could recruit, train, and experiment however it saw fit. Predictions were due at 9 a. The questions were hard: Will a European Union member withdraw by a target date? Will the Nikkei close above 9,? Tetlock, along with his wife and collaborator, the psychologist Barbara Mellers, ran a team named the Good Judgment Project.

Rather than recruit decorated experts, they issued an open call for volunteers. After a simple screening, they invited 3, people to start forecasting. Among those, they identified a small group of the foxiest forecasters—bright people with extremely wide-ranging interests and unusually expansive reading habits, but no particular relevant background—and weighted team forecasts toward their predictions.

They destroyed the competition. Tetlock and Mellers found that not only were the best forecasters foxy as individuals, but they tended to have qualities that made them particularly effective collaborators. They crossed disciplines, and viewed their teammates as sources for learning, rather than peers to be convinced.

But at the same time, by almost every Chinese citizen will be completely genotyped. Every era has its own ideas about the future. Now we imagine bicycles and green cities where cars are limited, or where cars are autonomous. We have really different priorities now, so that works its way into our understanding of the future. I think of science fiction as engaging with questions being raised in the present. There are a lot of myths about the future that people believe are going to come true right now.

This is as much a reflection of our time as it is what might actually happen. It seems unlikely that a human-equivalent brain in a computer is right around the corner. But we live in an era where a lot of us feel like we live inside computers already, for work and everything else. So of course we have fantasies about digitizing our brains and putting our consciousness inside a machine or a robot. But they seem much more closely allied to our fantasies in the present than they do to a real technical breakthrough on the horizon.

So I think there is going to be a lot more work on really humble technologies that allow you to take your community off the grid, or purify your own water. For a psychiatric patient, we might have everything about their heart disease, kidney disease, cancer; for a blood pressure management recommendation for the ICU, we have all their oxygen information, their lactate, and more.

The breakthrough for us was when we found that all the previous approaches for doing this were wrong in the exact same way. Once we untangled all of this, we came up with a different method. We also realized that even if our ability to predict what drug is going to work is not always that great, we can more reliably predict what drugs are not going to work, which is almost as valuable.

Combining the two is difficult, but if you can fuse their successes, then you should be able to do better than either system alone. How to do that is a really tough, exciting question. Professor, director of the bioinformatics lab, University of Quebec at Montreal.

When a farmer in Quebec decides whether to inseminate a cow or not, it might depend on the expectation of milk that will be produced every day for one year, two years, maybe three years after that.

Farms have management systems that capture the data and the environment of the farm. Until now AI and machine learning have been associated with domain expertise. But less than 10 years from now they will need to be regulated.

I think there are a lot of challenges for scientists like me to try to make those techniques more explainable, more transparent, and more auditable.

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Wonder What's Next? Try It Out We predict that you'll have tons of fun if you check out the following activities with a friend or family member: Do you think you'd like to predict the future for a living? If you want to be a meteorologist, that's exactly what you might do one day! Learn more about the various aspects of predicting the weather. Put what you learn to use by trying to predict the weather over the course of the next few days.

How accurate are your predictions? Up for a challenge? It's simple. Predict the future. Grab a journal and do some brainstorming. Make predictions about the future events of your life for the next day, week, month, and year.

Plan to revisit your predictions on a regular basis to evaluate how accurate your predictions turn out to be. What did you guess correctly? Which predictions were inaccurate? Do you notice any trends or patterns with your predictions? For example, were your predictions for the next day or week more accurate than those for the next month and year?

Did you get it? Test your knowledge. What are you wondering? Wonder Words stock data historical experience accurately anticipate analyst statistics probability Take the Wonder Word Challenge. Join the Discussion. Phillip brown Feb 3, Jan 16, We cannot, unfortunately. Brilliance Nov 15, Predict my future please. Nov 15, We can't do that, Brilliance. Only you predict your future. I have a really strong feeling that something big will happen on the 4th January and I cant help but feel what happens will change everything and everyone.

Salon fillemon Nov 4, Nov 4, Nov 19, We'll be sure to remember that date! Thanks, leelou! Oct 19, Elyssa Aug 9, I think I can predict the future. One day I was practicing my violin, and suddenly a thought flashed into my mind, and it read: There is going to be a drill tomorrow at school, like a tornado drill or something.

And sure enough, when I walked into the classroom that day, my teacher announced we were going to have a tornado drill at school. And also, a couple times before, I have dreamed of what people are going to wear to school the next day. And when the next school day came, they were wearing the exact same outfit I dreamed about, it was a orange sweatshirt and jeans. I have had many more experiences with with this future reading as well.

I am not making this up. UnderstanD Feb 2, Feb 4, Ryan kochendorfer Mar 14, Aug 11, That's interesting, Elyssa! Super cool! Wonderopolis Oct 20, We can't predict the future; can you, Hunterg? Wesley Apr 23, That's great to know, but maybe someday we can predict the future.

Wonderopolis Apr 23, Maybe so, Wesley! However, we tend to enjoy life's little surprises! Jim Apr 1,