FUTUROLOGY has a chequered past. Croesus, king of Lydia, consulted the oracle at Delphi and was advised, 鈥渋f King Croesus should cross the Halys river, a great empire would be destroyed鈥�.
Believing the oracle鈥檚 divination to be favourable, Croesus attacked Persia in 547 BC. However, it was his own empire that ultimately crumbled.
Today鈥檚 oracles seem no more reliable. Who five years ago was predicting that the world economy would now be on its knees? Did anyone foresee an African American president of the US, or that swine flu, not bird flu, was to go pandemic? As the great quantum physicist Niels Bohr once remarked, 鈥減rediction is very difficult, especially about the future鈥�.
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That is true, but only to an extent. Nobody knows what next week鈥檚 lottery numbers will be, or which country will win the 2014 football World Cup. But the future is not a closed book, so long as you pick the right questions and methods.
聯The future isn鈥檛 a closed book, so long as you pick the right questions and methods聰
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the self-styled 鈥減redictioneer鈥�, uses game theory to calculate the likely outcome of political negotiations. Complexity theorists, meanwhile, are increasingly confident that they can detect warning signs of imminent collapse in systems such as the global economy. it can use all the personal data it continually harvests to guess what you鈥檒l do next.
Now New 杏吧原创 is playing the prediction game. We teamed up with Samuel Arbesman of Harvard University, who uses measures of scientific progress to predict the timing of new discoveries, to make some forecasts (see 鈥淚n with the new: 2011 predictions, 2010 in review鈥�).
There鈥檚 something inherently satisfying about using science to make predictions about science. It brings futurology closer than ever before to genuinely following the scientific method. Futurology is also useful: it helps focus the mind on, say, what to do next should Earth鈥檚 twin be found in 2011 (see 鈥�2011 preview: Expect Earth鈥檚 twin planet鈥�).
We鈥檝e tried making predictions before, but hopefully our strike rate will be higher this time. Whatever the outcome, though, we confidently prophesy that the science of prediction is here to stay. Or, to put it another way, the future is not what it used to be.