Technological Forecasting Quotes

Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says, "What if?" not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere - flying, space travel, but even there we missed badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.

I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course--the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.

There is no such thing as science fiction, there is only science eventuality.

Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.

You look at these past predictions like there's only a market in the world for five computers [as allegedly said by IBM founder Thomas Watson] and you realize it's not a good idea to predict too far into the future.

I had a great time creating the future on 'Minority Report,' and it's a future that is coming true faster than any of us thought it would.

I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.

In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic.

I took computers in high school. I would do all my own programming, but I didn't see the future of computers for anything other than data processing. Who was going to use a computer for communications?

If you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it [does] this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather.

And it's interesting, when you look at the predictions made during the peak of the boom in the 1990s, about e-commerce, or internet traffic, or broadband adoption, or internet advertising, they were all right - they were just wrong in time.

You couldn't have fed the '50s into a computer and come out with the '60s.

If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.

Science fiction writers have usually been very poor prognosticators of the future, either in literary or technological terms, and that's because we're all too human and, I think, have the tendency to see what we want to or, in the case of those more paranoid, what we fear.