Technology Prediction

As far as prediction is concerned, remember that the chairperson of IBM predicted in the fifties that the world would need a maximum of around half a dozen computers, that the British Department for Education seemed to think in the eighties that we would all need to be able to code in BASIC, and that in the nineties Microsoft failed to foresee the rapid growth of the Internet. Who could have predicted that one major effect of the automobile would be to bankrupt small shops across the nation? Could the early developers of the telephone have foreseen its development as a medium for person-to-person communication, rather than as a form of broadcasting medium? We all, including the 'experts', seem to be peculiarly inept at predicting the likely development of our technologies, even as far as the next year. We can, of course, try to extrapolate from the experience of previous technologies, as I do below, by comparing the technology of the Internet with the development of other information and communication technologies and by examining the earlier development of radio and print.