Thread by @amywebb

I've spent two solid days reading papers and books published in the 1980s - early 2000s by prominent thinkers who were predicting the next 50-100 years. I've noticed some common threads.....

They all:

- argued Japan would be the dominant economic force, behind America

- completely missed China's ascent

- thought Russia would implode by 2020 <or>

- said the dominant global conflict would be US vs Russia

- thought climate change was temporary/ a fad

- failed to see the inevitable rise of distributed media

- didn't give much thought to mobile devices

- misjudged the rise of automation by an average of 1-2 decades

I think the reason they got so much wrong had to do with some core weaknesses in their analysis:

- failing to recognize and mitigate cognitive biases

- discounting outliers

- focusing too narrowly on disruption

- not considering social changes outside their personal circles

And assuming there wasn't a way to calculate the trajectory of trends using data. Scenarios are strongest when rooted in data.