Why is predicting the future so hard? 

‘I did not claim that the experts were always wrong in predicting the future. We had just never uncovered any accurate predictions.’

It’s November 2019.

Artificially intelligent replicants have staged a mutiny and have become illegal on Earth; flying cars are the standard way of travel and we walk to phone booths to make video calls.

The 1982 film Blade Runner got a lot wrong.

It even predicted the continuation of heavy cigarette smoking in offices.

But it’s not alone in its mistakes.

The Future Of Everything series has avoided sci-fi future-gazing precisely for this reason – predictions are wrong so much of the time.

The world has been ending at least once-a-decade for the last century, Einstein didn’t think nuclear power was possible and, according to British physicist Lord Kelvin, X-rays were going to prove, in the end, to ‘be a hoax’.

Why do people keep getting things so wrong?

A 1984 book The Experts Speak, the ‘definitive compendium of authoritative misinformation’, analysed over two of thousand predictions made.

‘I did not claim that the experts were always wrong in predicting the future,’ its co-author Victor Navasky wrote in 1996.

‘It was just that in our work we had never uncovered any accurate predictions.’

He now thinks that predictions are even worse:

‘We now have a president [Donald Trump] who, according to The Washington Post, has got things wrong more than 10,000 times,’ he tells Metro.co.uk.

‘And he’s supposed to be the country’s leading expert on the facts so it’s 1,000% confirmation of our theory.

‘Experts got so many things wrong and they are meant to be the ones who know.

‘If someone were to update the book now, I think they would have trouble keeping under thousands of pages.’

Those making a living out of being able to make predictions are keen to show that it is not guesswork but rigorous research and analysis that make the future predictable.

‘People ask me “why don’t we have flying cars when everyone predicted them?”,’ futurist Melissa Sterry tells Metro.co.uk.

‘But heavyweight futurists weren’t talking about that, they were talking about less exciting but more accurate things.

‘You can always see patterns emerging.

‘If you look at things we thought were unpredictable, you can look through the data and relevant history. It’s not an exact science but there are things you can say with certainty.’

And Sterry has found her patterns in the starker side of the future:

‘I would always pitch my predictions towards the more pessimistic end,’ she says.

‘Year-on-year tends to align with the worst case scenario.’

With those sorts of apocalyptic predictions, perhaps we should look to the great Nostradamus for help?

He is said to have predicted the rise of Hitler, the 9/11 attacks, the work of vaccination inventor Louis Pasteur and countless other events.

‘Nostradamus’ predictions frequently employed vague and obscure imagery that had allowed readers to develop their own interpretations and retrofit the “predictions” as applicable to modern events,’ Factchecker Snopes has said.

‘That is one reason why these prophecies are almost always considered of significance only after the occurrence of the events they supposedly predicted.’

Given over half of young people in the US believe that astrology used for horoscopes is scientific, it’s not too far a stretch to understand why Nostradamus, perhaps the most famous astrologer in history, still has such a following.

This is just one example of our bias when it comes to predictions and what is ‘true’.

There are a number of psychological principles clouding our judgement:

1. Hindsight bias – remembering the past as more predictable than it really was
2. Projection bias – using the present situation to dictate the future
3. Optimism bias – believing that things will work out no matter what (often just called wishful thinking)
4. Hyperbolic discounting – the difficulty with seeing our real future selves as ourselves, seeing short-term rewards as having higher value than long-term ones
5. Salience bias (or perceptual salience) – focusing on things that seem like a big deal while ignoring bigger issues

Predictions rely on the assumption that memory is perfect and all that has gone before will influence what is still to come.

But memories are regularly amended and psychologists are clear on how much ‘inventing’ our minds do when it comes to believing what we want to believe.

So if we keep getting it wrong, why do people still believe what they’re being told?

‘[Predictions are made so] you can construct a story that makes sense,’ Dr Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural science at the LSE, tells Metro.co.uk.

‘We want to construct narratives that provide us with coherence and consistency otherwise you’re going to sound to yourself and to others as if you’re a bit scatty.’

And, Prof Dolan says, you’re more likely to believe some people than others:

‘We think other people lie more than us, except our partners,’ he says.

‘People wouldn’t marry someone who lies. So [they] lie less but everyone else lies more, evidence suggests.

‘We are more sceptical and cynical of other people.’

Even if we’re cynical enough to have ‘had enough of experts’, they are more likely to provide probabilities than absolute ‘truths’ provided by commentators.

‘Any good futurist will give you a spectrum rather than a specific answer,’ Sterry says.

‘It takes just one shift in a system for the entire system to reconfigure.

‘Inexperienced people see change as linear, A to B to C but it’s never that simple and there will be a range of answers.

‘It can look like people are making it up as though futurism is some sort of clairvoyance but it involves a lot of research and a very wide range of knowledge.’

So what of the eerily accurate predictions of telecommunications company AT&T?

In 1993 advertising campaign You Will, it predicted ‘you will’ use GPS and smartwatches, be used to remote working and all sorts else.

But this campaign wasn’t predicting the future, more just explaining research and development already underway at AT&T that hadn’t hit the market yet.

This difference between projection and prediction can get confusing.

‘I gave a talk at the first Ted in 1984 and it had five predictions in it that more-or-less came true,’ Nicholas Negroponte, chairman emeritus of MIT’s Media Lab, has said.

‘People called them predictions but they really weren’t predictions, they were extrapolations…

‘I had 15 years of research stored up. Some of it seemed old hat even if, in retrospect, people thought it was predictive.’

But when science fiction straddles that boundary between prediction and projection, how much of it are we really meant to believe?

‘The sci-fi world wasn’t developed to be interpreted literally,’ Sterry says.

‘Works of media are not blueprints of what the future will be, it’s a fable or a warning of what might happen.’

These ‘fables’ are one thing but when trying to predict the future for real, Victor Navasky says that we should ‘beware of those who make projections based on statistics, do not be blinded by the prestige of the source and optimistic predictions should be viewed with special suspicion.’

Metro.co.uk has spent the last two months of The Future Of Everything series talking about the end of the future, making projections based on statistics and talking to prestigious sources.

If predicting the future is a fools’ game, what does that make us?