October 16, 2000

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The Big Picture:
The Future Is Up To Us

Our future is largely a function of our past, our present, and the choices we make

By Leon A. Kappelman

don't know any IT folks who moonlight as fortune tellers. Yet we're constantly called upon to predict the future of technology and its use by our companies, competitors, suppliers, and customers. We call it "planning" instead of "soothsaying." Regardless of the moniker, forecasting the future of computer and communication technologies is an error-prone pastime for experts of all kinds. Consider this attributed sampling of humiliating predictions:

• "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication," a Western Union internal memo said in 1876.
• "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, said in 1943.
• "The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it," The New York Times said in 1949.
• "Where ... the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons," Popular Mechanics said in 1949.
• "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home," Ken Olson, president, chairman, and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., said in 1977.
• "640K ought to be enough for anybody," Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said in 1981.
• "By the turn of this century, we will live in a paperless society," Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors, said in 1986.
• "I predict the Internet ... will go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse," Bob Metcalfe, inventor and 3Com founder, said in 1995.
• "Folks, the Mac platform is through--totally," PC magazine said in 1998.

Predictions that fail to come true may not actually be bad predictions at all. Rather, such predictions often serve as admonitions to steer us away from undesirable outcomes. Consider your parents' warning, "Get out of the street or you'll be hit by a car," or the pessimistic predictions about the Y2K problem that resulted in appropriate action being taken. Both overly pessimistic and optimistic forecasts tend to err as a result of oversimplification. Moreover, predicting human behavior is problematic at best, and acts of God and wild cards are almost impossible to anticipate.

Humans in general are ill-equipped for fortune telling. We too readily project our own views, motivations, and biases onto others and tend to place too much emphasis on current experience. The latter, known as "recency bias" to designers of decision-support interfaces when combined with extrapolation and oversimplification, often leads to all varieties of conclusion jumpings, including stock-market bubbles and crashes. Thus the admonition that "past performance is no guarantee of future" anything.

The fact is that our future is largely a function of our past, our present, and the choices we make. It might be simpler if we humans were at the mercy of the fates. But it's our own choices that will largely determine our destiny. And technology, much like all the other tools at our disposal--money, guns, fossil fuels, automobiles, software, hardware, and all the rest--has a potential for good or evil. It's our use of these inanimate objects that brings about rewards and retributions.

The technological advances of the past half century have brought profound changes in the nature of time or at least our perception of it. The very character of reality has been transformed as we find our daily experience of the world, and of each other, being mediated more and more by computer and communications technologies. Our increasingly mediated existence blurs the boundary between reality and nonreality. This is apparent among children playing video games and less obvious among adults watching the evening news.

Our technologies provide nearly limitless possibilities for blessings--or curses. I'll leave the prognostications and hand-wringing to others and instead call your attention to the space between your ears. For it's here that our fate will be decided, literally. It's the quality of our thinking, the completeness of our decision models, and the ethical basis of our decision criteria that will seal our fate.

In short, it's not our technologies but the ways we choose to use them that will determine our future. So please, choose well.

Professor Leon A. Kappelman is director of the Information Systems Research Center in the College of Business Administration at the University of North Texas. You can reach him at kapp@unt.edu or on the Web at http://www.coba.unt.edu/bcis/faculty/kappelma

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