A big reason that Gordon Moore was so accurately able to predict the future was that he was in the process of creating it, with his work at Intel. Same with William Gibson and his work with e-books and science fiction in general.
Another futurist once said “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” But who was that wise man? If you ask “the Internet” (Google, chatGPT, etc.) you often hear it was Abraham Lincoln (a wise man indeed), or “management guru” Peter Drucker. If you dig deep enough, however, the most likely answer seems to be the little-known but certainly very wise Nobel prize winner Dennis Gabor, back in 1963. In a book entitled… “Inventing the Future.”
We are still the masters of our fate. Rational thinking, even assisted by any conceivable electronic computors [sic], cannot predict the future. All it can do is to map out the probability space as it appears at the present and which will be different tomorrow when one of the infinity of possible states will have materialized. Technological and social inventions are broadening this probability space all the time; it is now incomparably larger than it was before the industrial revolution—for good or for evil.
The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man’s ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive.
Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, 1963 (italics added)
Say what? Sounds like a Nobel prize-winning physicist, doesn’t it? I guess it’s not a surprise that almost no one gives him credit for the quote.
When trying to help distribute the Future, it helps if one is good at predicting what that Future is and will be. And so it helps even more to be in the process of inventing that Future.
It’s also fun.