Improvements in IT enable us to gather, store and transmit information in vast quantity, but not to interpret it. But what are we going to do with all that information? We have plenty of information technology – what is perhaps needed now is more intelligence technology, to help make sense of the growing volume of information stored in the form of statistical data, documents, messages, and so on.
Predictor: Forester, Tom
Prediction, in context:The 1997 book “Computers, Ethics, and Society,” edited by M. David Ermann, Mary B. Williams and Michele S. Shauf, carries the 1992 article “Megatrends or Megamistakes” by Tom Forester. Forester argues that the information revolution did not have the profound effects that were predicted. He writes: ”Brody went back and looked at the forecasts made by leading U.S. market research firms about the commercial prospects for robots, CD-ROM’s, artificial intelligence, videotex, superconductors, Josephson junctions, gallium arsenide chips, and so on. In almost every case, he found that the market researchers had grossly exaggerated the market for each product, sometimes by a factor of hundreds. The main reason for this appallingly low level of accuracy was that the researchers had mostly got their information from vested interests such as investors and vendors. A second lesson was that new technologies often did not succeed because there was still plenty of life left in old technologies. Consumers in particular were loathe to abandon what they knew for something that offered only a marginal improvement on the old. Predictions based on simple trend exploration were nearly always wrong and forecasters often neglected to watch for developments in related fields. They also failed to distinguish between technology trends and market forecasts, and they greatly underestimated the time needed for innovations to diffuse throughout society … Improvements in IT enable us to gather, store and transmit information in vast quantity, but not to interpret it. But what are we going to do with all that information? We have plenty of information technology – what is perhaps needed now is more intelligence technology, to help make sense of the growing volume of information stored in the form of statistical data, documents, messages, and so on.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1992
Topic of prediction: General, Overarching Remarks
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Computers, Ethics, and Society (book)
Title, headline, chapter name: Whatever Happened to the Information Revolution in the Workplace?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Pages 203, 204
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Guarino, Jennifer Anne