How to spot the future

  • 03 May 2012


When John Naisbitt was writing Megatrends, his prescient vision of America's future, he used a simple yet powerful tool to spot new ideas that were bubbling in the zeitgeist: the newspaper. He didn't just read it, though. He took out a ruler and measured it. The more column-inches a topic earned over time, the more likely it represented an emerging trend. "The collective news hole," Naisbitt wrote, "becomes a mechanical representation of society sorting out its priorities" -- and he used that mechanism to predict the information society, globalism, decentralisation, and the rise of networks.

As clever as Naisbitt's method was, it would never work today.

There's an infinite amount of ink and pixels spilled on any topic. These days, spotting the future requires a different set of tools. That's why at Wired, we have developed our own set of rules to size up ideas and separate the truly world-changing from the merely interesting. After 20 years of watching how technology creates a bold and better tomorrow, the international Wired editions have seen some common themes emerge, patterns that have fostered the most profound innovations of our age.

But surely technology always promises something radically new? Not necessarily. When a product or service breaks new ground, it's usually following a familiar trajectory. After all, the factors governing thermodynamics, economics and human interaction don't change that much. And they provide an intellectual platform that has allowed technology to succeed on a massive scale, to organise, to accelerate, to connect.

So how do we spot the future -- and how might you? The seven rules that follow are the principles that underlie many of our contemporary innovations. Odds are that any idea we deem potentially transformative, any trend we think has legs, draws on one or more of these core principles. They have played a major part in creating the world we see today.

And they'll be the forces behind the world we'll be living in tomorrow.

1 L<span class="s1">ook for cross-pollinators It's no secret that the best ideas -- the ones with the most impact and longevity -- are transferable; an innovation in one industry can be exported to another. But even more resonant are those ideas that are cross-disciplinary not just in their application but in their origin.

This notion goes way back. When the mathematician John von Neumann applied mathematics to human strategy, he created game theory -- and when he crossed physics and engineering, he helped hatch both the Manhattan Project and computer science. His contemporary Buckminster Fuller drew freely from engineering, economics and biology to tackle problems in transportation, architecture and urban design.

Sometimes the cross-pollination is potent enough to create entirely new disciplines. This is what happened when Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky started to fuse psychology and economics in the 70s. They were trying to understand why people didn't behave rationally, despite the assumption by economists that they would do so. It was a question that economists had failed to answer for decades, but by cross-breeding economics with their own training as psychologists, Kahneman and Tversky were able to shed light on what motivates people. The field they created -- behavioural economics -- is still growing today, informing everything from economic policy to the produce displays at Whole Foods.

More recently, the commonalities between biology and digital technology have inspired a new generation to reach across specialties and create a range of new cross-bred disciplines: bioinformatics, computational genomics, synthetic biology, systems biology. All these fields view biology as a technology that can be manipulated and industrialised. As Rob Carlson, founder of Biodesic and a pioneer in this arena, puts it, "The technology we use to manipulate biological systems is now experiencing the same rapid improvement that has produced today's computers, cars and aeroplanes."

The same goes for old industries. When Ford CEO Alan Mulally talks about cars as the "all-time mobile application", he's not speaking figuratively -- he's trying to reframe the identity of his company and the industry.

The point here is that by drawing on threads from several areas, interdisciplinary pioneers can weave together a stronger, more robust notion that exceeds the bounds of any one field. (One caveat: real cross-pollination is literal, not metaphorical. Be wary of flimflam futurists who spin analogies and draw equivalences without actually identifying common structures <span class="s2">and complementary systems.)

2 <span class="s1">Surf the exponentials Some trends are so constant, they verge on cliché.

Just mentioning Moore's law can cause eyes to roll, but that overfamiliarity doesn't make Gordon Moore's 1965 insight -- that chips will steadily, exponentially get smaller, cheaper, faster -- any less remarkable. Not only has it been the engine of the information age, it has also given us good reason to believe in our capacity to invent our future, not just submit to it. After all, Moore's law doesn't know which silicon innovation will take us to the next level. It just says that if the previous 50 years are any indication, something will come along. And so far, it always has.

Moore's law has been joined by -- and has itself propelled -- exponential progress in other technologies: in networks, sensors and data storage. Each of these cyclically improving technologies creates the opportunity to "surf exponentials", in the words of synthetic biologist Drew Endy -- to catch the wave of smaller, cheaper and faster.

YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim realised (while reading Wired, it so happens) that broadband was becoming so cheap and ubiquitous that it was on the verge of disrupting how people watched videos. Dropbox (Start, 05.11) did it with digital storage. As the cost of disc space was dropping at an exponential rate, Dropbox capitalised on that phenomenon, offering to store people's data in the cloud, gratis. In 2007 the two free gigabytes the company offered were really worth something. These days two gigs is a pittance, but it remains enough of a lure that people are still signing up -- and upgrading to the paid service.

And it's what allowed Fitbit to outdo Nike+. As accelerometers dropped in cost and size, Fitbit could use them to measure not just jogging, but any activity where movement matters, from walking to sleep. The new FuelBand shows that Nike has now caught on, but Fitbit recognised the bigger trend first.

Exponentials, it turns out, are everywhere. Just choose one, look where it leads, and take a ride.

3 <span class="s1">Demand deep design Too often in technology, design is applied like a veneer after the hard work is done. That approach ignores how essential design is in our lives. Our lives are beset by clutter, not just of physical goods but of ideas and options and instructions -- and design, at its best, lets us prioritise. Think of a supremely honed technology: the book. It elegantly organises information, delivering it in a compact form, easily scanned asynchronously or in one sitting. The ebook is a worthy attempt to reverse-engineer these qualities, but still, despite the ingenuity and functionality of the Kindle, it doesn't entirely capture the charms of the original technology. Good design is hard.

Indeed, good design is much, much harder than it looks. Take Apple: the company's design imperative is forever cited as intrinsic to its success, but Apple still stands curiously alone as a company where engineers integrate design into the bones of its products.

We are on the verge of a golden age of design, where the tools and skills -- once such limited resources -- are becoming automated and available to all of us.

This timing is critical. "Too much information" has become the chorus of complaint, and the cure is not more design but deeper design -- design that filters complexity into accessible units of comprehension and utility.

No company has managed this better than Facebook, which outstripped MySpace because it offered constraint over chaos and rigour over randomness. Facebook has tweaked its interface half-a-dozen times over the years, nudging users to share a little more information, to connect a little more deeply. Services such as Pinterest only make this more explicit. They promise to let us organise our interests into a clear, elegant form. They turn us into designers and our daily experience into a lifelong project of curation. This is deep design commoditised -- the expertise of IDEO without the pricey consulting contract. And done right, it is irresistible.

4 Give points for audacity When "big hairy audacious goal" entered the lexicon in 1994 (courtesy of Built to Last, the management tome by James Collins and Jerry Porras), it applied to ambitious executives eager to set high targets. Yawn. But the term also coincided with the birth of the web, when innovators began to posit a whole new sort of audacity.

Audacity can be written off as naïveté, as overshooting your resources or talents. But you can't make the future without imagining what it might look like.

Too much of the technology world is trying to build clever solutions to picayune problems. Better parking apps might appeal to VCs looking for a niche, but they are not ideas that seed revolutions. Instead, take a lesson from Tesla Motors, which had the pluck to spend $42 million (£26m) to buy a factory roughly the size of the Pentagon, stock it with state-of-the-art robots and begin making wholly viable electric cars.

These times call for more than mere incrementalism. Let's demand that our leaders get in over their heads, that they remain a little bit naïve about what they're getting into. As Peter Thiel told Wired two years ago, "Am I right and early, or am I just wrong? You always have to wonder." This kind of willingness to take a chance keeps the world moving.

5 <span class="s1">Bank on openness In 1997 Wired's founding executive editor, Kevin Kelly, wrote a story called "New Rules for the New Economy" (it was in many ways the inspiration for this very piece). His focus was on networks, the "thickening web" that was forging connections of catalytic power. Many of his radical rules have become commonalities today, but two of them are just coming into their own: connected individuals with shared interests and goals, he argued, create "virtuous circles" that can produce remarkable returns for any company that serves their needs. Since Kelly wrote his piece, these forces have flourished. Back then open-source software was a programming kibbutz, good for creating a hippy-dippy operating system but nothing that could rival the work of Oracle or Microsoft. Today open source is the default choice for corporations from IBM to Google. Openness itself has become a philosophical necessity, the catalyst that turns one employee's lark into a billion-pound business.

Less than a decade ago there were a multitude of services competing for the emerging legion of bloggers: Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger, WordPress. Today, only the last two remain relevant, and of these, the small, scrappy WordPress is the champ. WordPress was free and easy to install, allowing an aspiring blogger (or blogging company) to get off the ground in hours. Users who wanted additional features could turn to a community of fellow users who had created tools to meet their own needs. And that community didn't just use WordPress -- many made money on it by selling their designs and plug-ins. Their investment of time and resources emboldened others, and soon the WordPress community was stronger than any top-down business model forged inside the walls of their competition.

Sure, there are Apples and Facebooks that thrive under the old rules of walled gardens and monocultures.

But even they try to tap into openness by luring developers to the App Store and the Open Graph. True openness requires trust, and that's not available as a plug-in. When transparency is just a marketing slogan, people can see through it.

6 Favour the <span class="s2">liberators Liberation comes in two flavours. First are those who recognise an artificial scarcity and move to eliminate it by creating access to goods. See the MP3 revolutionaries who untethered music from the CD, or the BitTorrent anti-tyrannists who created real video-on-demand. Sometimes, the revolution takes longer than expected. Back in 1993, George Gilder pointed out in Wired's US edition that the cost of bandwidth was plummeting so fast as to be imminently free. Gilder's vision has been proven correct, paving the way for Netflix and Hulu. And yet telcos are today -- still! -- trying to throttle bandwidth. But this is just biding time on the scaffold. In the words of investor Fred Wilson, "scarcity is a shitty business model".

The second flavour of liberation takes a more subtle approach to turning scarcity into plenty. These liberators use the advent of powerful software to put fallow infrastructure to work. Think of how Netflix piggybacked on a national distribution infrastructure by having the US Postal Service carry its red envelopes. Or how the founders of Airbnb recognised our homes as a massive stock of underutilised beds, ready to be put into the lodging market. Or how limousine service Uber turns idling drivers into on-call icons on a Google map, blipping their way to you. Reid Hoffman, the philosopher-investor (Wired 04.12), describes these companies as bringing liquidity to locked-up assets. He means this in the financial sense of "liquidity", the ability to turn capital into currency, but it also works in a more evocative sense. These companies turn static into flow, bringing motion where there was obstruction.

What's it like to live in the future? Ask an Uber driver -- these guys are electrons pulsing through a real-life network, and they're delighted by it. So should we all be.

7 Spend time with t<span class="s1">ime-wasters The classic business plan imposes efficiency on an inefficient market. Where there is waste, there is opportunity.

That's a great way to make money, but it's not necessarily a way to find the future. A better signal, perhaps, is to look at where individuals are being consciously, enthusiastically inefficient.

Where are they spending their precious time doing something that they don't have to do? That's where culture is created. Take the Homebrew Computer Club -- the Silicon Valley hobbyists who traded circuits and advice in the 70s. Out of this grew the first portable PC and, most famously, Apple.

This same phenomenon -- people playing -- has spurred various industries, from videogames to the social web. Today, inspired dissipation is everywhere. The maker movement is merging bits with atoms, combining new tools (3D printing) with old ones (soldering irons). The DIY-bio crowd is using off-the-shelf techniques and bargain-basement lab equipment to put biology into garage lab experiments. The phenomenon of hackathons, meanwhile, converts free time into a development platform, creating a partylike competition atmosphere to make innovation fun.

These rules don't create the future and they don't guarantee success for those who use them. But they do give us a glimpse around the corner, a way to recognise that in this idea or that person, there might be something big.