ABSTRACT
When I was Acting Director of the Commission for the Future, I received many requests to make specific predictions about the future. The lesson of history is that people who make specific predictions about the future often finish up with egg on their face, even if it's in an area where they could be presumed to have some expertise. It has been said that it's difficult to make forecasts, especially about the future. There are two reasons for this: one related to information and the other more fundamental. First, we usually don't have enough information to make definitive predictions. At the peak of scientific hubris, there was a view that if only we knew the position and velocity of every particle we could chart the entire future of the universe through the laws of Newtonian mechanics. Of course, we don't have anything like that much information. However, even if we did have all that information and the capacity to process it, the more fundamental problem is that the future of the universe isn't deterministic in that simple mechanistic sense. Just as the world in which we live today has been significantly shaped by previous generations, so the future is being significantly shaped by individuals, groups and corporate entities, whether acting consciously or unconsciously
