Corrosive clairvoyants hinder progress

For Morgan Stanley, the market for global business-to-business ecommerce in 2000 was $200bn. For Forrester Research it was $600bn.

When analyst firms as illustrious as these disagree about the past, it looks pretty foolhardy to rely on their forecasts for the future. After all, even building societies underestimated last year’s boom in UK house prices, and general economic predictions for 2001 mostly ended in tears.

So how, we might ask, will IT forecasting itself end up this year? Life will remain uncertain. Tired jokes about crystal balls will still attend forecasters’ every pronouncement, especially given the CIA’s failure to anticipate the terrible events of 11 September.

Nevertheless, uncertainty itself will prompt more interest in the future. The feeling will grow that, if you aren’t very professional in forecasting the twists and turns in IT, you’ll fall victim to a rival that is. And the feeling will be right.

Already the Cabinet Office’s Performance and Innovation Unit forecasts governmental challenges for 2010 to 2015. Yet many forecasters will feel too humble to confidently predict the plans of what they regard as fickle fate.

Many will remind us that the great scientists and technologists of the past never foresaw the long-term uses to which their ideas were eventually put. The tendency will be to produce dystopian forecasts about IT in tune with the public’s current pessimism.

Of course, naively to extrapolate today’s trends into the future is to make a classic error in forecasting. The fad for apocalyptic scenarios in IT may be just that: a fad.

Moreover we have the now dated Dan Dare to remind us that, like many predictions, my forecast for the forecasters may say more about my worries about the present than it does about the realities of the future. But when computer clairvoyants wail about the triumph of cyber terrorism they sanction a wider and all too durable mood of foreboding in IT.

Forecasters, after all, convinced millions that the Millennium Bug would mean disaster. And although history never repeats itself, in 2002 forecasters will: they will flaunt their worldliness, assuring people that human nature doesn’t change – at least, not for the better. They will slam the IT world for being too ‘technology push’ rather than ‘demand pull’ in orientation.

In doing this, they may well help to discredit experimentation, and put a brake on progress.

Another trend is that, as they continue their over-the-top attacks on techies, forecasters themselves will continue their long tradition of mistaken technological determinism.

Few forecasters anticipated the vogue for emphasising ’emotional intelligence’ in the office, or the work/life balance. So forecasters will persist in taking IT, not society, as the fundamental driver of the future.

They will make a fuss about the fusing of biology with electronics in ‘bionic’ brains, organs and limbs. They will misinterpret society’s perceptions of such things and underestimate the way these perceptions encourage government instincts to regulate IT more firmly.

Forecasters see the social roots of IT only in the market, whether its influence is malevolent or benevolent. And whatever their disagreements, the critics will join with the IT enthusiasts in agreeing that the web has its own chaotic kind of DNA, that the code is unfathomable, and that we kid ourselves if we think otherwise.

Now that kind of misanthropy really could prove to be dangerous over the next 12 months.