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Successful inventions often stem from futurist predictions, whether intentional or unintentional. Examples include Nikola Tesla’s prediction of alternating current and Francis Bacon’s prediction of the scientific method. Business and finance also rely on futurist predictions, which can make or break careers and fortunes.
Underlying almost every successful invention is a successful futurist foresight. Some inventions are made by accident. But most are purposely created based on futurist predictions that they will be adopted. Of course, most predictions about it are wrong. But many may be right. Nikola Tesla, one of the most acclaimed amateur futurists of the 20th century, predicted that alternating current would become his primary way of using electricity. He was right.
Particle physicists successfully anticipate the future when they postulate particles predicted by their theories. Such particles whose existence has been predicted in this way include the top quark, positron and neutrino. So one could say that theoretical physicists are unintentional futurists.
Historically, futurists are best at predicting the future when they actually play a key role in bringing about the future they predicted. In this way the prophecies can be self-fulfilling. Examples include the widespread adoption of low-cost automobiles, the launch of Sputnik, the moon landing, and the harnessing of nuclear energy, just to name a few. Of course, a hindsight bias is at play here, making it easier for us to remember futurist predictions that have turned out to be successful.
The worlds of finance and business are full of professional futurists, even if they don’t usually define themselves as such. Using studies, equations, trials, and educated extrapolations, business futurists try to project whether or not a corporate branch should open in a particular city or how many years it will take for a particular start-up to achieve positive cash flow. Careers and fortunes are made and destroyed in the aftermath of these predictions. One reason the stock market is so chaotic is that its behavior depends not only on the historical performance of numerous companies, but on aggregate predictions of future performance.
Perhaps the most successful futurist prediction was that of Francis Bacon, the English philosopher credited with inventing the scientific method in the early 17th century, just a few years before his death. He predicted that his new method of acquiring knowledge, initially called the Baconian method, would become a powerful and pervasive way to derive truth from observations of nature. The explosion of the Scientific Revolution in the following centuries completely confirmed his prediction.
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