2026-05-01
Lecture Friday: Practical Techniques For Predicting The Future
A decade-old lecture on forecasting the future. Spoiler: it holds up. His five rules remain ironclad. I can't think of anything in the last ten years that undermines the framework.
One big thing he missed is our continuing slide from empiricism into tribalism, where technology adoption has to be understood through partisan affiliation rather than personal experience. Not that we were purely empirical then and purely partisan now. We're just in a gradual transition, which is changing the dynamics of adoption. It helps catch edge cases like understanding how important people's egos were to Flickr.
He's a bit too enthusiastic about VR, but he admits this is because it's his area of research. I think presence is really cool, I'm just not convinced it's a foundational technology. At the very least, there's just been a series of huge missteps in the industry. Despite the flagship success of VRChat and Beat Saber, they've both made a series of bad management choices. Later games did better, like Batman: Arkham Shadow and Half-Life: Alyx (a.k.a. Half-Life 3). Yet these early blunders resulted in lasting damage to the VR ecosystem because they set a tone and people didn't easily come back. The Metaverse is probably on par with New Coke as a commercial failure. It'll be added to classroom case studies for a decade or more. Hopefully with the moneyzillas out of the picture, interesting things by small creative teams can start to flourish.
The problem, though, is that modern socialization is now highly fragmented. Highly social people bounce between literally dozens of different group chats with overlapping groups of people, navigating which group knows what to be sure messages fit the pre-existing context. I'm not sure prolonged socialization digitally, where you have to immerse yourself, is even desirable outside of romantic encounters anymore. This is where I think VRChat and its clones just couldn't pull it off, but someone else might. Allowing non-VR users was one big mistake. It's done to grow user count under the guise of making it easier to try but it allows people to miss half the fundamental experience while thinking they saw what there was to experience and thus miss the core point. Instead of working hard to make the minimum specs as low as possible, set a robust floor for enthusiasts. Perhaps eye tracking needs to be non-optional?
The other problem is not being able to embrace the intimate aspects of the technology. Not porn, but intimacy. Think of it as a romantic date night competitor. VRChat is labeled as a children's toy, and that's a hot no-no. But in this space, you need to avoid being labeled as adult entertainment. Think of it this way, you need a brand that a stereotypical woman would find fun and enjoyable to try as a second date. Something she'd talk to her friends about after. The hard part is how expensive that trial is compared to a romantic date. A robust setup that leaves a good impression is easily thousands of dollars, and you now have to buy two of them. Any system aiming to connect you with a global community has completely missed the mark.
You end up likely needing to navigate plausible deniability because the furry community will flock to it. This means modding and decentralization. VRChat, being a SaaS company, is not going to work. To their credit, they did go in pretty hard on customizability, but again, the hosting they provide undermines it. You need to cut yourself out of the loop. Think web browser.
Still, his call that AR would only really appeal to children was pretty accurate. Even with a coat of Apple mystique, headsets are still dorky, but photo filters were huge for a while. He even predicted Nintendo's success the year after. He did miss that nostalgia is one hell of a drug, though. AR has become a huge deal for video meetings where most people use it to hide their room. It's essentially the modern computer wallpaper. It's table stakes for these applications now, but I don't think it's something that makes anyone any money.
The hard part with children is cost. Tech is expensive, and children's toys just aren't. Everything for children has to hit a price point that's extremely low. It's just what happens when your target market has little to no disposable income. Meanwhile, I recently went to a graduate showcase for media studies and game design students, and there was a surprising number of VR experiences the students were working on. Other pieces were predicting the future of an AI singularity, so obviously take this as anecdata, but VR adoption may have more generational divergence than we think, which may materialize more as they acquire more buying power. The experience is going to have to be very valuable to overcome the friction of headset brace face, whacking your knees on nearby furniture, and installing and calibrating the motion sensors in your room. Headsets with eye tracking are more expensive, and that further limits the social impact. Same with adding limb trackers. And yet, PlayStation VR may just have been a catalyst. Its very low cost meant you could buy one for your kids. I'm just not sure if they enjoyed it enough to pay a high price later for something better.
And that's another hidden lesson: the impact that purchasing power has on technology. As we squeeze out the middle class, we'll see larger and larger pivots to providing goods and services exclusively for the rich, and that will curtail the futures you're likely to experience. As Gibson notes, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." It's why many professions have already become app-based gig work with more being transitioned every year. All while we pour trillions of dollars into betting on AI. The R&D is being spent chasing rich money because there's more and more of it and less elsewhere.
The problem is rich money continues to chase abstract wealth. Don't make things, rent them. Don't rent them, own a rental company. Don't own a company, sell it to a conglomerate. Don't conglomerate into a monopoly, own shares in a monopoly. Don't own shares, bet on derivatives and outcomes. Don't bet your money, use AI to write an algorithm to bet others' money and charge fees. What does that say about future trends in technology?