The techniques of being an Internet visionary are just like those of lower-tech fortunetellers through the ages. A technological visionary must tell people what they want to hear, because your company's stock won't rise if you spout an unpopular vision to analysts.
I do not like to talk about the future. I don't like to be one of those people. It's so easy to have a very vague idea and say, oh, computers will be 3D-ish and then 10 years later I'll say I predicted it 10 years ahead. I don't think that's honest and I don't think that's valid and worth anything.
And this is one way to do technology forecasting; get a sense of where technology is, and then anticipate the next upturn.
Learning how to understand how technology evolves, using tools like a Technology Road Map, is what you need more than anything to ride on top of the tsunami instead of being crushed by it.
I am a futurist, projecting trends in science into the next decades and century, but ironically my two daughters - one is a neuroscientist and the other is a pastry chef - tell me that my taste in music is positively prehistoric.
And it's interesting, when you look at the predictions made during the peak of the boom in the 1990s, about e-commerce, or internet traffic, or broadband adoption, or internet advertising, they were all right - they were just wrong in time.
One of the things I liked about the movie 'Minority Report' was they used a lot of futurists as consultants to really try to understand what the world really would be like in 50 years.
The thing that 'Neuromancer' predicts as being actually like the Internet isn't actually like the Internet at all!
Technological prescience in science fiction usually requires an author with luck. Societal prescience requires a poet.
The role I see for my books is trying to think through the consequences of various things because a lot of the issues around technology and the nuances in it are not usually widely appreciated. That's how I view my writing as I sort of explore this terra incognita ahead of us in an effort to try to understand where we might be heading.
I've always had fun looking forward, seeing where technology is going, and finding interesting ways of applying that to comedy.
