In my forthcoming book, Jump the Curve: 50 Strategies for Helping Companies Deal with Emerging Technologies, one of the strategies I encourage executives to employ is called “Don’t Laugh.” The strategy is centered on the notion that history has consistently demonstrated that all too often very smart people dismiss—and even laugh off—predictions about the future for the simple reason that they don’t understand the exponential progression of technology.
One example I don’t include in my book is the story of genome experts who, in 1990, dismissed as “implausible” the idea that the human genome could be sequenced by 2005. From their perspective at the time, the genome was less than 1% decoded and the project had already cost over $1 billion—and they had been working on it for years.
What they didn’t comprehend was how new and better supercomputers would ultimately speed up the task. To make a long short story, the human genome was decoded in 2001—under budget.
Now fast forward to today. An article in MIT’s Technology Review discusses the progress being made in constructing a working brain model. Christof Koch, a professor of biology and engineering at Caltech, is quoted as saying that claims that the human brain can be modeled within 10 years are so “ridiculous” that they are not worth discussing.
If the quote sounds familiar, it is because I have explained before how Lord Kelvin, the New York Times and scores of other notable ”linear thinkers” have ended up looking foolish in their attempts to dismiss the future by stating that any number of advances—such as human flight, digital recording, or perhaps cellphones that can diagnose disease—were equally ridiculous.
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Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
