At the recent CES, Intel gave a demo of its vision of a future smartphone. This reminded me of my 2004 LRC post, The future of technology, about an NTT DoCoMo video forecasting the future of mobile communications. I’ve updated the links in that post; it’s interesting to see the forecast for the 2010s made in the early 2000s (NTT DoCoMo Vision 2010 video, on YouTube here); the most recent DoCoMo video I could find is The Road to Hokusai’s Waterfall. One interesting thing about these videos is they illustrate the Austrian view of forecasting and certainty. As noted in Verstehen and the Role of Economics in Forecasting, or: If You’re so Rich, Why Aren’t You Smart?, the future is uncertain, but not radically so. We can know some things about the future, so that we are not faced with radical, kaleidic uncertainty; but the future is not perfectly predictable either. Both the ability to make some predictions, and the inability to make perfect predictions, is illustrated in the 2004 technology forecast of 2010.

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