Precision Predicting

Inventors have to be able to predict the future with some precision. If you pour thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars of your own money into developing an invention only to have the world ignore it because it was too much too soon, well, you won’t make that mistake very often.

This is how my rule-of-thumb evolved into make the technological improvement just 10% better than the old technology. Ten percent is a number people can excitedly get behind. Five times better, not so much or so I thought. But fudging the numbers downwards didn’t work particularly well for me and that model felt unethical so I went back to the real numbers.

Five times improvement in efficiency is often considered too good to be true.  I heard that quote recently while presenting a new ship propulsion technology that was five times more efficient to a group of maritime investors. The technology rewrote the science of fluid dynamics and I had built eleven prototypes all meeting or exceeding the five times efficiency number to prove it. The technology would save large ship owners twenty-million dollars per year per ship in fuel costs and it would be a substantial step in dramatically reducing atmospheric carbon. Too good to be true? No, just disruptive like so many other technologies unleashed in the past few years.

Disruptive technologies such as being able to communicate with anyone anywhere on the planet for pennies with both voice and video is too good to be true as is engineering custom personal cures for your previously deadly disease. Not having to drive your car anymore to get where you are going and to have your car work for you when you aren’t using it is also too good to be true. Yet, this advance is just a couple of years off.

Technology now exists to make videos or audio recordings of anything you can imagine whether real or fictional. This humorous Link is a good example. You can now make a video of anyone saying or doing anything. Too good to be true? Scary but no. This technology is here now. And those last-forever lightbulbs, free electricity on your roof and bulletproof materials and clothing that keeps you warm or cool as the need arises, are all too good to be true. It turns out that “too good to be true” is a sure clue to a changing future.

The aforementioned prop will eventually introduce inexpensive water sports to a new generation via solar-powered canoes, and as a pump, it will move massive amounts of water inexpensively across vast areas to where it’s needed for crops and it may even propel airships quietly and inexpensively as the yachts of the future. And it will do it silently.

Those extrapolations are the model for this column’s predictions but they don’t stop there. What are the benefits of silent fans? What are the virtues of cheap, nonpolluting transportation? The laminar discharge fan could sweep out forest fires by blowing the flame back onto the burned area starving it of fuel. A portable pump version could remove flood waters quickly and efficiently improving rescue efforts in flooded areas. And, of course, directed personal air conditioning could save billions in heating or cooling costs. Are you getting the picture?

More than one can play. If a reader sees a new reality forming they should let us, the editors of this column, know. Send an email to the link below and we may write about your insights so you can alert the public and be recognized as the futurist that you are.

Of course, we will look at the long-term effects on the population considering social implications such as jobs, education, population distribution and even leisure time. Do you remember leisure time?

Let’s not forget the environment. What technologies have the potential to save the earth from a stagnant ocean or an oxygen-less playground?

We will consider the effects new technologies will have on cost and quality of living, mental and physical requirements, cultural shifts, romance, opportunity for the individual and evaluate whether the technology can reach its full potential.

As best we can, we will attempt to predict the future. And in this prediction we will ascertain how hard we must work or invent or change our ways in order to survive and live well, all the while alleviating the stress associated with not knowing if we will make it. After all, isn’t that the only predicted future that we need to know?