In 2014
Dr. Joel Orr, Chief Visionary, Cyon Research Corporation

"My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer."

Thus begins The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information, a famous paper by Princeton psychologist George A. Miller. (Read it at http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html.)

Miller shows that our short-term memory is limited to juggling about seven things at a time; handling more, as modern life requires of everyone, forces us to use one or more forms of encoding--tricks for chunking things together.

When I started thinking about life in 2014, for the purpose of writing what I hope will be an entertaining--and not too unreasonable--forecasting piece, I quickly hit a wall: The wall of innovation. You see, over short periods, technology predictions are pretty easy: Just take what we have now and make it smaller, faster, and cheaper.

And since Moore's Law, which can be expressed as, "Computer performance-to-price ratios increase by a factor of ten about every three to four years," has been working like a metronome for almost forty years--well, there you are: "Your 2008 desktop computer will be ten times as powerful as the one you use today, will cost about $1000, and you'll have to look hard to figure out where it is on your desk." Wow, Mr. Wizard! How did you know?

But thinking about ten years out is much tougher. Part of the prediction problem is Moore's Law; human minds treat ten-fold changes as qualitative, not merely quantitative. So when computer performance increases by a factor of ten, or the size of a 300-gigabyte disk drive decreases by a factor of ten, we see it as some completely new thing--not just a faster or smaller replica of the original.

And if there is one thing that humans are universally bad at, it's coping with novelty. Inside each of us a small child is screaming, "I don't want new shoes! I want my old shoes!"

What really puts the icing on the putative futurist's cake is actual novelty, not just the stuff where quantity becomes quality. Let me give you some possible examples, from recent events:

• Scientists in Israel have discovered that shock-waves from carefully placed explosives can de-salinate aquifers into which ocean waters have seeped. Early experiments indicate that the process may work with a wide variety of contaminants, not just salt.
  
  
• In Emotional Design, usability champion Donald A. Norman argues that machines should be designed to evoke emotions in their users, for utilitarian reasons--and to help them do that, they should in some way "feel" emotion themselves.
  
  
• Intel has announced that they can use silicon to make optical chips that are much faster than their electronic counterparts--and make it possible, through the use of new kinds of optical fiber, to actually spread the components of a single computer over many miles. "It will eradicate the difference between computing and telecommunications," said one researcher.
  
  
• Time magazine recently reported that a special process plant--backed, among others, by former CIA director James Woolsey--is now creating pure and clean gasoline and motor-oil equivalents out of the refuse from a Perdue turkey-packing facility near Philadelphia.
  
  
• While 2014 may be early for it, turkey-offal fuel will be wiped out by nanotechnological "make-anything" boxes, that will actually accumulate power from their alchemy-like transformations to sell back to the electrical grid--while making you ham and eggs, and a pair of hiking boots, out of almost-free acetone-like feed-stock.

So here we are in 2014. Fresh water is no longer a problem anywhere, thanks to kits with special survey equipment and some explosives. Countries, locales, that were formerly uninhabitable, are now at the heart of a massive global real-estate boom.

On our commute to the office, the family car announces that it has a feeling we should get off the freeway three exits sooner than usual, and take the city streets. We've learned by experience to trust the car's intuition, so off we go down the exit ramp. As we progress, we can see the totally stopped traffic on the freeway, a block over.

We don't pass any movie theaters or video stores on our drive; optical chips and fiber have given us almost-unlimited bandwidth, and any movie ever distributed is instantly available on the Internet.

Fuel from animal waste products is now at 25 cents a gallon. But the distributors are hedging their bets with heavy research investments into the rapidly shrinking fuel-cell technology; electric cars, some with solar assist, are not that rare anymore.

But hang on--before you get too excited, consider that this fantasy is based on a mere handful out of the many thousands of innovations we already know about--not to mention the ones we don't!

And it ignores some major threats--the rising tide of radical Islam; the loss of privacy; the erosion of "unalienable rights"; the evaporation of moral standards; you can probably think of others. You can bet that the "bad guys," whoever they are in a particular circumstance, will be using a lot of this great new stuff to achieve their ends, too.

What about all the complex interactions among these and the innumerable other trends, those that are at work today, and those that will emerge over the next ten years? Time for a cliché: The mind boggles!

Professor Miller pointed out that we have difficulty dealing with more than seven chunks or so at a time. How do we chunk this overwhelming outpouring of novelty, and make sense of it? How do we translate it into personal terms--what it will mean to us?

We had better find some anchors. So much of our world is already changing; the pace will only increase. It's time for us to think about what really matters to us, what we care about. We need to talk about it at home. We need to find stability in a consistent way of looking at family, home, and work.

The way buildings, bridges, washing machines, automobiles, and computers are made is changing, more and more quickly. Things we took for granted just last year have been superannuated. How can we deal with all this newness? Where are the patterns that can summarize what we observe, so that we can decide what to do?

Miller's feeling of persecution stemmed from the fact that the number seven showed up in a variety of different psychological phenomena, leading him to believe--erroneously, as he shows in his paper--that they are all aspects of a single underlying process.

In the face of the overwhelming onslaught of new stuff we've been facing since about the end of the nineteenth century, Professor Miller can easily be forgiven for this self-referential error in chunking strategy--an attempt to see a pattern where one does not exist.

A recent issue of the Arlington Institute futurist newsletter quoted legendary scientist and science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke: "To predict the future, we need logic; but we also need faith and imagination, which can sometimes defy logic itself."

I pray that in the exponentially greater roar of novelty that will be blowing us about in 2014, we will have Miller's grace in testing our hypotheses--and in retreating when we find them to be wrong.

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