From my perspectiveCommon errors in reasoning about the future: Three informal fallacies

- Common visions of the future fail to account for accelerating technological change.
- Our intuitions about futures arising from complex dynamic change fail in three ways.
- The linear projection fallacy erroneously assumes only steady incremental change.
- The ceteris paribus fallacy erroneously envisions single-variable futures.
- The arrival fallacy erroneously envisions static futures with fixed technologies.

The continued exponential growth of the price-performance of computing is likely to effectuate technologies that radically transform both the global economy and the human condition over the course of this century. Conventional visions of the next 50 years fail to realistically account for the full implications of accelerating technological change driven by the exponential growth of computing, and as a result are deeply flawed. These flawed visions are, in part, a consequence of three interrelated errors in reasoning: 1) the linear projection fallacy, 2) the ceteris paribus fallacy, and 3) the arrival fallacy. Each of these informal fallacies is likely a manifestation of shortcomings in our intuitions about complex dynamic systems. Recognizing these errors and identifying when and where they affect our own reasoning is an important first step toward thinking more realistically about the future.