A personal triumph! I finally finished a challenging, irritating but useful book about forecasting the future. I took on Nassim Taleb’s daunting The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007) because it seemed like something technology prognosticators ought to understand.

A ‘black swan’, in Taleb’s terminology, is an essentially unpredictable event: the events of 9/11, the rise of Google. It has three qualities: unpredictability, massive consequences, and, most interestingly, ‘retrospective explainability’ — as in, “Well, of course search would be the most important way to dive into the Internet, and of course Google’s approach was better than anyone else’s.”

I’ve spent over ten years building and using forecasts, and answering sometimes hostile questions about them. As I’d suspected from the jacket cover, The Black Swan was an education on how the other side thinks, dripping with attitude: Taleb reviles how humans, including professional futurists, attempt to predict what’s ahead but fall woefully short.

I value having read the book; it offers cogent lessons. One such: You cannot manipulate more information than your past can deliver. Example: a turkey being raised for Thanksgiving will never anticipate — based on his daily feeding — that his end will come quite suddenly. In this case his past has negative value in anticipating his future. Another: Beware the reification of your spreadsheets. Just because a figure appears automatically in a cell doesn’t make it correct.

In the end, though, I asked myself: is it wrong to try to anticipate technology’s future impact on our world? For that’s what I and my technology analyst colleagues do. Here’s where I came out, simply stated:

• We should not stop asking ourselves what’s next — for one thing, it’s too much fun
• While the past is insufficient support, and potentially misleading, it’s still a valid input to that effort
• Pending near-term events, parallel episodes in other domains, and, yes, guesswork also play a part
• If you’re right more often than you’re wrong, you add value

Did you read the book? Share your reactions in the context of anticipating technology’s evolution.