The Future of Technologies that Don't Yet Exist
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Paul Saffo analyzes the historic patterns of technology innovation and adoption, and predicts their impact on entrepreneurship.
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Paul Saffo:
paul Saffo is a forecaster and essayist with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society. He teaches at Stanford University and is a Visiting Scholar in the Stanford Media X research network.
He was the founding chairman of the Samsung Science Board and serves on a variety of other boards including the Long Now Foundation, the Singapore National Research Foundation Science Advisory Board, and the Pax Group. He has served as an advisor and Forum Fellow to the World Economic Forum since 1997.
He is a columnist for ABCNews.com, and his essays have appeared in numerous publications including The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. He is a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and holds degrees from Harvard College, Cambridge University and Stanford University.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Question: How can businesses best use your counsel?
Paul Saffo: I’m a technology forecaster, which means I spend my time exploring the intersection between technological advancements and entrepreneurship. Technology advances our conversation between inventors and society. Inventors propose and society disposes and it’s that process that has delivered all the surprises, some welcome some unwelcome, in our lives over the last couple of decades.
What I really am is a historian of technology who spends most of his time looking at technologies that don’t exist yet. Looking at the historic pattern of technology innovation and adaption can tell us volumes about how things will evolve in the future, and in fact you can pull out some very simple rules.
Perhaps the simplest is when it comes to advance technologies. Never mistake a clearer view for a short distance just because the technology looks like it’s about to arrive in the very near future. Chances are there will be some surprises and in the long run even the most expected of futures tends to arrive late and in completely unexpected ways.
