Prediction is difficult.
Sometimes, shorter term accuracy is harder than long term directionality. For example, no one knows precisely what level UK interest rates will be at in six months’ time, but it’s a pretty safe bet that over the next three years the trendline is down.
Usually, though, the further out your time horizon, the harder the prediction becomes, even in the broadest terms. The cone of uncertainty widens, more wildcards are in play, more events happen.
Back to the future: predictions from 1924
With that in mind, here’s a prediction from 1924, unearthed by the Canadian archivist Paul Farie, as part of an excellent thread on things that were predicted for this year a century ago.1
At first glance, this seems pretty far out. Musicians obviously still tour, and when they were prevented from doing so during the pandemic – and did perform from their own homes, on occasion – it was devasting for the individual artists and other parts of the sector that depend on live events. Taylor Swift is about halfway through the biggest live tour (in revenue terms) of all time. Last summer, higher than expected inflation in Sweden was blamed on a Beyoncé concert. The conclusion: live concerts are still very much a thing.
And yet…
It’s not quite Eras level revenue, but $2m a week for two years (and counting) for something filmed once, in 2021, is not bad either. And it represents incredible foresight from the prognosticator in Farie’s thread – someone living in the early days of telephony recognising that it could mean remote access to culture and live events.
It’s also particularly surprising, because so many of the other predictions in Farie’s dossier are so wide of the mark, particularly those concerning technology. No, we don’t have interplanetary travel. No, men’s legs haven’t withered from underuse due to the adoption of the car. And no, schools don’t remotely control children’s beds to ensure they are at their desks punctually in the morning. A pity – it would make the school run much easier.
As we’ve written about in this newsletter before, we have a tendency to overstate both the magnitude and the speed of technological change.
Here’s a (moderately) boring chart for this edition, showing the proportion of adults in the UK who’ve used the internet from any location and any device in the previous three months since 1990. It tells the story we expect and a couple that maybe we don’t.
Firstly, the internet has gone from being a concept no one has heard of to a universal utility that the majority of people depend on. But that journey lasted over thirty years. That is quite quick, but also, if you think about it, quite slow too. The internet has taken a long time to do away with a lot of analogue things. Ceefax was still operational in 2012. Argos printed its last catalogue in 2020. Freemans printed its last catalogue last year. I can still, in 2024, pay my council tax by cheque.
Young People, Old Habits
The perceived rapidity of technological change is often wrapped up the perceived chasm between the generations. Older generations see younger generations – maybe those only slightly younger – using new tools in new ways and think everything’s changing very quickly. But it takes much longer to leave the past behind us. Data collected by YouGov in 2022 found that young adults were often pretty likely to have direct experience of activities in a pre-digital, pre-internet age. Specifically, among those aged 18-29…
At least half had bought a physical newspaper, used a floppy disk, used the yellow pages to look up a phone number or used an A-Z road map to get somewhere
At least two-thirds had listened to music on a cassette, used a camera with film, written with a fountain pen and owned a mobile that couldn’t access the internet
The vast majority (more than 80%) had watched a VHS, used a calendar on a wall or owned a dictionary
The second slightly unexpected story from the chart is the pattern of uptake. It doesn’t move consistently at all. It grows very slowly during the 1990s, reaching about a quarter of UK adults by the millennium. That covers the early adopters. The next few years are ones of rapid mass-adoption – almost half of adults are using the internet by 2002 and three quarters by 2007.
But then the line flattens. This is partly predictable; obviously the last 20% are going to be harder to get on board, if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be the last 20%. But the extent of the slowness is remarkable. It takes six years, after 2007, to go from 75% to 90%. And then the line gets really flat – there is essentially no change between 2013 and 2019. Then, the pandemic, and not having access to the internet becomes an urgent problem, both individually and socially. The line curls upwards again.
What does this mean?
It’s difficult not to think about AI when looking at this data. Some see the rate of AI progress and use as pretty much vertical from this point; exponential progress in capability leading to rapid changes to the way we do things. The story of technological change over the past 30 years suggests a flatter line (at least overall) and adoption in stages – slow, then quick, then slow again.
We exaggerate the future impact of technology, in terms of both speed and the magnitude of its consequences. The predictions from 1924 aren’t guilty of expecting too much too quickly, but are more likely to imagine the worst possible outcomes – our legs atrophying because of underuse as a result of machines, government systems using networks to exert control over the minutiae of daily life. The same is true today of discussions about how AI will affect the way we work.
There are lots of barriers that slow tech adoption. Some of these are foundational – different age cohorts adopt new technologies at different speeds, and that will always act as a brake on growth.
Footnote: Short Term Futures
You’re probably drowning in predictions for 2024. These start early – often in the autumn of the previous year – and end late. Trajectory’s own ‘year ahead’ webinar takes place on January 25th (sign up here!).
Often – and we would say this, wouldn’t we – they have real value. Each year does come with its own set of events, landmarks, launches and set pieces. This year there are seismic elections in India, the US and the UK. There are significant anniversaries – 200 years since the National Gallery was founded, 10 years since the Scottish Independence referendum and 5 years since an ‘unknown pneumonia’ was reported in China – that will set the cultural tone. Then there’s the stuff that’s harder to predict precisely, even at close range, like the next manifestations of generative AI, or whether the Israel-Gaza conflict will erupt into a regional war.
Sometimes – and we’d probably say this too, wouldn’t we – the ‘X Trends to Watch in 2024’ can be box ticking exercises (rise of B2B creators, anyone?). Rob Mayhew satirises these kinds of trends analyses pretty excellently in the video below.
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Are there really 10 brand new consumer trends for 2024 that didn’t exist last year? We’d argue no: the things that are going to be really impactful this year were present in 2023 and 2022 (and probably have roots going back further than that) and will still be important in 2025 and 2026. We think a little perspective, and plenty of data, is required for thinking about the year ahead.
So, if you still have an appetite for year-ahead predictions, come along to our webinar on January 25th. You can register here. We’ll be thinking about what we know and don’t know about 2024, the long term narrative behind those trends, and what it means for people, organisations and society.
Many thanks to John Sills for alerting me to the thread. PSA: everyone should subscribe to John’s substack, here: