Paul Saffo has spent more than three decades looking into the future, but he is quick to clarify that he does not predict it.
He forecasts.
The distinction matters. Prediction assumes a future waiting to be discovered. Forecasting begins with uncertainty. Saffo maps what he calls the cone of uncertainty, the widening field of possibilities that opens as we move farther into the future. What comes next is not fixed. Our choices help shape it.
For decades, first during his long tenure at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto and later at Stanford University, Saffo has studied the messy ways technological change moves through society. Revolutions rarely arrive on schedule. Radio, television, personal computing and the internet all took long, uneven paths before becoming ordinary.
His guiding principle is wonderfully simple:
“Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
You can stand on a ridge and see a distant peak perfectly. The view tells you little about the canyons, crevasses and rough country between here and there. Saffo has observed that transformative technologies often take twenty years to become an overnight success.
That patience has made him one of Silicon Valley’s most perceptive observers. He teaches forecasting at Stanford, is a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, and has long been involved with the Long Now Foundation, where thinking stretches across centuries and millennia. He holds degrees from Harvard College, the University of Cambridge and Stanford Law School.
But Saffo is most interesting at the edges.
He looks for anomalies, abandoned experiments and faint signals that do not quite fit the present. He calls them “Doppler whistles” from the future, small and easily dismissed phenomena that may carry the first sound of something much larger approaching.
And he expects to be wrong.
Good forecasting requires that kind of humility. Map several possible futures. Search for evidence that contradicts your assumptions. Learn from failure. Never become so attached to the future you hope for that you stop seeing the one taking shape in front of you.
Keep looking toward the horizon.
Just remember there is a lot of country between here and there.
