Great moments in prognostication

They’re all so sure. This is the future. This is the opportunity that’s as big as the internet, as big as railroads. Here’s one venture guy exuding the confidence of the moment:

Rothenberg says his firm has already secured enough money to invest in a second round of virtual-reality companies this fall. “It’s hard for people to write checks for virtual reality until they try it. Then, not that hard,” he says. He likens this opportunity to the Internet in 1995. “No one calls a company an ‘Internet company’ anymore. In 10 years, everyone will have VR as part of their company.” *

Oh, I didn’t mention — I wasn’t talking about artificial intelligence. I was talking about virtual reality.

That excerpt is from Joel Stein’s 2015 Time magazine article about the future of VR — the one with the infamous cover art of a barefoot Palmer Luckey floating away thanks to the reality-obviating potential of his stupid headset. (These days Palmer is still barefoot and stupid, but has turned his attention to developing new ways for the US military to kill people.) Stein’s article is not wholly uncritical, but it’s pretty interesting that if you try to google it these days the first results you get are a series of apologies from him for having written it.

The article isn’t actually bad. It’s just an example of how motivated actors can exploit a journalist’s desire for objectivity. Stein describes his actual experiences with VR fairly. But, being intellectually honest, he knows that he, himself, cannot predict the future. So when he quotes investors and technologists and various other flimflam men who believe they can, all he can do is quote them accurately and trust the reader to sort it out. And then his editors title the piece “Why Virtual Reality Is About to Change the World.”

Still, though, it’s hard to argue that readers are being served when you give them passages like this:

“…I am slack-jawed, baffled. It was Arthur C. Clarke who famously observed that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ By that standard, Ginger is advanced indeed… [This technology is a]s big a deal as the PC, said Steve Jobs; maybe bigger than the Internet, said John Doerr, the venture capitalist. “'

Whoops! That wasn’t Stein on VR. That was Jon Heilemann on the introduction of the Segway.

Well, you know what they say folks, when you’re right 52% of the time, you’re wrong 48% of the time.

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*For those of you keeping track, the prediction that everyone would have VR as part of their company was supposed to have come true by last year.