When is the last time you made a prediction that people paid attention to?

Like many things in life, there are a number of methods and techniques that can be used, but the thought processes involved in making predictions are not always as straightforward as we might imagine, and to be sure, creating a viral one includes a huge degree of luck.

For this reason I’d like to step you through my latest lightening-strike of imagination to give you some insights into this mystical science.

In 2018 ecommerce finally reach the 10 percent mark. It has taken ecommerce a full 25 years to build enough momentum for 10 percent of all retail customers in the U.S. to make the transition to online sales.

This is a very important data point because it speaks to the heart of our human ability to adapt to a new way of doing business.

Granted, it is only a data set of one, but it opens the door for talented observers to speculate on the “25-year rule of human behavior” that has the potential to better refine our understanding of the changes at hand.

Does this mean that it will take 25 years for 10% of all travel to transition to autonomous vehicles? Perhaps. But let’s dive a little deeper into this topic.

The Fine Art of Creating a Viral Prediction

One of the key features of a viral prediction is its “surprise factor.” So if I predicted “by 2040 only 10% of the cars on the road would be driverless,” this would indeed surprise many of the autonomous transportation enthusiasts because it would be far lower that they’re expecting.

With driverless cars having a rather blurry beginning date, 2040 fits closely to the auspicious 25-year rule. Also, 2040 ends up being a milestone date that’s easily remembered.

However, “10% of the cars on the road” is far different than total commuter traffic. Doing a hardware prediction about total vehicles on the road is quite different than predicting commuter miles and trips. By adding a second half to the prediction, we can spice it up even more, and make it far more intriguing.

PREDICTION:

“By 2040, only 10% of the cars on the road will be driverless, but at the same time, 10% of all cars will handle 90% of all passenger miles.”

This kind of prediction has what I call, a double surprise factor, and it brings with it a level of complexity that begs for more detail and discussion.

Many people have a strong loyalty to their cars and will have a hard time making the transition to go “carless.” For this reason, it can be argued that the vast majority of cars will have transitioned into the category of hobbyist vehicles that are only driven once a month or even less.

Today’s “just in case” mindset of having a car in the garage just-in-case we need to go somewhere will be replaced with “just in an extreme case” attitude that will keep a car in their garage in case the national system breaks down, or they need to “sneak away” for an old-fashioned drive in the country, or we get attacked by aliens.

Whatever the reason, many people will have a hard time parting with their “first love.”

Throughout the prediction and the surrounding discussion, each of the elements, and its supporting data, needs to maintain an overarching “ring of truth.” While it may insult your intelligence initially, after thinking about it, you mentally say, “ok that makes sense,” or “hmmm, I’ll need to think about that,” or it at least gets a qualified “maybe.”

Follow-On Predictions

A follow-on prediction is one that is derived from the first one.

The prediction I made above will naturally lead to a number of follow-on predictions:

1. By 2040, as driverless cars handle 90% of all commuter miles, they will reduce the number of accidents and injuries to less than 10% of what we have today.
2. By 2040, individual car sales will plummet to less than 10% of what they are today.
3. By 2040, over 90% of all dealerships will have gone out of business, over 90% of car loans will have disappeared, and over 90% of privately owned cars will have switched to “hobbyist” level insurance.

Each of these follow-on predictions becomes a logical extension of the original, but they also demand the same level of scrutiny given to other forecasts.

Dealing with Objections

Predictions are an imperfect art form. On one hand they force a listener to think about an event in the future that they may never considered otherwise. It also forces them to draw their own conclusion.

Yet virtually every prediction will be wrong on some level. It may be the wrong time frame, too broadly defined circumstances, different age group, or incomplete data set. But even if every aspect of a prediction is described perfectly, when it finally happens, it somehow feels different.

For these and a number of other reasons, predictions have become a lightning rod for objection and criticism. That comes with the territory.

I should note, that is you receive no criticism; the prediction hasn’t stirred up enough emotion and can’t possibly go viral.

I always consider the best objections to be ones that come from highly articulate people that raise issues that I haven’t considered, and build an entire discussion thread around their key arguments.

Five Viral Predictions

Over the past decade I’ve made a number of predictions that have gone viral and, in some respects, have become a modern day meme. I have also written several columns that have gone viral and created many viral social media posts that have lit up the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

That said, here are five predictions that have gone sufficiently viral to cause them to spread around the world.

Prediction #1:

“By 2030 the largest company on the Internet will be an education-based company that we haven’t heard of yet!”

I first made this prediction in 2014, but it went viral after an interview with Business Insider early in 2016 and later became the focus of a World Economic Forum video that went viral on Facebook and YouTube.

Prediction #2:

“Cryptocurrency is very much here to stay and is going to displace 25% of national currencies by 2030.”

This is a prediction I made during a 2018 interview with Time’s Money Magazine. It first captured the imagination of people inside the Crypto world, but quickly spread to hundreds of other publications.

Prediction #3:

“By 2030 over 2 billion jobs will disappear!”

I made this prediction at TEDx Reset in 2012 in Istanbul and have been quoted on this in newspapers, magazines, and TV stations literally all over the world ever since.

Prediction #4:

“We will reach the first billion drones in the world by 2030!”

I originally made the prediction in 2014, but it went viral after my talk at the World of Drones Congress in Brisbane, Australia in 2017 where several Australian publications mentioned it.

Prediction #5:

“The reunification of North and South Korea will happen by 2020!”

This came about because of an interview I did in 2013 with Korea’s Chosun Newspaper, one of the most influential Korean-language daily newspapers in South Korea. Later it became part of a 1-hour show on KBS where I was the featured guest. Now, after the meeting of the Presidents in Singapore and the removal of landmines along the DMZ, this has gone viral once again in Korea and many feel it may indeed be possible.

Some feel the progress that has already been made is enough to call it a “win.” But I’m still hoping for a complete German-like reunification.

Key Ingredients of a Viral Prediction

As you will note, there are a few common elements that will increase the likelihood of a prediction going viral.

• Relevant Hot Topic – Jobs, drones, and cryptocurrency are all timely, newsworthy, and meaningful to the masses.
• Memorable Date – 2030 is far more memorable than 2028.
• Quantifiable Event – Words like some, more, or decreasing do not have the same affect as “2 billion” or “25%.”
• Ring of Truth – Yes, the ring of truth is quite different than actual truth, but in our mind it somehow passes unscathed through the various skeptic filters we have in place.
• The Surprise Factor – It’s always hard to describe things that people will find surprising or unexpected, but it’s a critically important component of a viral prediction.
• Legitimizing Forces – Some people have their own huge social media followings, but it’s far better to have an unbiased third party media person voice your prediction.

Since most aspects of our lives are filled with some degree of luck, we also shouldn’t underestimate the sheer value of saying the right thing in the right place at the right time.

The Power of Prediction

The future is constantly being formed in the minds of people around us. Each person’s understanding of what the future holds will influence the decisions they make today. As we alter someone’s vision of the future, we alter the way they make decisions today. My goal has always been to help individuals and organizations make better, more informed decisions about the future.

If I make the prediction that “By 2030 over 90% of all crimes will be solved through A.I., data collection, and other forms of surveillance,” a forecast like that causes several things to happen.

First, you have to decide if you agree that a certain percent of crimes will be solved that way. If so, it forces you to think about how fast the surveillance industry is growing, how invasive this might be, and whether privacy concerns might start to shift current trends in the other direction.

More importantly, it forces you to consider the bigger picture, and whether this is a desirable future. If it reaches 90%, how many police, judges, and lawyers will be out of a job? Will this create a fairer justice system, a safer society, or a far scarier place to live?

The more we think about the future, the more we expand our understanding of it

Final Thoughts

Are you changing as fast as the world is? Change is inevitable, but how you deal with change can vary greatly. In a world that never stops changing, great leaders can never stop learning. How do you push yourself as an individual to keep growing and evolving? Does your company push you in the same manner?

The future, as a whole, is unknowable, and this is a good thing. Our involvement in the game of life is based on our notion that we as individuals can make a difference. If we somehow remove the mystery of what results our actions will have, we also dismantle our individual drives and motivations for moving forward. That said, the future can be forecast in degrees of probability. By improving our understanding of what the future holds, we dramatically improve the probability with which we can predict the future.

Futurists come from a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. What we have in common is well-researched big-picture-thinking, strong pattern recognition, and innate curiosity. Ideas that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another, especially when they challenge assumptions and rewrite common knowledge among the rank and file.

Discoveries and predictions are closely related. French novelist Marcel Proust once said, “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” The most successful companies don’t just out-compete their rivals; they redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world heavily steeped in stealing old ideas rather than blazing new trails.

Our ability to tap into and leverage the power of the future is directly tied to the number of times we think about it. The more we think about the future, the more we expand our understanding of it. And the more we understand the future, the easier it becomes for us to interact with it.

Cities are in trouble.

Never before have we seen such a massive convergence of technologies affecting cities as profoundly as we see today. Very few have looked at tech adoption rates as something to monitor.

The current retail apocalypse is just the tip of the iceberg as many cities in the U.S. are set to lose over 50% of their current revenue streams over the next couple decades.

At the heart of the problem is an overly complicated sales tax systems ill-equipped to bend, flex, and morph with the demands of our emerging culture.  But it’s far more than just sales tax revenue that’s at stake.

Cities will soon be tasked with new responsibilities that require the dismantling of old systems, at the same time creating entirely new systems and new organizational structures, requiring new policies, new talent, and new methodologies.

Infrastructure will also change. Parking lots will give way to queuing stations, HOV lanes will give way to driverless-only lanes, and drone-landing pads will begin to spring up around every neighborhood.

Traffic cops will give way to drone command centers, schools will have to prepare for the arrival of driverless students, and zoning laws will have to be completely reworked.

Cities have most certainly been through large-scale transitions in the past.

• From horse and buggy to cars
• From ground-based transportation to airplanes
• From cumbersome film-based photography to cameras everywhere
• From wired phones to anywhere anytime wireless communications
• From paper maps to GPS

Yes, cities have many the tools at their disposal to make the necessary alterations, but most will need help, as they’ve never faced declining revenues like this before.

Cities tend to be strongly separated by function. Each area (fire, police, utilities, etc.) has their own budget and change tends to trigger fear, defensiveness and very often, interdepartmental turf wars.

Some will view this as the opportunity that it truly is, tackling the problems before they occur. But others, best described as the change-resistant majority, will be left far behind.

History will show this to be a great turning point with well-run cities not only rising to the challenge, but also tackling mega-projects that will define their place on the global stage.

63 unanswerable questions to help understand the problem

After traveling to dozens of countries, it has become clear that cities will need to establish their own priorities and plan their own approach. They pride themselves on their differences.

Consequently, there will be no one-size-fits-all solutions. Indeed, many will settle on similar “best practices” and find a number of common solutions, but each city will have make those determinations on their own.

The following questions are currently unanswerable, but will serve as a way of understanding the scope of changes on the horizon.

Disruptions from autonomous vehicles

With hundreds of companies staking their future on driverless technology, it seems inevitable that we are moving into an era of fully autonomous vehicles:

1.    What percentage of the population will relinquish ownership of their vehicle in 5, 10, 15, and 20 years?

2.    What percentage of road traffic will be fully autonomous vehicles in 5, 10, 15, and 20 years?

3.    How long before we see driverless lanes and entire highways dedicated to driverless vehicles?

4.    What provisions will be necessary to accommodate bicycles, motorcycles, skateboards, joggers, and other physically active people?

5.    How long before we see the removal of traffic signs, stoplights, lane markers, etc.?

6.    How many parking lots will disappear in 5, 10, 15, and 20 years?

7.    What forms of transportation will always have drivers?

8.    How will all these changes affect sales tax collection in your city?

Further implications from driverless vehicles

It’s important to begin thinking about how many industries get affected by driverless technology and their long-range implications.

9.    At what age is it ok for a child to ride solo in an autonomous car?

10. How many car-related businesses (auto part stores, tire shops, brake shops, car washes, etc.) will disappear in 5, 10, 15, and 20 years?

11. How many car dealerships will disappear in 5, 10, 15, and 20 years?

12. What will happen to the price of gas, and the collection of gas tax, when consumers switch to electric vehicles?

13. With the transition to electric vehicles, all requiring frequent recharging, what addition loads will this place on our electric systems?

14. What changes will need to be made to highway infrastructure as we become increasingly dependent upon driverless systems?

15. How long until the last emissions testing center disappears?

16. How will Hollywood deal with “chase scenes” in the driverless car era?

Changes to local justice systems

Since a high percentage of every police force is dedicated to traffic control, often as much as 80%, we need to consider how this will affect staffing and revenue models for the future.

17. How will the number of traffic cops change over the next 5, 10, 15, and 20 years?

18. How will these changes affect the number of lawyers, judges, and DAs associated with traffic court?

19. How will a decreasing number of traffic violations affect city revenue in 5, 10, 15, and 20 years?

20. What new kinds of vehicles will spring to life in the driverless era and how will cities manage them?

Driverless delivery

As e-commerce grows, and our frequency of online purchases climbs from once-a-week, to dozens of times per day, the amount of delivery services will increase exponentially.

21. How will driverless trucks change the transport industry?

22. What segments of the trucking industry will be the first to make the transition to driverless transport?

23. What percentage of the trucking industry will employ driverless technology in 5, 10, 15, and 20 years?

24. With fewer, possible no drivers, will the trucking industry become a cheaper form of transport than trains?

25. How long before we see conductor-less trains?

26. How long before we see fully automated mail delivery?

27. How long before we see fully automated transfer of cargo between trains, ships, planes, and trucks?

28. Will driverless technology ever become as safe as the airline industry?

Disruptions from flying/driving drones

If we start with the scenario that sometime in the future every major city will have 50,000 drones flying overhead on a daily basis, many questions come to mind.

29. What will the city’s responsibility be for managing these drones?

30. When it comes to privacy, how close can drones fly to a home, business, or person?

31. How will the city handle drone-related complaints such as noise, snooping, menacing, etc.?

32. What criteria will be used to determine if a drone is “menacing?”

33. At what point will people/authorities have the right to shoot a drone out of the air?

34. At what point will people/authorities have the obligation to shoot a drone out of the air?

35. How long before most cities have their own fleet of drones?

36. How long before most police departments have their own fleet of drones?

Search engines for the physical world

Recent improvements in scanning and sensing technology has given us the ability to create digital models of the physical world. As we expand surveillance capabilities, with fleets of scanning drones used to both image and analyze data on a near-real-time basis, we can begin to imagine a new kind of search technology, designed around searching the physical world.

37. What type of scans would instantly be viewed as an invasion of privacy? (i.e. seeing through walls, clothing, etc.)

38. How long before we can scan and find a specific person, car, or drone with this type of search engine?

39. How long before we can track a person in real time?

40. Who will have access to the technology and resulting data?

41. What are the privacy/security issues that will arise?

42. If police departments become tasked with doing stalker reports, does this become a new responsibility for cities?

43. If search engines can spot key vulnerabilities, such as system flaws and infrastructure failure points, who will have access to this information?

44. What are some of the unintended consequences from this technology?

Driverless Mobile Businesses

The mobile food truck industry is paving the way for a much larger industry. Driverless mobile businesses, built on the frames of RVs, trucks, vans, and other large vehicles, will be reborn as traveling dental offices, tax preparation centers, hair salons, dog grooming parlors, chiropractic clinics, and retail storefronts. The number one challenge of traditional retail has always been driving customers to the store. As we move into a highly mobile marketplace, businesses can drive to where the customers already are.

45. With many overlaying and confusing taxing districts, how will merchants know the proper about of sales tax to charge for every new location?

46. Where will driverless mobile businesses be allowed to set up shop in each city?

47. Will there need to be a new type of business/vehicle classification system developed to regulate these businesses? (Just as we don’t allow porn shops to be built next to grade schools, we will probably need some sort of mobile location ordinances as well.)

48. How long before online sales reach 50% of all purchases in your city?

49. How long before sales from mobile businesses reach 10%, 15%, 20% or 25% of all purchases in your city?

50. Will mobile businesses increase or decrease traffic on the roads in 5, 10, 15, and 20 years?

Major failures

Emerging technology will take its toll on many existing businesses. Very often whenever a major business failure occurs, a city will be tasked with picking up the pieces.

Over the coming years we will see a number of extraordinary failures with complicated ownership issues in the background stalling redevelopment for decades. What provisions does your city have for managing the following kind of failures?

51. Hospitals

52. Colleges

53. Golf courses

54. Theme parks

55. Power plants

56. Airports

57. Shopping malls

58. Stadiums

The City of the Future

Over 50% of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas, and that number will grow to 70% by the year 2050, according to the United Nations.

Today, there are 31 mega-cities – metropolitan areas with more than 10 million people – like Tokyo, Seoul, Delhi, Shanghai, Mexico City, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, Moscow, and Cairo. By 2030, the UN predicts, there will be 41.

As the number of city dwellers rise, so do problems like overcrowding, pollution, housing shortages, and aging infrastructure. But with problems come opportunity and many cities will use this as an opportunity to leapfrog forward.

Gone are the days where people are impressed by projects costing $10-$50 million or even $100 million. We are witnessing an explosion in the number of $1 billion+ projects with many now exceeding $100 billion. Megaprojects are set to triple over the coming decades.

59. What are some of the mega-projects that will define the truly great cities of the future?

60. Is further urbanization a good thing or a bad thing?

61. What are the key components of urbanization that will demand the most attention?

62. What percentage of city workers will find their jobs disappearing in 5, 10, 15, and 20 years?

63. Will it be possible to retain current city employees and retrain them for new positions? What type of retraining will be necessary to make this happen?

Final Thoughts

Rest assured, we’re only scratching the surface with these questions.

Each is designed to be a conversation starter. Even though the answers, for the most part, are unanswerable, every conversation will create a growing level of awareness, and taking appropriate action will not be far behind.

The role of the city is changing. While many are heavily invested in the near term race to label themselves a “smart city,” far greater challenges lie ahead.

With automation, the role of people is changing. In the future, relationships will still matter, but they will matter differently. Skills and talent will still matter, but they will matter differently. And our drive and purpose will still matter, but it will matter differently.

Even though much of today’s technology is giving us super-human abilities and virtually everyone can now think-faster, know-faster, and do-faster than ever before, every new technology requires skills, talents, and understandings that are hard to quantify.

The people of the world have an “unfinishable mandate” to continually stretch, grow, propagate, and master not only the world around us, but also the entire universe. And it all begins with rethinking our cities.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Epiphany Z – 8 Radical Visions for Transforming Your Future”