The pattern is remarkably consistent. We either wildly overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies (remember when blockchain was going to replace every institution within five years?) or we catastrophically underestimate their long-term consequences. Nobody building the early internet imagined it would reshape elections, create trillion-dollar companies, or leave millions of people psychologically dependent on dopamine hits from their phones.
It isn’t just that we fail to predict which technologies will emerge; we fail spectacularly at predicting the second- and third-order effects of the technologies we already have. Social media was supposed to connect the world. It did. It also polarised it. The smartphone was a communication device. It became an anxiety machine for an entire generation of teenagers. Nobody planned these outcomes. They emerged.
-Nicholas Bate, from here
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