Forecast
Forecast is defined as: the process of estimation in unknown situations. Many aspects of our daily lives need to be forecast, from how much milk is left in the fridge to how will this decision impact my financial future? Most of the forecasts are shallow and are not for very distant into the future. These posts are an attempt to look a bit further at the possibilities and see how they may be played out, what would need to happen and how socially and technologically it could be done.
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Big Mac Index
As economists struggle to settle on the “right” worth of different currencies, there are some real-world objects with comparable prices across the globe. One such product is the iconic McDonalds’ Big Mac hamburger. Sold in many countries world-wide, it is a quick metric to determine if a local currency is over or under valued.
Everybody votes!
As far as prediction markets go, you wouldn’t expect to find one in a video game console, but that’s exactly what Nintendo did in the Wii with the Everybody Votes Channel.
Introduction to Prediction Markets
When you gather a suitably diverse group of people together, ask them a question and average their answers, the result tends to be more accurate than the result of any one person including experts. The implication of this, is that the crowd as a whole can make better informed judgements than traditional experts. There just needs to be an ideal way to extract those tiny bits of relative information from individuals in a consistent manner. Enter the prediction market.
The Long Now
The Y2K problem was pop-culture’s initiation into short-term thinking on a global scale. The issue revolved around the 2-digit year, 19__ on checkbooks and in computer databases. When the year 2000 arrived, it broke a lot of code that filled in the __ with 00 making it 1900 instead of 2000. The long now foundation challenges us to think in the longer term, not in years, not in millennium, but in 10s of millennia.
Future predicting: What might happen in the next hundred years?
This is an article that ran in the December 1900 issue of Ladies Home Journal. It was predicting life 100 years into the future in the year 2001. The following is that article annotated with notes about how close or far off they really were with their predictions.
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