Re-engineering the Crystal Ball

Computerworld - Innovation, particularly of the technological kind, has undoubtedly been a marvel of modern human endeavor. Yet if there is one area where our vaunted success deserts us, it is that of foreseeing technological innovation. When confronted with a problem that may lend itself to a technological solution, we fail to correctly assess its potential size and impact. When the need is to foresee the potency of a technological solution to a problem, we are routinely found wanting. This technology foresight deficit follows one of two possible patterns that contrast starkly with each other.
The first pattern is one of exaggerated response, which we may call the Extreme Tendency. In this pattern, problems and the technologies that address problems are accorded a status that is more extreme than is warranted by the facts.
When faced with a problem whose potential consequences may be dire, those consequences are overstated -- often grossly. Some impending disasters that never were: worldwide grain shortages escalating to global famine proportions; the Y2k bug devastating corporate operations and causing airplanes and elevators to crash; and computer viruses laying waste to vast tracts of the information landscape and turning many users permanently off the use of computers.
The same Extreme Tendency pattern plays out when a technology becomes available to solve a problem, with many of us cheerfully seeing certain technologies as panaceas: During the dot-com boom, Internet-based companies would fulfill every consumer need so that regular companies would no longer be necessary; third-generation technologies would revolutionize telecommunications; the Segway would do the same for urban personal transportation; CASE (computer-aided software engineering) tools would virtually replace the human being in computer software development; and artificial intelligence would replace humans in many other activities.
The second pattern of foresight breakdown is one of understated response, or what may be labeled the Quiescent Tendency. This pattern is, in large measure, an opposite of the first.
Problems are underrecognized to the point of being considered unworthy of the effort of finding a solution. An example of such an "unbefitting" problem is that of voice communication over long distances. An early telephone was invented by Elisha Gray, but he didn't bother to file a patent for two years (and was famously two hours too late at the patent office), largely because he didn't think it addressed any major need.
Edison made substantial discoveries that could have been used for voice transmission, but he didn't devote his energies toward that problem until after the telephone was invented in 1876. Even Bell failed to