How to Predict the Future

You’ve got to love the old line that making predictions is hard—especially ones about the future. But joking aside, futurism is a big and fascinating business. How can we determine which of today’s technological trends will coalesce into something meaningfully new, and which ones will soon be forgotten? In her upcoming book The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, Amy Webb argues that anyone can methodically analyze such questions. Webb, who is CEO of the Future Today Institute and previously wrote Data, A Love Story: How I Cracked the Online Dating Code to Meet my Match, explained her ideas—and took reader questions—in an interview with MIT Technology Review’s Executive Editor, Brian Bergstein.