Future
The usual way in which we plan today for tomorrow is in yesterday's vocabulary. We do so, because we try to get away with the concepts we are familiar with and that have acquired their meanings in our past experience. Of course, the words and the concepts don't quite fit because our future differs from our past, but then we stretch them a little bit. Linguists are quite familiar with the phenomenon that the meanings of words evolve over time, but also know that this is a slow and gradual process.
—E.W. Dijkstra, On the cruelty of really teaching computer science
If it hasn't happened yet but is going to, then it's part of the future. Checking whether or not something is going to happen is notoriously difficult. Luckily, the field of heuristics and biases has given us some insights into what can go wrong. Namely, one problem is that the future elicits far mode, which isn't about truth-seeking or gritty details.
External links
See also
- Hindsight bias, absurdity heuristic, representativeness heuristic
- Near/far thinking
- Exploratory engineering
- Intelligence explosion, technological singularity
- Existential risk
- Black swan, narrative fallacy
- Prediction