Quotes About Prediction

If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.

At the rate we're going, the 21st century looks pretty clear. It's going to be pretty violent.

I'm surprised that VR has come about so quickly. It's lucky I just happened to write a book imagining virtual reality right on the cusp of it actually happening.

As mechanistic biologists, we are hoping that by understanding how the virus works at the molecular level, we will be able to predict with more accuracy how it will evolve.

Being a visionary is a new profession, but it is really just a variant on fortunetelling, which may be the world's oldest. And its marketing appeal is similar - people will pay for reassurance about the unknown.

The techniques of being an Internet visionary are just like those of lower-tech fortunetellers through the ages. A technological visionary must tell people what they want to hear, because your company's stock won't rise if you spout an unpopular vision to analysts.

Some scientists have come up with a complex mathematical equation to predict happiness based on the premise that happiness stems not from how well things go but whether things go better than expected.

My crystal ball is fuzzy

I mean some can predict the future because they create it," said Rosenblatt. "Oh, not the good things. We can't make someone love us, or even like us. But we can make someone hate us. We can't guarantee we'll be hired for a job, but we can make sure we're fired." He put down his apple cider and stared at Gamache. "We can't be sure we'll win a war, but we can lose one.

dogs can be trained to predict their owners' epileptic fits, but not the other way around

It is easy indeed to display foresight after the event. In retrospect all fools become wise.

What Communism was to the twentieth century, Islam will be for the next one hundred years.19

People who study eschatology

Foresight is a virtue and averts many a misfortune.

because we cannot see things beforehand, and only know how dreadfully miserable we are, we think it is always going to be so.

If I know your closest friends, I can accurately predict your future.

Sometimes science fiction does become scientific discovery.

The idea that we can systematically understand certain aspects of the world and make predictions based on what we've learned, while appreciating and categorizing the extent and limitations of what we know, plays a big role in how we think.

we've always predicated our quotations on the assumption that life expectancy in the United States would continue to rise. But during the past three years it has in fact started to go down.

the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, written 70 years ago: "It is dangerous . . . to apply to the future inductive arguments based on past experience, unless one can distinguish the broad reasons why past experience was what it was.

Absolute prediction is completion . . . is death!

There had never been a death so foretold.

Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.

The heart knows today what the mind will learn tomorrow.