People underestimate the importance of threshold effects in complex systems like the economy, culture and society at large. Most confident predictions about the future hold way too many variables constant over time, which leads to faulty predictions with high confidence.
Discussion
(AI alone represents a likely series of threshold effects for which predictions about literally anything should be covered in a heap of salt)
Becoming a “climate denier” ?
Isn’t it interesting many threshold jumps we’ve seen in these complex systems were predicted in an art form one way or another, almost like art creates a collective imagination which engineering follows through?
Science-fiction has predicted a lot of technologies that might come to pass, yes. But I’d argue they didn’t predict the broader social and political dynamics that would come as a result of them. So while say, you could argue Jerry Pournelle predicted the smartphone in his fiction (which he called “pocket computers”), he didn’t predict the rise of say, social media and the economic and cultural impacts of mobile computing. So I’d say, yes and no.
I’m pretty sure broader social and political effects (as 2nd order) was unpredictable for the engineers building these technologies as well. Even the visionary ones. (Steve Jobs - App Store is one example). Ain’t it all come down to the problem of affecting human behaviour at any sizeable scale? Wether it’s political, social etc. it seems hard to predict.