Extreme prophecy and unsubtle predictions
I've recently read a couple of smug comments from technology enthusiasts lambasting what they perceive as Luddism from sceptics of some recent technological adventure. One comment on The Conversation equated doubters of massive on-line open courses with a newspaper executive insisting that people would never want to read classifieds anywhere other than a printed newspaper. And, having worked in copyright protection for many years, I'm well-acquainted with the hacker triumphalism that follows the breaking of some rights management scheme.
The technology enthusiasts involved are, of course, cherry-picking the failed predictions of their opponents (or, in the case of the comment cited above, describing a caricature that probably doesn't represent tbe opinion held by any actual person). The Register, for example, recently described ten technology fails illustrating that technology enthusiasts can be just as mistaken in their views of the future as anyone else.
I guess I'm pre-disposed to doubt apocalyptic predictions like the notions that universities will be replaced by massive on-line open courses or that iPhones have already brought about a revolution. Aside from the fact that I'm yet to experience any such apocalypse despite the numerous technological changes that have occurred over the course of my life, extreme predictions of this sort are inevitably simplistic.
For one, the world is vastly bigger than any single technology or product, and the changes brought about by any one are always going to tempered by numerous other influences. So the iPhone is a very successful mobile computing product: but what did it do for refrigeration, power generation or surgery?
For another, existing institutions don't just sit back and wait for their demise when a new technology comes along, even if technology enthusiasts would rather that they did. The music and newspaper industries, for example, may have struggled to re-organise their businesses around electronic media, but they never just packed up and walked away, and they continue to try things even now. And far from planning to either shut down their universities in the face of massive on-line open courses, or pretend that such things don't exist, vice-chancellors Ed Byrne and Margaret Gardner, offer some more measured thoughts about how existing universities might work with on-line courses.
Publishing executives, vice-chancellors and others in their position probably won't be correct in every detail — but could they be as wrong as a prediction that technology X will overwhelm everythng?
