Carissa Véliz

We don't pay a price to get predictions right or wrong these days.

And that makes us more gullible and more vulnerable towards predictions because, yes, you're right, every expert gets asked about the future and whether they have a good track record or not.

And if they get it wrong, nobody remembers.

We're so overloaded by information that essentially it means nothing.

And then if somebody gets it right, they might gain undue attention because they probably got it right just through...

fluke if you have everybody making predictions somebody's going to get it right even if it's not because they actually saw a glimpse about the future and in a way what we're

What we're saying is that maybe we should have something of a cultural change in which we rely less on certain kinds of predictions for certain kinds of things in certain kinds of contexts.

And one of the things that I would like to see less of is journalists asking experts of anything about the future of whatever it is they study.

Because there's very good research that experts on X field are no better

than others at predicting the future of that X, whatever that field might be.

Well, no, because people are experts, but they're experts in the past or the present.

So, for example, if you ask me about privacy, I can tell you quite a few facts about privacy, about how our data gets collected and what happens to it and how it gets sold and who uses it.

If you ask me about the future of privacy, I have no idea.

But if a journalist asks me, I might venture

And it doesn't mean that I'm not an expert on privacy.

It's just that there's no such thing as an expert in the future of anything at all.

Yes, there are so many examples and they're so interesting, from the political world to the medical sphere.

And I'll start with the medical sphere because it's so tangible.

One of the things that most shocked me when I decided to write this book is that there are so many books about prediction, about how to predict, about forecasting, but there are no books about the ethics of prediction.

And that is truly shocking, given how much we rely on prediction.