Spotting the Future

I caught the following article this morning as it flitted by on Twitter (via +Fabienne GOUX-BAUDIMENT), "How to Spot the Future," by Wired of last year.  I of course could not resist checking it out.

Their list of rules of thumb for spotting the future include:

1. Look for cross pollinators
2. Surf the exponentials
3. Favor the liberators
4. Give points for audacity
5. Bank on openness
6. Demand deep design
7. Spend time with time wasters

Fundamentally, I was kind of "ehh," about the whole article.  Perhaps Wired really does use those, um, heuristics, to anticipate change, but the academic in me is not that impressed (of course, the academic in me wants to see one of their intrepid editors write up a proper historical study of their experiences in this regard, so that we can see exactly the historical precedents that inform their rules of thumb).

At the same time, what I often see around me when others are "forecasting" the future is not dramatically dissimilar: a broad rule of thumb/model of change combined with some form of informal frequency analysis + novelty hunting (scanning the Web and identifying things that seem to be popping up more but are not yet fully mainstream + picking out things that provoke and are probably less well known).