Leaders Need to Stop Pretending They Can Predict the Future |
In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence, made a bold prediction: "We should stop training radiologists now," he told the crowd at an industry conference in Toronto. "It's just completely obvious... it might be ten years, but we've got plenty of radiologists already."
Well, it's 10 years later, and the Mayo Clinic, to take one example, employs 55% more radiologists than it did at the time of Hinton's prediction. The number of radiologists in the U.S. has increased by roughly 10%. Hinton’s prophecy is just one of history’s many “completely obvious” forecasts that never came to be.
Flip through cable news, and within minutes, you’re bound to stumble across an expert projecting certainty about AI’s impact on jobs, whether the Democrats will flip the House, or when the war in Iran will end.
Alas, as psychology professor Philip Tetlock, who evaluated decades of expert predictions in politics and economics, famously found, “the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”
In times of great uncertainty, certainty is ever more alluring. Believing that we can predict the future gives us........