http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/why-futurism-has-a-cultural-blindspot
Like the hungry person who orders more food at dinner than they will ultimately want - to use an example from Lowenstein and colleagues - forecasters have a tendency to take something taht is (in the language of behavioral economics) salient today, and assume that it will play an outsized role in the future. And what is most salient today? It is that which is novel, "disruptive," and easily fathomed: new technology.
As the theorist Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Antifragile, "we notice what varies and changes more than what plays a larger role but doesn't change. We rely more on water than on cell phones, but because water does not change and cell phones do, we are prone to thinking that cell phones play a larger role than they do."
