Equivalent facts can lead to different choices depending on how they are framed.
More quotesPut an artificial moon in a spreadsheet and somebody will call it a strategy.
That is the confidence trick of futurology: precision impersonates knowledge. Pocket phones and lasers were plausible capabilities. Undersea colonies and silent helicopter taxis were plausible pictures. The difficult bit was never drawing the gadget; it was predicting which technologies people would welcome into ordinary life, which complementary systems would arrive and which supposedly inevitable desires would turn out not to exist.
QR codes spent years looking like a solution searching for a meeting, then cameras and contactless habits gave them a proper job. Video calling existed long before many teams treated it as normal office furniture. The smart fridge, meanwhile, keeps returning from the future to ask whether I want my milk to have a software update. Technical possibility is cheap. Social usefulness is the bloody expensive bit.
I have no objection to being wrong about the future. Everybody will be. I object to paying handsomely for decorative certainty. Name the assumptions. What must become cheaper? Which behaviour must become normal? What evidence would kill the story before it kills the budget? Which investment remains sensible across several futures? A five-year curve without those answers is fan fiction with axis labels.
The useful forecast leaves escape routes. It tells you what to watch, what to delay and where to place a small bet while everyone else is ordering the commemorative launch sculpture.
If all it produces is a confident keynote and a frightening invoice, buy a horoscope. At least the horoscope has stars in it.