> People tend to vastly overestimate what will happen in 50 years and massively underestimate what will happen in the next two.
I like that we now also have "Amara's Law" [1] that makes the exact opposite point:
> We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
So either that "futurist" was an idiot, or this shows that with respect to future developments, really no one has any idea what they are talking about.
I think there's a slight difference. Amara's law is about "a technology" - just one - and its initial impact vs second-order effects.
e.g. Twitter started out as a micro-blogging platform, and it had impact in that area. But the real impact on people of this kind of fast social media came about from it's longer term use in shaping public discourse, and how that role is weaponised.
See also the saying "We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us"
As for the other quote, I don't know if it's true that "we massively underestimate what will happen in the next two years" but it seems to be a statement about the volume of change, the number of new things, rather than the continued impact of one.
This jumped out at me as well. I think it's fair to say that if you aggregate all predictions, there will be those who vastly over- and under-estimate progress on any given time frame, so depending on who the authors were paying attention to, both could be correct. The interesting question is whether there is, in aggregate, a tendency to over- or under-estimate on a given time frame. My money is on Amara's Law for that.