What of the longer-term future? How can we make sense of it? There are many futurists, and all too many people with views about what the future will bring. But there are no experts on the future. It's not possible to be an expert on something that hasn't yet happened, and most experts perform poorly as predictors.

Some of the reasons are obvious: their models are too simple to cope with complexity, or work only in stable periods but not in periods of turbulence. But we have no choice but to attempt some view of what lies ahead, and social change depends on some degree of optimism that what should happen will happen. Our era looks ahead to distant horizons. The ancient Greeks imagined us looking backwards in time, which meant that the past was ahead of us, the future always behind us, which made it oddly more frightening because it was unseen.

Expertise and humility

Futurism is by any standards an odd activity. The more publicly visible a futurist is, the more likely they are to be wrong. The media reward exaggeration in a reinforcing feedback loop that turns otherwise sensible people into quite silly ones (you could cheekily call it the TED paradox: the more coherent and articulate the picture of future possibilities, the more misleading it probably is). Another lesson is that the more you hold on to a single dominant explanation for change, the more likely you are to be wrong – whether it's the inevitability of democratisation, technology's power to liberate humanity or the eternal nature of ethnic conflict. The world obeys many laws, not just one, and trends produce counter-trends. That's why technological determinism – the assumption that new technologies will diffuse into a grateful world and drive change in a linear way – so often misleads, even though it's as popular as ever.

Serious analysis and thought do confer some advantages in understanding how patterns evolve – but only if leavened with a good deal of humility.