These laws are my explanation of why so many predictions of future society, technology, and discovery - whether created for the purposes of fiction, or in a serious attempt to see what is 'just around the corner' - more than often turn out to be fundamentally flawed.

The First Law is in many ways the simplest, but is nevertheless commonly overlooked by people who really ought to know better. Simply stated it is this - "The Majority of Time-Frames Used in Prediction are not Calculations but the First Thing that Came into the Author's Head." This sounds fairly rude to the authors, but it is easier to understand it in a simplified form. What I mean is that - sometimes without realising it - we all have a natural inclination to use what you might call timemarks. These are like landmarks, only they represent an obvious point in time, rather than space. The year 2000 was for many years a very obvious choice to represent 'the near future', and 2001 a simple twist to make it less obvious to the reader. Once used by one writer, a timemark soon spreads, as it is then the first thing to come into the heads of other writers. In short, then, any dates given in a prediction of the future should be looked at carefully, as they are most likely not related to the event at all, but to the writer's mindset. For example, I suspect that it was no coincidence that a book written around 1948 was titled 1984.

The Second and Third Laws regard Breakthroughs, so before we look at them, we need to take a moment to define what a breakthrough is. A breakthrough, as discussed here, is a dramatic and unpredictable jump in the fundamental way something works. It is a quantum leap of one kind or another, either in technological terms, like the invention of the microchip (or even the transistor), or in social terms, such as the boom in usage of the internet. A breakthrough, then, is, by definition, unexpected. It is something that isn’t part of the previous trend, but the beginning of a new one; it is a jump in the graph, where one line or curve ends, and another begins; it is the bane of anyone trying to predict anything: completely unpredictable.

With that definition in place, the Second Law seems fairly obvious. Basically, it is "At Any Time, an Unexpected Breakthrough May Come which Negates All the Patterns the Author is Working With." It barely needs explaining, as it is fairly obvious that if there is some unexpected upheaval of some sort, all predictions will be wrong. All that needs to be added is the affirmation that such breakthroughs do happen: take, for instance, the fact that most households now have an internet connection of some sort. At one point in time it would have been impossible to predict that they could have the sheer computing power, before the breakthrough of microchips came along. Before that, it was unthinkable that anyone would have the computing power to do that, before the transistor. And more recently, nobody expected that the number of home users wanting to be on the internet would suddenly boom. This last example is one that isn’t quite so obvious, but if you think about it, it is very much a breakthrough, in the way society looks at the internet. When it was developed, it was merely for military use, then academic communication between universities. It was a social breakthrough when it became a commercial and recreational concept. To take a completely different example, writers a century or so ago, dreamt of what we would see as airlines, and jumbo jets (and even moon landings). But, because they were working with extrapolations, rather than breakthroughs (they were only human), they saw them all based on dirigible balloons, giant airships, the breakthrough of which had just happened. So they didn’t take into account that because the graph had just jumped into a new direction, it might well do so again!

Finally, we come to the Third Law, which is in one sense a twist on the second. It warns "Predictions are Often Based on Expected Breakthroughs, the Absence of which may Negate the Patterns the Author is Working With." For instance, many serious predictions feature a cure for cancer, as medical science is a wonderful thing. However, ask a medical scientist, and they will tell you that a cure for cancer would be a breakthrough. Think about what that means, and you'll realise that any prediction with this at its heart will almost inevitably fail to come true. A particular recipe for disaster is when an author combines the First and Third Laws, and gives a date for an expected breakthrough. Even if the breakthrough does, as it turns out, come, it will, by its very nature, come at an unpredictable time.

These laws are not the kind of Laws which it is a crime to break. Rather, they are points that should be born in mind when writing any kind of prediction of the future. In fact, if an author is aware of them, they can be put to good use. If there is no awareness, it can become amusing, or even annoying, for later readers, as the predictions fail to come true – especially if a date slips in under the First Law, and ends up in the past rather than the future. But if a writer is aware of the Second and Third Laws, and writes based on a certain breakthrough coming about, as a hypothesis, it can make for very interesting reading.

But on a final note, I find it very interesting to discover what dates and breakthroughs were and weren’t predicted at different eras of history. I am fascinated by the concept that "Yesterday’s Tomorrow is not Today". So perhaps these aren’t the Laws of Failed Prediction after all, but rather represent a part of human nature that’s forever striving to cheat the Laws of Space and Time.