As a futurist I am always asked to make predictions. Often somewhat in jest, people ask me who is going to win the election, how much will the stock market go up in the next three months, who will win the Super Bowl, things like that. While I have been accurate in such predictions, it is not what I do. My job is to analyze trends and the underlying dynamics that create them. Having developed a level of pattern recognition allows me to connect a seeming disparate collection of events and occurrences to discern the early development of a new …