This is the second of three columns where I look at all the forecasts I have made about things that might happen through the end of 2013.  As I wrote in the first column here this is not an exercise in self-congratulation.  It is an opportunity to look back not just on forecast accuracy but to analyze why or why not trends developed, things happened and perhaps what that might suggest going forward.

Almost all of my forecasts about specifics are on the forecast page of my web site

Date of Forecast

September 2008

Forecast

Complete genetic mapping for individuals …

[This column was first published in the Shift Age Newsletter #27]

Eight years ago I first began to write and speak about the future full time.  Then, as always, I was asked about what accurate forecasts I had made.  This told me of course that my legitimacy to some degree would be based upon this.  So I did start to make forecasts.

The second thing I realized was that most people, and certainly people who lead institutions and companies, are interested in what will happen six months to five years out as that is what is their primary …

The fast and easy answer is yes.  The privacy our parents and grandparents had is no longer.  The privacy we still have in pockets of our lives will not be available to our children and grandchildren. The historical definition of privacy that has existed for centuries no longer exists.

In the last seven years I have written and spoken about privacy and whether we will have any in the future.  In 2006, before the iPhone and all the hand held computing that has followed, I wrote a column titled “Technology Advances, Privacy Declines”.  As I wrote in a recent …

In the middle of the 19^th century, the telegraph was the first technology in history to speed up communications between two people or two locations.  Prior to the telegraph the speed of human communications was measured in horse days; how far a horse could travel in a day. It always amazes me to think that this was the reality only 160 years ago.  My great grand parents were alive then!

There was the brief two year run of the Pony Express, which sped that up by having a fresh horse every 10 to 15 miles between St. Louis and California as …