November 13, 2003
Other similar ideas
Looks like there are other futures markets out there:
Long Bets [ Welcome ]
MIT Futures market
The first one
Everyone's favorite Hollywood Stock Exchange.
Plus some more academic oriented stuff like The World Future Society, and The Futurist and the Journal of Futures Markets.
Even some whacky ones.
I have found a couple of interesting papers on the area:
By Robin Hanson
Len Ellis part 1 and part 2
and John Walker (no not that one).
But my effort here is modest. It will focus initially on simply documenting what I want to know about. What I need to know about to build my house. If anyone else is interested, all the better.
Posted by Martin at 04:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 04, 2003
The Idea
So tonight I was laying in bed for about an hour. Couldn't sleep. Mind wandering. About all sorts of random stuff. But mostly about the future. Predictions on a large number of things. How will this trend turn out? What will the stock market be like? What about wireless technology? What will home entertainment be like? What will happen to the real-estate market in Seattle? What direction are interest rates going? Will fuel cells be economical for home use soon? Ok, so I am a geek and these things keep me up at night for no good reason.
Well, there is sort of a reason. I am about a month into what will probably be a two year process to build a house on the south slope of Queen Anne Hill in Seattle. When you build a house, it forces you consider the direction of the many trends and technologies that will influence your decisions during the life of the project. It is a massively multi-variant equation with many decision points on matters outside my (and most people's) core competency. Basically a hard problem with lots of chances to make mistakes. So how do you attack such a problem? Organize your thoughts and hopefully enlist as many friends as you can to help collect information to make the best decisions on the trajectory of each moving part.
In short, a new Blog. TwoYearsFromNow.com is all about collecting and organizing predictions on the trajectory of many things over the next two years. Inspired in part by a recent Wired article, this is an attempt to harness the collective futuristic powers of a few (or more) for the hopeful benefit of the many. So I will just start writing down all what I think will happen in a bunch of different areas, call it baseline assumptions. Hopefully others (more knowledgeable) will add posts that correct all the my factual errors and start new categories. Over time, hopefully, when you read the threads in a category you will be able to converge on an opinion that you can believe. The real cool thing is that time will keep marching on. We will know in a relatively short time if we were right or not.
I am not sure a Blog is the best way to track this kind of activity. I may experiment with a bulletin board. Or some kind of peer to peer voting system for predictions in each category so that the community can vote on what they believe will happen (in addition to commenting on it).
Well, this should be fun.
Posted by Martin at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack