What predictions from 25 years ago tell us about the next 25 years

Opinion

The Henley Centre’s influential Media Futures 1999 analysed how the internet would impact businesses and consumers. Its authors look at how it helps us go about looking at the future of AI now.

It’s 1999.

We are on the eve of a new millennium. Tony Blair’s New Labour is getting into its stride. War in Kosovo. The start of the Euro currency. The shuttle docked with the International Space Station. Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Ricky Martin. Saving Private Ryan won the Oscar for Steven Spielberg.

And in the media-sphere, TV is dominated by terrestrial channels, with Channel 5 just getting going; Teletext and Ceefax are a “slow internet”; reality TV is not yet very real.

Sony’s PlayStation has launched, but Microsoft’s Xbox is not in play. Print media has seen the rise and decline of lads’ mags. DVDs are big and Netflix will rent you one through the post (you still could up until 2023). Google is just founded. Amazon is a bookstore. And Steve Jobs is back at Apple, which is on the up again.

The browser has enabled the internet to bust out of the academic back room and is beginning to have an impact among real people, so traditional businesses are starting to ask questions. Is the Internet here to stay or is it just a passing fad? Will it disrupt my business? (Find and replace “internet” for “AI” and we’ll be in 2024.)

Looking back on Media Futures

This was the context into which The Henley Centre for Forecasting launched Media Futures 1999, an extensive report on the state of media and thorough analysis on how the internet would impact businesses and consumers.

Now is a timely moment to look back to mark the 25th anniversary of the publication, but also to reflect that the internet was then entering public consciousness to much the same degree that AI is entering it now.

The temptation in a retrospective like this is to ask what we got right and what we got wrong. There are a lot of detailed numerical predictions within this report and I’m sure many of them were inaccurate.  (Anyone wanting to view the original can access it for free in the Archive of Market and Social Research.)

Attention trumps information

It is very difficult to cast your mind back to the state of the world at that time with what we know now.

But when you look at the themes developed in Media Futures, many of them proved to be incredibly prescient. I should say we certainly did not invent all of them, but we drew attention to things that proved true.

There was a lot of talk at the time about the coming “information economy”, but we pointed to the existing concept of the “attention economy”; if economy is the study of the distribution of scarce resources, then information was not going to be in short supply — but attention was.

Supply vs demand

This switch in thinking means that you have to focus on the demand side of the future every bit as much as the supply side. Technology is always able to do new things — the trick is to identify which of them society is ready for, able to pay for and how people will adapt it to their own needs.

As a result of this approach, we talked about “choice media”, which was a direct predictor of streaming services and on-demand content. It was also clear that this would lead to significant growth in paid-for media.

Similarly, it was possible to be confident that the trend away from traditional forms of advertising and the growth in ad avoidance would continue. Our prediction was that advertising and content would become more integrated, yet we still overstressed the continued importance of linear TV.

We were clear that the value of prime content would skyrocket, but we were thinking of sporting rights and movies; TV blockbusters were still part of the Netflix future.

The rise of influence

Although we incorrectly predicted a seismic shift from producer power to consumer power, this did lead us to expect a growth in ecommerce and platform-based businesses. We foresaw that companies would have to develop strategies for creating and using synergies between the internet, “traditional” media and the high street.

Media Futures made a detailed consideration of online communities and their strengths, with a clear expectation that they would be more influential.

We never actually used the term “social media”, but it was clearly contained within our analysis. This also led us to expect a growth in user-generated content and horizontal communications (ie. person to person rather than broadcaster to people). WhatsApp, anyone?

At the time, this was seen as particularly important to younger consumers — always a strong indicator of future change. Beyond the economic potential of communities was also the spectre of the influence on political discourse.

Redistribution of power

The mobile phone industry was in growth phase and we fully expected that there would be dramatic redistribution within screen media.

There were no smartphones and we expected mobiles to have limited capacity versus computers, but we confidently predicted that internet access would not be confined to computer screens — an example of the prediction having to wait for technology to catch up!

It was obvious even then that size would be important. Network effects deliver increasing returns as the number of participants grows.

There was a clear expectation that traffic would concentrate around the biggest players — eventually Google, Facebook and the like. The dominance of the major search engines (remember Yahoo, Excite and Lycos?) led us to give search engine optimisation a key role in the future.

One of our analysis tools was the “media reflex”, which looked at where consumers would go first for particular media needs. Mistakenly, we thought that TV would remain the reflex for entertainment, but this way of thinking helped us to look at new and emerging media formats.

Questions for the next 25 years

So what does this allow us to say about how AI will develop over the next 25 years?

Nothing. Because behind a question like that is a lot of hard work. However, we can say something about how we would go about looking at the future of AI.

Understand the technology: what is it capable of? Talk to the experts: what are they talking about and what are they not talking about?

Do some good research on the public. Don’t ask them what they want or expect — they don’t know. Ask about their lives, their use of technology, their interaction with service providers, their levels of technical ability and their financial and time resources.

Bring a multidisciplinary team to the table — no issue can be viewed from a single angle. Do some hard thinking about how things interconnect and what other things are going to change as we look into the future.

Develop frameworks for your thinking: what will AI do to the media ecosystem, how much will people lean in to it and how much will they lean back from it? What don’t we know yet?

Then put it all together and see if it makes sense. As Arthur C Clarke famously said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Just make sure it’s not an illusion.

Paul Edwards(far left), Karl Weaver (centre) and Chad Wollen were authors of Media Futures 1999. Edwards was CEO of The Henley Centre for Forecasting and now holds a number of non-executive director roles. Weaver was a consultant at Henley and is now managing partner at Yonder Consulting. Wollen was head of media futures at Henley and is now managing partner at Privacy Experience Agency.