66% of the experts thought that there would be at least one devastating cyberattack within the following ten years. While there have been some dramatic hacks against companies, mostly to steal credit card numbers and related information, there have been no cyberattacks that could be categorized as crippling. The experts at the time predicted that terrorists would be able to take over power plants or do other drastic things that have never materialized.
56% thought that the internet would lead to a widespread expansion of home-schooling and telecommuting. There certainly has been growth in telecommuting, but not nearly to the extent predicted by the experts. It’s the same with home schooling, and while it’s grown there is not yet a huge and obvious advantage of home schooling over traditional schooling. The experts predicted that the quality and ease of distance learning would make home schooling an easy choice for parents and that has not yet materialized.
50% of them thought that there would be free peer-to-peer music sharing networks. Instead the recording industry has been very successful in shutting down peer-to-peer sites and there are instead services like Spotify that offer a huge variety of free music legally, paid for by advertising.
Only 32% thought that people would use the Internet to support their political bias and filter out information they disagree with. Studies now show that this is one of the major consequences of social networking, in that people tend to congregate with others who share their world view. This finding is related to the finding that only 39% thought that social networks would be widespread by 2014. The experts en masse did not foresee the wild success that would be enjoyed by Facebook, twitter and other social sites.
52% said that by 2014 that 90% of households would have broadband that was much faster than what was available in 2004. At the end of 2013 Leichtman Research reported that 83% of homes had some sort of broadband connection. That number was lower than predicted by the majority of experts, but what was even lower is the average speed that people actually purchase. Akamai reports that the average connection speed in the US at the end of 2013 was 8.7 Mbps. But this was not distributed in the expected bell curve and that average consists of a small percentage of homes with very fast connections (largely driven by Verizon FiOS and other fiber providers) but with many homes with speeds that are not materially faster than what was available in 2004. For example, Time Warner just announced this past week that they are finally increasing the speed of their base product from 3 Mbps to 6 Mbps.
32% thought that online voting would be secure and widespread by 2014. There are now a number of states that allow on-line voter registration, but only a tiny handful of communities have experimented with on-line voting. It has become obvious that there is a real potential for hacking and fraud with on-line voting.
57% of them thought that virtual classes would become widespread in mainstream education. This has become true in some cases. General K-12 education has not moved to virtual classes. Many schools have adopted distance learning to bring distant teachers into the classroom, but there has been no flood of K-12 students moving to virtual education. Virtual classes, however, have become routine for many advanced degrees. For example, there are hundreds of master degree curriculums that are almost entirely on-line and self-paced.
But the experts did get a few things right. 59% thought that there would be a significant increase in government and business surveillance. This has turned out to be true in spades. It seems everybody is now spying on us, and not just on the Internet, but with our smartphones, with our smart TVs, and even with our cars and with the IOT devices in our homes.
The Pew Institute continues to conduct similar surveys every few years and it will be interesting to see if the experts of today can do better than the experts of 2004. What those experts failed to recognize were things like the transformational nature of smartphones, the widespread phenomenon of social networking and the migration from desktops to smaller and more mobile devices. Those trends are what drove us to where we are today. In retrospect if more experts had foreseen those few major trends correctly then they probably would have also guessed more of the details correctly. Within the sample of experts there were undoubtedly some experts who guessed really well, but the results were not published by expert and so we can’t see who had the best crystal ball.