The Hype Cycle and Perfect Prediction Horizons

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

So declared Roy Amara in 2006. Futurists have since been wrestling with this law and its implications.

Amara’s Law implies that between the early disappointment and the later unanticipated impact at scale there must be a moment when we get it about right.

I reckon this Perfect Prediction Horizon is 15 years in the future.

We expect too much of an innovation in the first ten years. We foresee too little impact in the first twenty years and thereafter. But our intuitions tend to be about right at that 15 year time horizon.

The Hype Cycle captures this (and perhaps little else) well.