‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it’ — quote of the day by physicist Dennis Gabor on the nature of innovation
Dennis Gabor was a Hungarian-British physicist who’s widely credited with inventing holography, a photographic technique that can record and reconstruct three-dimensional images. This is an invention for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971. But his legacy extends to his philosophy on the nature of innovation
“Technological and social inventions are broadening this probability space all the time; it is now incomparably larger than it was before the industrial revolution—for good or for evil. The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man’s ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive.”
Go your own way
Gabor wrote this iconic passage in his now-extremely rare book ‘Inventing the Future’, in which he sketched out an optimistic vision for the future.
Quote of the day
This article is part of TechRadar Pro’s QOTD project to provide an insight into the minds of the brightest and most recognized figures in the technology industry today and in years gone by. Read the full series here.
At the core of his belief was that there was no need to any longer passively predict what may come to pass in the years ahead. Instead, the influence and strength of science and industry was such that mankind could forge its own future.
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The comments also focused on that pivot point of the industrial revolution, before which the possibilities of the future were fairly limited, in his view. As each wave of innovation comes to pass, the possibilities continue to expand.
Charting a path
There’s no understating the influence that Gabor had in modern science and industry. His comments were routinely quoted, and even adopted, by others. Chief among the figures that took this philosophy to heart was Alan Kay, described as one of the true luminaries of personal computing.
Kay, whose career spanned stints at Apple and HP among other industry titans, used this idea of inventing, not predicting, the future as a core maxim from 1971. He used the phrase to inspire his work in pioneering elements like the graphical user interface and laptops many years before they were realized.
Although Gabor was a very influential figure in the technology world, his predictions weren’t always on the mark. In 1962, for instance, he said sending documents via telephone wires was possible, but only in principle. That’s because the equipment required was so expensive that he didn’t see a world in which they’d be cheap enough for the technology to become practical.
