
Predictions have a tendency of tripping people up. At one extreme, if you peer too far into the future, you can end up making outlandish statements. Anyone from 1911 predicting that China would have gone from dynastic rule to a republic, then to communism, and now into a pseudo-capitalist economy that's the second largest in the world, building dozens of nuclear power plants and manufacturing hundreds of millions smartphones, would have seemed, shall we say, excitable.By contrast, if you look too close, your predictions end up merely mundane. No-one would be surprised to hear that next year, TVs will be bigger, phones will be smaller, and the lines of the jobless will be longer. Tell us something we don't know!Somewhere in between those two...