It's pretty futile, but I really enjoy trying to figure out how much of human technology I could have predicted given basic starting knowledge of "organisms with this body will build advanced technology".
Like, could I have predicted something like cars? Or clothes? Or stigmas?
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Um. No. Per Popper, predicting a technology is equivalent to inventing the technology.
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I don't mean specifically, I mean generally. Would I have predicted that humans would have ended up using a fast transportation unit thing? Are there any analogues of "system transports things faster" in other fields?
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maybe or maybe not, but if you focus on predicting future inventions instead of past ones, you could get rich
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She has a better way of getting rich that doesn't require long chains of reasoning all working out correctly 😉
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When I was younger I often put myself in the mental position of other people as: "Would I have thought of the solution to said problem the same way this person did had I been in that particular predicament?"
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Yes I think you could predict cars, clothes etc. The difficulty with cars isn't whether humans will build them, it's knowing that such a thing is even possible, which requires some pretty serious physics knowledge.
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I try to predict social trends in the future. But technology is too chance based to really predict in my view. That said, I like to imagine what technology will end up like in the last decade of my lifespan.