We are always forecasting, from judging the speed of oncoming vehicles as you navigate your way, planning our day to day activities, to planning for retirement.

In doing this, we might rely on trends from the past. The trends tells us a good story about the past, while smoothing out the bumps and valleys. It also gives us the false confidence that the conditions of today will prevail tomorrow. That we will not be more innovative than we are today, or that there won’t be new stumbling blocks.

Sometimes, though, the bumps and the valleys might reveal more about the future than the overall trend. Like the past, the future is seldom a force-fitted graph.