Here's a few reasons why people have so much trouble predicting the future: 1) Fail to realize that even the best superforecasters' predictions drop off dramatically past a three year time horizon and that most folks are worse than dart throwing monkeys at future predictions. 2) Fail to realize you literally can not see black swan inventions coming around the corner. If you predict the future of Germany in 1439, then in 1440 your predictions are completely wrong because of the Printing Press. If you're an 18th century farmer you can't see a web developer job because it exists on the back of countless developments and inventions you can't predict. 3) They change one variable and hold all other variables the same. i.e. AI advances and nothing else does, no parallel discoveries or innovation, no solutions, no mitigations, no societal or cultural changes. 4) Predict unlimited resources and zero friction in the real world (dust, disconnects, diffusion, etc) to slow/divert/change/impact the development. All changes experience equal and opposite reactions. 5) They mistake their ability/expertise in a domain for a parallel/orthogonal ability to predict the future of that domain and its impact on the world. Two different skills and they do not usually overlap (though very rarely they do.) 6) What I call "classic sci-fi or Jules Verne syndrome", which is similar to one variable changes. It's like in Jules Verne when one guy gets the submarine and nobody else does. But life is more like cell phones, lots of people getting them over time in a diffusion curve. 7) They mistake exponential curves as infinite always and never see an S curve coming. 8) The see infinite resources (compute/memory/learning upper limits/improvement) and no limitations.