This long-form post on the Farnam Street blog brings together a number of the concepts from Future Hunters: strategic foresight, signals, drivers, trends, the fringe, and technology development.
https://fs.blog/2019/05/gatess-law/
Key Concepts
Amara's Law/Gates' Law: “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.”
Gartner Hype Cycle: "Hype cycles are obvious in hindsight, but fiendishly difficult to spot while they are happening. It’s important to bear in mind that this model is one way of looking at reality and is not a prediction or a template. Sometimes a step gets missed, sometimes there is a substantial gap between steps, sometimes a step is deceptive."
The Adjacent Possible: "Now that we know how Amara’s Law plays out in real life, the next question is: why does this happen? Why does technology grow in complexity at an exponential rate? And why don’t we see it coming? One explanation is what Stuart Kauffman describes as “the adjacent possible.” Each new innovation adds to the number of achievable possible (future) innovations. It opens up adjacent possibilities which didn’t exist before, because better tools can be used to make even better tools."