《财富》水晶球：2014全球大事预测

    20世纪60年代，气象学家通过测量大气层现状，并向前外推的方式预测天气。他们往往向一个计算机模拟扔一些数据，比如风向、气压、空气水分和温度，一两周后的天气预测值j就会由此出炉。这些预测大多是错的。正如麻省理工学院(MIT)一位名叫爱德华•罗伦兹的研究人员所发现的那样，测量大气层时最微小的错误很快就翻倍放大，随后再次翻番，最终使得这一最佳预测模型陷入混乱。天气的演变轨迹并非直线，企业、经济或技术创新亦是如此。所有这些都表明，预测各个行业2014年的动态绝对是徒劳无功的苦差事。但我们还是想试一试。不过，首次涉足预言领域的我们也尝试着采用非线性思考方式，即尽量回避显而易见的趋势，同时要求我们的专家团队也这样做。下面这些预测是《财富》同仁在思考来年大势时展现的集体心智。我们对每项预测都以百分比的形式，给出了它在2014年12月31日前成为现实的概率。我们唯一有把握的事情就是，这肯定比预测天气有趣得多。

    Up through the 1960s, meteorologists forecast the weather by measuring the present state of the atmosphere and extrapolating forward. They'd throw some data into a computer simulation -- wind direction, barometric pressure, moisture in the air, temperature -- and out would come a prediction of the weather a week or two hence. Most often, it was wrong. As an MIT researcher named Edward Lorenz discovered, the tiniest errors in measuring the atmosphere soon doubled in magnitude, and doubled again, turning the best predictive modeling into a demonstration of chaos. The weather doesn't follow straight lines. Neither does business. Or the economy. Or technological innovation. All of which would suggest that trying to predict what's going to happen across a span of industries in 2014 is a fool's errand. We thought we'd try anyway. For our first foray into prophecy, however, we also tried to think nonlinearly -- dancing past the obvious (when we could) and asking our expert sources to do the same. What follows is a look into the hive mind of Fortune as we ponder the coming year. For each prediction, we've given our best guess as to the probability, in percentage terms, that it will come true by Dec. 31. The only thing we're quite sure of? It's more fun than predicting the weather.