Technological Feasibility Does Not Mean Economic Viability

One of the most common mistakes in technological forecasting is moving from "this is possible" to "this will happen."

Between these statements lies the economics of the entire system.

One must calculate not only the cost of creation, but also the cost of operation: compute, data storage and growth, network, support, migrations, people, security, integrations, the cost of failure, and the price of scaling.

Many beautiful architectures break not in the laboratory, but after multiplying the load by a thousand, a million, or a billion users.

Therefore, one of the fundamental questions for a futurist is: "Does the economics here add up once we include all real-world flows and dependencies?"

This is not a requirement to know the exact ROI of any research in advance. At the frontier, exact figures often do not exist. But a futurist is obligated to see the mechanisms that can make a technically possible system economically impossible.