Things change all around us and we do not see it.

We are creatures of three dimensions, and all spacial ones. Although we move through time, we live in the present. We rarely have the ability to step back and see the sweep of time. a very few humans have the ability. H.G. Wells was one. Olaf Stapledon in his 1930 novel "last and First Men" covered the future history of mankind over 2 million years! In his later novel, written in 1937, "Starmaker," he covered the history of mankind in a couple of paragraphs!

So we forget thst the top ten discount retailers of 1962, the year of WalMart's foundation are none of them in existence. We find it difficult to imagine the sweep of time so that even the most imaginative prognosticators are wildly wrong. The future of the computer, the phone, film and even distribution channels and book publishing have been poorly predicted. Yet while this realization may not make us better forecasters, it does not even make us more wary about the predictions of others.

Of course, if anyone could predict the future their dreams would be dismissed as signs of insanity.