“Technology Forecasting: The Garden of Forking Paths”, 2014-06-01 (; backlinks):
Pessimistic forecasters are overconfident in fixating, hedgehog-like, on only one scenario for how they think something must happen; in reality, there are always many ways through the garden of forking paths, and something needs only one path to happen.
A classic cognitive bias in technological forecasting is motivated-stopping and lack of imagination in considering possibilities for a steelman.
Many people use a mental model of technologies in which they proceed in a serial sequential fashion and assume every step is necessary and only all together are they sufficient, and note that some particular step is difficult or unlikely to succeed and thus as a whole it will fail & never happen. But in reality, few steps are truly required.
Progress is predictably unpredictable: A technology only needs to succeed in one way to succeed, and to fail it must fail in all ways. There may be many ways to work around, approximate, brute force, reduce the need for, or skip entirely a step, or redefine the problem to no longer involve that step at all. Examples of this include the parallel projects used by the Manhattan Project & Apollo program, which reasoned that despite the formidable difficulties in each path to the end goal, at least one would work out—and they did.
In forecasting, to counter this bias, one should make a strong effort to imagine all possible alternatives which could be pursued in parallel, and remember that overall failure requires all of them to fail.