Prediction is cheap
I noticed it the way you see a streetlight flicker before it goes out.
A dashboard glowing with confidence. Percentages, confidence intervals, neat little curves. Everything looked certain right up until the moment someone had to choose what to do next. That’s when the room went quiet. The prediction sat there, finished and proud, while the decision hovered, unwanted, like a question nobody volunteered to answer.
We live in a culture that confuses foresight with wisdom.
If something can be predicted, we treat it as understood. If it can be graphed, we assume it has been handled. But prediction is passive. It describes a future without touching it. That difference used to matter. Lately, we act like it doesn’t.
Prediction thrives because it feels clean.
It promises clarity without consequence. A model forecasts demand, risk, behavior, and failure. Then it stops. The decision layer, where tradeoffs live, gets quietly handed to “the system,” “best practices,” or whatever default setting survived the last meeting. This is not an accident. Decisions require values. Predictions only require data. One can be optimized. The other can be blamed.
What makes this slippery is that decisions now wear the costume of inevitability. When a system predicts an outcome, the action that follows is framed as obvious, even necessary. No one admits that every decision embeds a preference about who absorbs the cost and who gets protected from it. Decisions choose sides.
I keep coming back to how relieved people feel once the model speaks.
The tension drains from the room. Responsibility thins out. The future feels smaller, more manageable, even if it’s worse.
When we let prediction stand in for judgment, we trade moral discomfort for technical calm. We stop asking whether the outcome should happen and settle for knowing that it probably will.
It helps to see prediction as a flashlight, not a steering wheel. Useful. Narrow. Honest about what it can illuminate. The mistake is pretending the beam decides where we go. The moment you separate knowing from choosing, something clicks back into place. The quiet recognition that decisions were disguised, never outsourced.