This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

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It’s not just that forecasts too often reflect a tiny elite’s wishful thinking, it’s that they often paper over uncertainty or downright ignorance. Today, with climate change topping the World Economic Forum’s 2016 Global Risks lists, it’s easy to feel grateful that the jungle road builder never got built. The point isn’t to knock GM’s mid-century execs. It’s that there isn’t much separating them from today’s would-be innovators who haven’t proved much better at identifying whether the public really wants or needs their future-defining “advancements.” (And for every protest of, “But the iPhone!” there are dozens of other “innovations” that tanked.) 1964 New York World’s Fair [Photo: Flickr user Don O’Brien Predicting the future, we already know, is big business. And why merely satisfy a need, the Steve Jobs-ian logic goes, when you can create one that people didn’t know they had? Get ahead of a trend, and you stand to make gobs of money. Create a trend, and make gobs more. But who does that really serve? Who’s It All For? If this type of charge has been lobbed as a generic broadside before, current events show its consequences are far from abstract, and they’re growing. It’s not just that forecasts too often reflect a tiny elite’s wishful thinking, it’s that they often paper over uncertainty or downright ignorance. Take Donald Trump’s surprise victory and the upset outcome of the Brexit referendum. Both were largely votes to reject the status quo at all costs, and prognosticators scarcely saw them coming. Psychologists know that people become more inclined to reject things when they feel all their options are bad—net dissatisfaction pushes us to opt out of everything rather than into something. [Photo: via Wikimedia Commons So when the workforce appears to be careening toward rampant automation, to take just one (not altogether groundless) popular fear, a future of endless freelancing may not strike people as an appealingly liberating alternative, however much they may wish to ditch their desk jobs. Just because you’re seeing users flock to your sleek new freelance marketplace doesn’t mean they’re doing it because they want to. Someone who just got laid off and needs a quick paycheck isn’t rushing to embrace her chosen future; her signup on your platform is your net gain, but not necessarily her career win.

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That’s why it isn’t just frivolous or indulgent for a lighting company like Ketra, at least in BuzzFeed’s description last week, to “suggest new problems with your lights that you didn’t know you had, so you’ll buy a new class of products that you eventually can’t live without” (luxury commodities have been around since camels trekked the Silk Road)–it’s actually counterproductive, in an Economics 101 sense. It’s not the task of every business to do the most good for the most people; that’s government’s job. But it is the function of every business to answer this question with integrity: “What problem are you solving?” Innovating With Integrity Why “with integrity”? Because Econ 101 poses that question simply for the sake of identifying a target customer segment. The world we live in now, however, begs us to think a lot harder and more urgently about collective problems in addition to consumer ones: climate change, the erosion of democratic principles, threats by stateless enemies. Want to make an impact on the future we’ll all have to live in? Want to really innovate? Start by asking ordinary people what they want tomorrow to look like, then work backward from there. People become more inclined to reject things when they feel all their options are bad. This is why the familiar outcry for greater diversity matters so much, especially right now. Businesses have gotten much better at talking about inclusion and diversity, and many have made halting but real progress at matching that talk to action. But there’s still a ways to go, and the pressure to do more is mounting. Companies need to reflect the world they’re trying to reshape. When they do, they’re better at seeing humans as something more than math problems, only knowable through trend analysis. Because in reality, we’re complex, inefficient creatures who seek joy, sociability, and meaning in our lives and in our work. Those things have always been trending. Lately, there’s a lot that threatens them, and that’s a problem that all the internet-connected coffee makers in the world can’t solve, but that real food-guzzling, car-driving people just might.