We were not predicting it.

We can predict the accident and we can predict who, which cars, are in the best position to move out of the way to calculate the safest route for everyone.

Because we can anticipate, forecast what the speaker is likely to say.

Those who believe that investments in the US stock market will maintain the same strong growth trend for decades may well be right.

It is difficult to predict how America role in the region will evolve.

Yet, imagining the aftermath we can also predict that it will have several facets which will prove quite oppressive and burdensome for Turkish citizens.

When interest rates fall, the opposite effect on asset prices may be predicted.

We're going to be predictive we're going to know what you're likely to have.

But the costs are too high to be impulsive, and the storms of political Islam are difficult to forecast.

In forecasting interest rates one is engaged not in examining fundamentals, but in predicting what average market opinion expects average market opinion about fundamentals to be.

Population change happens slowly, but its effects can be forecast early.

The bottom line is that we can t predict where the threat will emerge, so we need a distributed, intelligent detection system.

It is often impossible to predict at the outset of a mission what demands or dangers United Nations troops will encounter.

We foresee a network of collaborative arrangements local, regional and global forming the building blocks of a new system of collective security, all hinged on the focal point of the United Nations.

But what will this world look like? We can foresee the power that will shape its geopolitics, but what values will underlie the exercise of that power?

Numerous land and sea ecosystems are in danger of being destroyed forever, with effects that are hard to predict.

The effects are unpredictable but likely to be huge, in terms of crop production, diseases, costs and availability of irrigation and drinking water, coastal erosion, and so forth

Pakistani liberals may be right that their country is invulnerable to an Islamist power grab. But the costs are too high to be impulsive, and the storms of political Islam are difficult to forecast.

As America s primaries move beyond Iowa and New Hampshire, it is simply impossible to predict who will be the Democratic and Republican nominees, much less who will become the 44th president of the United States.

The outcome of any such experiment is impossible to foresee, because other countries experience can never be a perfect guide to a new system the situation is never exactly the same in a different environment.

The outcome of the court hearings is difficult to predict, but it will answer the question of whether Russians have lost the freedom artistic self expression that they gained after communism's fall.

The bottom line is that we can t predict where the threat will emerge, so we need a distributed, intelligent detection system. In practical terms, how should it be built?

Optimists counter that smart phones, Big Data, and expected advances in nanotechnology, robotics, and biosciences are harbingers of a new era of technology driven productivity improvements. It may be impossible to predict the next killer app, they argue, but it will always be developed.

But what will this world look like? We can foresee the power that will shape its geopolitics, but what values will underlie the exercise of that power?

However, it gives us no pleasure to prophesy today the fire that Serbia will tomorrow attempt to kindle in Kosovo and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, after the fire in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, but this time a fire with horrible consequences for the Balkans, Europe and even beyond.

Back in the early 1990's, American officials like me who were making long term forecasts for the Clinton administration cautioned that it would be rash to forecast an average long run growth rate of more than 2.5 per year and that actual growth might turn out to be even slower.