Will Osama Bin Laden be caught in 2008? Will George Bush pardon Lewis "Scooter" Libby? The prediction markets are already taking bets. But predicting the future is not what it used to be. Just think of the performance of hedge funds which claim they have had strategies for for beating the average. Yeah right!

As The Economist points out in the piece The Future of Futurology, even the word "futurologist" has more or less disappeared from business and academia. "Futurologists prefer to call themselves 'futurists', and they have stopped claiming to predict what "will" happen. They say that they "tell stories" about what might happen," says The Economist.

One of the reasons for the decline in predicting is that our future will be shaped by forces like genetic engineering, nanotechnology, climate change, clashing cultures and seemingly limitless computing power. And only one or two of us really understand this sort of stuff in any detail.

So how do futurologists, or futurists as they are now called, make a buck? The Economist offers some tips: think small, think short-term and no too far out, say you don't know and can't be certain, get embedded in a particular industry so that have specialist knowledge and talk less, listen more.

Still, the prediction markets will continue a booming trade. Chances are they more likely to be right than individuals where they take the informed guesswork of many and turn it into a consolidated probability. But don't bet on it.