????20世紀60年代，氣象學家通過測量大氣層現狀，并向前外推的方式預測天氣。他們往往向一個計算機模擬扔一些數據，比如風向、氣壓、空氣水分和溫度，一兩周后的天氣預測值j就會由此出爐。這些預測大多是錯的。正如麻省理工學院(MIT)一位名叫愛德華?羅倫茲的研究人員所發現的那樣，測量大氣層時最微小的錯誤很快就翻倍放大，隨后再次翻番，最終使得這一最佳預測模型陷入混亂。天氣的演變軌跡并非直線，企業、經濟或技術創新亦是如此。所有這些都表明，預測各個行業2014年的動態絕對是徒勞無功的苦差事。但我們還是想試一試。不過，首次涉足預言領域的我們也嘗試著采用非線性思考方式，即盡量回避顯而易見的趨勢，同時要求我們的專家團隊也這樣做。下面這些預測是《財富》同仁在思考來年大勢時展現的集體心智。我們對每項預測都以百分比的形式，給出了它在2014年12月31日前成為現實的概率。我們唯一有把握的事情就是，這肯定比預測天氣有趣得多。

????Up through the 1960s, meteorologists forecast the weather by measuring the present state of the atmosphere and extrapolating forward. They'd throw some data into a computer simulation -- wind direction, barometric pressure, moisture in the air, temperature -- and out would come a prediction of the weather a week or two hence. Most often, it was wrong. As an MIT researcher named Edward Lorenz discovered, the tiniest errors in measuring the atmosphere soon doubled in magnitude, and doubled again, turning the best predictive modeling into a demonstration of chaos. The weather doesn't follow straight lines. Neither does business. Or the economy. Or technological innovation. All of which would suggest that trying to predict what's going to happen across a span of industries in 2014 is a fool's errand. We thought we'd try anyway. For our first foray into prophecy, however, we also tried to think nonlinearly -- dancing past the obvious (when we could) and asking our expert sources to do the same. What follows is a look into the hive mind of Fortune as we ponder the coming year. For each prediction, we've given our best guess as to the probability, in percentage terms, that it will come true by Dec. 31. The only thing we're quite sure of? It's more fun than predicting the weather.