There’s one thing Andrew Odlyzko knows for sure about technology bubbles: they’re nearly impossible to predict.

Odlyzko, director of the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota, visited Yahoo! Research recently as part of the Big Thinkers Distinguished Speaker Series. He gave a thought-provoking, standing-room-only talk entitled: "High-tech Bubbles, Technology Diffusion, and How to Prepare for the Next Techno-mania".

Although most people think of the dot-com debacle as the greatest technology bubble in history, Odlyzko suggests otherwise. Instead, he points to the British Railway Mania of the 1840s. "Over a four to five year period, investors poured the equivalent of about five trillion dollars into the railways," he says. "By comparison, the billions lost in the dot-com crash was trivial."

Odlyzko poses an important question: Will we see another technology bubble anytime soon, and are we actually in another mania right now—what some people are calling "Bubble 2.0?"

Odlyzko believes technology bubbles often have common themes, which help to identify their existence. One is the breathless over-estimation of the speed of technology diffusion. Before the dot-com crash, this was referred to as "internet time." Similarly, back in the 1840s, it was called "railroad speed." In both instances, the experts grossly overestimated how fast people would adopt the new technologies and how quickly society would change as a result.

"For the most part, society moves very slowly," says Odlyzko. "In both cases, people didn’t come instantly, but rather in their own sweet time."

Technology bubbles, he notes, tend to have another key commonality: a willful refusal on the part of so-called experts to look at clear quantitative measures that would have shown crashes were inevitable. "People stopped being skeptical," he says. "They willingly suspended their disbelief and became technology cheerleaders rather than leaders."

Another interesting aspect of bubbles, observes Odlyzko, is that even the experts don’t understand what is attractive about the technologies they are hyping. In the 1840s, for instance, conventional wisdom said the majority of railway revenue would come from the transport of coal. As it turned out, commercial passengers generated nearly 80 percent of the revenue. In the same way, society is finding new uses for the Internet that no one ever predicted.

The point, says Odlyzko, is don’t expect researchers and the people who build the technology to understand the future any better than the businesspeople who try to sell it.

So, is it possible to prepare for the next bubble? Yes… and no. "History doesn’t repeat," concludes Odlyzko. "It just rhymes."