How to Predict the Future

In my previous post I said that I love it when life imitates art. Science fiction gadgets, as we see them on the screen, often turn up in real life in one form or another. I think that the reason for this is that sci-fi writers are futurists at heart. They see the technology as it is now and extrapolate its development to the future.

Take a look at the following video, released by Sony in the last week of November 2011. Are we getting closer to inventing a real holodeck?

And, just for the fun of it, here is a satire on the whole Start Trek/futurist thing:

According to Bryan Alexander's article "Apprehending the Future: Emerging Technologies, from Science Fiction to Campus Reality", there are a number of different ways to predict future technologies:

• The Environmental Scan: Repeatedly survey the technological horizon, looking for the leading edges of new projects and trends. One website that does just this is http://www.openthefuture.com/. 
• The Delphi Method: Experts in a field are assembled, either physically or virtually, and consulted on emergent developments in that domain. 
• Prediction Markets: Games structured like commodity futures markets but using pretend currencies and trading on ideas or events rather than goods. Based on the parameters of the game, the results can show what might be popular, what might fail and what people want. 
• Scenarios: Individuals or teams represent actors in a situation. Scenario organizers portray events through various media and then facilitate as players react in accordance with the actors they are simulating. As defined pithily in The Forecasting Dictionary, a scenario is "a story about what happened in the future." 
• Crowdsourcing: Packaging a problem in such a way as to invite non-expert contributions and then distributing that request for help to the world at large. This can easily be achieved today by posting a question on Twitter such as, "What are the most important emerging technologies for..." and then analyzing the responses.

Unfortunately, though, for all their studies, methods and philosophizing about the nature of the human beast, futurists often get it wrong.

Donald Rumsfeld famously said:

...there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns; the ones we don't know we don't know."

The media made fun of Rumsfeld for this last sentence, but the truth is that when it comes to predicting the future, there will be societal and technological developments that we never would have been able to predict would happen. For instance, in 1960, a futurist might have been able to predict that traveling across the Atlantic would be reduced to a few hours (it did, for a while, with the five-hour Concorde flight between London and New York). However, a 1960s futurist could not have predicted social media or online retail. Such concepts did not exist. So despite all of our efforts, the unknown unknowns can come along and change everything. And they do.

Another reason why futurists fail is something that Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined "the black swan theory". The "black swan" is an unpredictable event (unexpected in even the most detailed and carefully calculated of probability models), which is of high impact and that is rationalized away when viewed in hindsight. According to this article on davemanuel.com , the following are examples of black swan events:

• The attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001
• The collapse of Soviet Russia
• The invention of the Internet

So if there are unknown uknowns and black swan events, what is the point of trying to predict future technologies? In a 2008 article entitled "What Science Fiction Writers have Learned About Predicting the Future of Technology", Frederick Pohl, whose work includes the classic The Space Merchants (written with Cyril M. Kornbluth), and most recently The Last Theorem, co-authored with the late Arthur C. Clarke, is quoted as saying:

No sensible science-fiction writer tries to predict anything...Neither do the smartest futurologists. What those people do is try to imagine every important thing that may happen (so as to do in the present things which may encourage the good ones and forestall the bad) and that's what SF writers do in their daily toil.

I undertook a quick (but non-definitive) experiment to find out if science fiction shapes our opinions of technological advancement. I found that there is a certain truth to Pohl's statement.

The plot of the series of "Terminator" movies is based around a future where the Skynet military system becomes self-aware, sees people as a threat to its existence and sets out to destroy the human race.

I did a Google search for the term "one step closer to Skynet" and found many examples of where bloggers, forum commenters and news articles ask whether the latest tech development is bringing them closer to a world dominated by evil robots. Examples of my findings include:

• http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/82072073/
• http://sim.miadal.com/post/12064728845
• http://swiftor.com/f33/ibm-takes-us-one-step-closer-skynet-40672/
• http://forums.elysianshadows.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=5450

In a February 2011 ARS Technica article entitled "A Step Closer to Skynet? Pentagon Wants Fighting Robots to Talk to Eachother", the journalist, Matthew Lasar, describes new developments in autonomous fighting robots that can collaborate with each other in real-time. Then Lasar makes a salient point:

All very interesting, but like most civilians our main reference point for these developments is the movies, some of which have been anticipating "interchangeable payload" scenarios for years."

I think that science fiction movies and novels are simply entertaining alternatives to the "Scenarios" method of predicting the future (see above). The stories told are possible futures, which we can either strive for or seek to avoid.

In the end, que sera sera, but I love the idea of trying to predict how technology will shape our future, even if we do sometimes get it wrong. Let's just hope that the Terminator scenario remains in the world of fiction.

---

Comments are most welcome!
Follow on Twitter: @ykarp
Subscribe to Y. Karp? Why Not! or follow on Facebook (see the side-bar).
Add this blog to your RSS feed reader