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A decade ago, I published Future Babble — about the futility of long-term prediction and the harm that self-delusion can do. The past 10 years provided abundant material illustrating its themes. Remember 2010? Post-racial society. Peak oil. It seems so long ago… 1/X
Newspapers and magazines are now filled with 10-year looks back and ahead but no one asked me to write based on my experience. I’m not surprised. I think Future Babble is one of my stronger books but it didn’t do well, for reasons I could discern in comments and reviews. 2/X
“Old predictions are boring and pointless.” Or “old predictions are only good for a laugh.” Or my favourite, “no one takes predictions seriously.” These are all so very wrong. Let me tackle each in turn. 3/X
“Old predictions are boring and pointless.” Old predictions are the record of smart, concerned people trying their past to see what’s coming. As we struggle to see what’s coming, we can learn from them — what works/what doesn’t, what’s possible/what isn’t. 4/X
“Old predictions are only good for a laugh.” Merely laughing at old predictions is indeed a waste of time. I focussed on forecasts made by by smart, serious people because their failure is — or should be — humbling: “If even their certainties crumbled, why am I so certain?” 5/X
“No one takes predictions seriously.” This is so wrong I could write a book… We all make plans and proceed with life based on assumptions about the future. Mostly those assumptions are unexamined. And mostly, we absorb them from the culture — and the experts who inform it. 6/X
What Keynes wrote could apply to long-term forecasts and the pundits who make them: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” 7/X
I often had conversations like this: “What’s your book about?” The futility of long-term, grand-scale forecasting. “Oh, everybody knows you can’t forecast the future! That’s impossible. … (30 seconds pass)… Oil’s finished. Hydrogen is the future. Self-driving…” etc. 8/X
In 2010, these conversations were all Peak Oil and food shortages. Later China. Big Data. Bitcoin and AI. In 2016, “Trump can’t win. Yes, it’s literally impossible.” Assumptions changed but confidence never wobbled.
9/X
Not even a Simpson’s punchline coming true — “President Trump” — could change the dynamic. Why not? The answer is in Future Babble: We have a profound psychological aversion to uncertainty. 10/X
People who think about the future seriously describe it as a “cone of possibility” because the range of possible futures — the extent of change that can happen — expands the further out you go. And since it doesn’t expand linearly, some call it a “trumpet of possibility.” 11/X
How wide is the range of futures? Basic complexity and chaos theory tells us it quickly becomes mind-bogglingly massive. What could the world look like in 2030? A thermonuclear ruin. An edenic garden. And everything between. That’s the range. 12/X
Seeing that clearly is unsettling. So we listen to hedgehogs who are sure they know what’s coming and read decade-out looks ahead without ever asking how accurate those hedgehogs and looks ahead were in the past. Because accuracy isn’t the point. Psychological comfort is.
13/X
During WWII, Kenneth Arrow was a statistician. The Army made plans based on month-long weather forecasts and Arrow discovered the forecasts were no better than random guessing. So he sent an urgent message up the chain of command: Stop using the forecasts. The response… 14/X
… “The Commanding General is well aware the forecasts are no good. However he needs them for planning purposes.” We prefer comforting delusion to unsettling truth, thanks very much. 15/X
I thought about pitching an article looking back at the decade-long looks ahead published in 2009. (Anyone remember Douglas Coupland in the Globe?) But then I made a forecast: Some pointless chuckles. Some shrugs. A few would understand the point — but they already know it. 16/X
So instead I decided to drink some more eggnog, watch the Sound of Music, and write this thread — which will be suitable for retweeting in 2029, if the future we experience is sufficiently far removed from thermonuclear ruin that you, me, and Twitter are here in 2029. 17/X
Sorry, one more illustration that should be much better known: In early 2001, a Pentagon analyst wrote a short memo that was clever then -- and is utterly poignant seen in hindsight. library.rumsfeld.com/doclib/sp/2382…
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