Predicting The Future

I read this guest post on Sarah Hoyt's 'blog, and it got me to thinking.

As Mr. Begley points out, one of the constant refrains of our time is how "the future" that we're living in doesn't look like "the future" as depicted in mid-20th Century science fiction and popular science articles. We don't have flying cars and Moon bases, but we do have pocket phones with faster processors than any computer on Earth in the year I was born. Our technology has gone in the direction of compactness and precision rather than scale and power.

The question we should be asking is not "Where's my flying car?" but "Why did we ever expect the future to look the way we imagined?"

Depictions of the future are almost always wrong. Visions of the 20th Century from 1900 look hilariously quaint (with some exceptions). There seem to be four sources of prediction failure. 

The Wrong Curve: Many extrapolations of current trends into the future tend to fail because of what I call "the wrong curve." A science fiction writer in 1950 could look at the speed of travel over history, from walking to railroads to airplanes to jets, and see that it's a logarithmic curve bending ever upward. By the year 2000 we'll be going faster than light! 

Well, no. Turns out speed of travel is an S-curve: slow build, rapid acceleration, then slows again as it bumps against new limits. Population growth seems to be similar, knocking the legs out of all the overpopulated dystopian Americas that flooded science fiction in the 1970s.

But that isn't the only Wrong Curve writers use. Some just extrapolate in a straight line, which means they fail to see things like the logarithmic curve of Moore's Law, or the cyclical swing of energy costs. Others assume trends are cyclical which aren't -- the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s seems to have marked a fundamental shift in society, not just a passing fad.

For science fiction writers and popularizers, the effects are at worst embarassing. But governments and business get hammered by the Wrong Curve all the time. Right now in the USA we're facing a pension crisis because the mid-century architects of pension systems thought that the number of workers entering the workforce would continue to grow faster than the number of retirees. The President's new health-care system depends on costs and revenues following curves which are somewhere between "highly optimistic" and "sheer delusion."  

Missed Boats: One reason some writers' visions of the future pick the Wrong Curve is that they've missed a boat. This actually is worse among serious real-world futurists than SF writers. I suspect the reason is that actual scientists and experts tend to focus on the areas they know best, while science fictioneers are intellectual magpies. So if you put nuclear physicists in charge of predicting the future, they'll concentrate on things like nuclear power and its applications, or the dangers of nuclear weapons, and ignore the Green Revolution or the threat of Islamist terrorism. 

The obvious Missed Boat in most mid-century visions of "the future" is computer technology. Not just the curve of improvement, but the applications and effects. Another Missed Boat is the promise of biotechnology. Science fiction writers have been all over that one while the professional futurologists still seem to be trying to ignore the implications.

Ignored Ripples: Even if you guess the right curve and don't miss any boats, you're probably not going to think about the ripple effects of your changes. One can imagine a writer like Isaac Asimov circa 1975 guessing that computers might become small enough to carry in your pocket and put you in touch with a global network of all kinds of information, and he might decide that changes in sexual roles and relations would continue. But would he predict that sending nekkid pictures would become an important political issue? 

In fairness, Ignored Ripples are likely the most difficult aspects of the future to predict. In order to make that kind of prediction about the world of the future one would need to possess a nearly comprehensive understanding of the world at present, which nobody really has (least of all the people who think they do). 

Non-Eternal Verities: Finally, many visions of the future stumble over the assumption that some things will "always remain true." I suppose this is, in a way, a case of the Wrong Curve -- the assumption that there is no Curve.

One sees this most in social extrapolations. In Rudyard Kipling's "As Easy As A.B.C." the story takes place after a 20th Century plagued by genocidal wars and murderous ideologies, with "crowd-making" a crime and cheap global airship travel -- but the London music-hall circuit is still thriving!

Within the genre ghetto, one can point to any number of distant planets in the far future populated by Texans in Stetsons and six-guns, or Japanese with samurais and ninjas, or Scotsmen afflicted by kilts and haggis. (Sometimes there's a nod to the colony founders deliberately trying to recreate a semi-mythical view of the past; sometimes there's no such thing.)

In point of fact, societies on Earth are a lot more plastic than we realize. We tend to look for continuities and ignore the disconnects. To a modern, the religious and dynastic wars of the Middle Ages make literally no sense. We try to shoehorn the Crusades or the Hundred Years' War into modern narratives of nationalism and economics because we simply cannot make ourselves understand them in their original context. (And when we ourselves are attacked by Medieval warriors motivated by faith, we scramble desperately to discover the "root causes" of their hatred, ignoring their own quite clear public pronouncements.)

To sum up, we shouldn't be surprised that "the future" in which we find ourselves doesn't look much like the predictions of Tomorrowland or the Club of Rome. The surprise is really that anyone should expect to predict the future at all. After all, there are no "historical forces" -- just the choices and actions of billions of humans all over the world. Sometimes their trillions of daily interactions seem to point in a single direction and we recognize a "trend" or a "tendency," or we flatter ourselves that we've discovered a "law" of human behavior. 

But humans aren't molecules. You can't set up the experiment again and repeat it. You can only watch the system play itself out, and try to guess what's going to happen next. If you get it right even half the time you're a prophet.    

Comments

[Bill Crawford]

Predicting the future is like predicting the weather. The farther out you go from the here and now, the larger the error margin has to be. What you are saying has much to it, but whatever changes are happening all have to be a better option than what is around us. Cars are much more than they were in 1900, but adding a third dimension to your travels is still not there in part because many drivers are at their limits with two dimensions and the road system we have built is still servicable for delivery and pickup of people and freight.

The population predictions were a simple extrapolation, but the longer we apply adolescence to our children, the longer they remain a liability and birth rates drop- to below replacement levels in many parts of the world.

It still remains that whatever paths change takes, the rate is usually greater than most people are willing to assume. I always tell people that if you took a group of people in 1900 and left them a legal pad and a pencil to predict the world of 2000, your best bet would be to take the most outlandish among them and throw the best away.

This was very interesting stuff, and I am planing to add this site to my list. My own is mostly a political blog, but I delve into some demographics in other parts of it, as part of my book research. Thanks for the interesting read.

[Alexander Jablokow]

As far as science fiction is concerned, there is predicting the future, and there is writing a readable story, and where the two come into conflict, the story better win.

So, sure Kipling could have described a completely incomprehensible future world. Instead he put in some orienting bits of current reality to make it possible for someone to read it.

You also need to make a distinction between stories *set* in the future, as opposed to stories *about* the future. Particularly since there are now several consensus futurelike places you can set stories (post-cyberpunk, new space opera, environmental dystopia, etc.) that have nothing to do with the author's own vision of the future.

Still, an SF novel that honestly grapples with the issues you describe is always a pleasure to come across.