The Future

For a Better Future, Predict the Future

1 The game of predicting the future is so uncertain that many people, including the famous American computer scientist Alan Kay, advise us to design the future ourselves rather than attempt to guess at what will happen. When Kay recommends this method of prediction, he uses the word “predict” differently than a meteorologist who says that he predicts that it will rain tomorrow. Although this idea of prediction by design is nothing new—it has been credited to many sources through the years—Kay’s remark has been remembered because he actually went on to accomplish what he imagined. He invented and promoted many early computers and other electronic devices. Kay’s statement can apply to all sorts of fields of innovation. For example, if an inventor predicts that in five years a cheap, gasoline-free car will be invented, she is sure to be correct if she invents that car herself.

2 This sort of “prediction” can help in all sorts of planning endeavors. If you were going to plan a vacation where you went scuba diving, it would be helpful to identify ahead of time some activities you might want to enjoy so that you can plan to arrive on time at the dive shop, with enough money and the right gear. If you don’t care at all what your vacation involves, then you don’t need to plan. But you’ll have to accept that you might spend it sitting on your front porch watching the sparrows. If you want your vacation to include distant or highly desirable leisure activities, you might have to plan more carefully. Very little except your own happiness is at stake when planning a vacation. But consider another area where journalists, researchers, and analysts devote a great deal of time: predicting the future of technology. In this area, a great deal is at stake; the health and happiness of millions might depend on inventors identifying a goal and working diligently toward it. In addition, a great deal of money is to be made. Pinpointing the next significant discovery allows an investor to direct funds to this area of innovation and profit in the long term.

3 Predicting what inventors and researchers hope to be the future of technology helps them to identify goals that they hope to achieve and perhaps profit from them. Futurist Ray Kurzweil took Kay’s tenet to heart. Early in his career as an inventor, he predicted the expansion of the Internet. He postulated that most books would be available digitally in the near future. He enabled that prediction by developing scanners and optical character recognition software. This software converts print documents to digital format. Today, Kurzweil predicts that in the next decade, every year medical technology will begin adding a year to the human life span. In other words, next year, the average American can expect now to live eighty years, and the following year, she can expect to live eighty-one years. Some might see Kurzweil’s claim as an outlandish prediction at best or an unsubstantiated guess at worst. I would argue we should see it as a daring provocation to medical researchers, challenging them to pursue exactly this goal.

4 Kurzweil and Kay (and countless unnamed others) used predictions to identify positive visions of the future. We can also use prediction to identify negative outcomes of current conditions. For example, a sociologist might predict that if development continues unimpeded, most major cities will be overcrowded. In response, voters and legislators could work together to limit development and change this future. Both positive and negative predictions allow citizens to plan for the ideal future outcome. Prediction can help us prepare for where technology could take us. Even if many predictions are wrong, some are shockingly correct and highlight significant shifts in human understanding.

5 Inventors like Kay and Kurzweil are not the only thinkers whose work intersects with future prediction. Historians, sociologists, political theorists, environmentalists, civil rights activists, and others make guesses about the future. You might have heard the aphorism, “if we don’t study history, we are bound to repeat it.” Studying the future involves the study of the past. If we do not study the past, we might repeat it. Reflection and prediction go hand in hand. Historian Jared Diamond scans many civilizations and time periods in his Pulitzer Prize winning tour de force, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond identifies the three tools in the title as essentially shaping the development of human history. He hopes to draw contemporary readers’ attention to the hidden powers shaping our future. If only past leaders had studied history like Diamond, they could have avoided certain negative situations.

6 Science fiction authors also often make surprisingly accurate guesses about the future. For example, in the early twentieth century, author Jules Verne wrote the novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. As a writer, Verne had carte blanche to describe what existed only in his imagination, however impossible it might have seemed at the time. The book featured a deep-sea ship, the Nautilus, which resembles many of current ocean explorers. The ship has a narrow profile, thick portholes, many navigational instruments such as a pressure gauge, thermometer, barometer, et cetera. As Rosalind Williams, a historian of technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out, the Nautilus was powered by electricity, a newly discovered and fascinating power when Verne wrote the book. Verne inspired scientists to pursue electricity and prompted inventors to create real ships like that in the book.

7 Such inspiration is surely more powerful than a humdrum day in the laboratory. By reflecting on the past and pondering our future, we can motivate ourselves to create a better one. Déjà vu haunts historians considering different periods in history. They see how the fall of Rome looks like the fall of the British Empire, how the colonization of China parallels the colonization of South America. To avoid our past mistakes and take better actions in the future, we have a cultural obligation to make predictions about how we would like the human world to be rather than merely accepting its inevitable progress. If we do not take such positive decisive steps, we might as well accept our fate like the Romans who visited the augurs.