Do We Think Too Much About the Future?
If you had lived in the early decades of the sixteenth century, how would you have thought about the future? Presumably, you would have considered it in everyday terms: you would have wondered whether it would rain tomorrow, speculated about what might happen in your town over the summer, and hoped to get married someday. But, in other respects, your approach to the future might have been unusual, at least by our modern lights. If you were religious—and who wasn’t?—then you might have taken for granted that “the End of the World was approaching,” the historian Reinhart Koselleck writes, in his book “Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time.” Perhaps you would have regarded the Reformation as urgent business: Martin Luther, Koselleck observes, “frequently referred to the fact that the Fall was to be expected in the coming year,” and even suggested that God was accelerating the timetable as a favor to the chosen, with “almost all of the new century . . . pressed into the space of one decade.” For practical purposes—planting, harvesting—there was a future worth thinking about. But, in the larger sense, history was on the verge of concluding.
Fast-forward nearly three hundred years, Koselleck writes, and listen to the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre speaking in the midst of the French Revolution, in 1793. “The time has come to call upon each to realize his own destiny,” Robespierre said. “The progress of human Reason laid the basis for this great Revolution, and you shall now assume the particular duty of hastening its pace.” Robespierre didn’t believe that history was about to end; he thought it was just beginning. He was hardly alone. Sometime between 1517, when Luther published his Ninety-five Theses, and Robespierre’s time, the idea of the future coalesced.
A lot had to change in the Western world in order for the idea of the future to make sense. In Koselleck’s account, the church, which told a coherent story about the beginning, middle, and end of time, had to loosen its narrative grip. Europe’s religious wars needed to pause long enough for political progress to become thinkable. Science and technology had to get off the ground. Skeptical philosophers had to raise impertinent questions about what it was actually possible to know. Governments played a role by actively repressing apocalyptic fervor; oddly, astrology helped, by proposing an “endless array of undatable, variable oracles” as a low-key alternative to millenarian prophecy. Meanwhile, Koselleck explains, ideas about rationality helped people see the future as “a domain of finite possibilities, arranged according to their greater or lesser probability.”
All this takes us to, say, the eighteenth century. At that point, we might say the ingredients of the future expanded to include the invention of accurate clocks and professional accounting; the advancement of journalism and science fiction; the perfection of loans, equities, insurance, and other market-based approaches to looking ahead; and more. The upshot, today, is that the future is deeply woven into the practical fabric of our lives. It’s almost as though we live there. And all sorts of people—technologists, writers, artists, politicians, investors, and businesspeople—now work to shape our notions about what’s to come.
How’s that going? Two facts stand out. First, since no one actually knows the future, guessing, speculating, or simply making things up remains the state of the art for almost everyone involved in describing it. (Prediction markets, the biggest recent innovation in forecasting, are based on the recognition that experts are often wrong.) And second, our views of the future tend to be dark, and seem to be getting darker. Young people, in particular, increasingly report that they’ve “lost the future” as something to look forward to; they feel trapped in a world careening out of control. A survey conducted by Pew Research found that only fourteen per cent of Americans would transport themselves to the future, if given the choice; nearly half say that they’d prefer to live in the past. Looking ahead, we see mostly malevolent inevitabilities—climate change, oligarchy, autocracy, A.I. overlords, and the like. The open future has closed up on us; we’re back in the end times, where we started.
Maybe the whole enterprise was doomed from the start: this is the implication of “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI,” by Carissa Véliz, a philosopher at the University of Oxford. Putting visions of the future at the center of society seemed reasonable, Véliz argues, only because so many took a “naive view of prediction,” imagining “predictions as quests for truth.” In fact, “predictions are power moves much more than they are attempts at acquiring knowledge”; often, they are actually “commands disguised as descriptions,” made by those who know that “the most effective way to predict the future is to determine it.”
Véliz indicts the process of prediction on two levels. To begin with, making good predictions is simply more difficult than we’d like. Would-be predictors face “data troubles” (numbers can be incomplete, deceptive, or outright fraudulent); “social troubles” (people are weird); “scientific troubles” (“We cannot predict through any rational or scientific methods the future of our scientific knowledge”); “coincidental troubles” (“flukes that forever alter the path ahead”); and “ironical troubles” (by “selling risk management,” predictors can actually increase systemic risk). These are all reasons to take any given prediction less seriously.
In addition, however, many acts of prediction aren’t what they seem to be. A prediction is often presented as a sort of would-be fact—a statement of what the predictor believes will, to some degree of probability, be true. But predictions are often twistier than that. At a minimum, Véliz suggests, most are “wishful” (“You want the horse you bet on to win”). Others contain hidden structures of motivation. If the forecast has a ten-per-cent chance of rain, you’re unlikely to take an umbrella, and yet, if it does rain, you may angrily conclude that the true chance was higher than ten per cent; as a result, Véliz writes, many weather apps deliberately overstate the probability of rain. Similarly, she notes, “when storms approach, responsible authorities tend to overreact, because the bad consequences of overreacting are less bad than those of underreacting.” These sorts of factors affect predictions large and small: you might sense them at work when your mechanic proposes replacing a part that may soon fail, or when an A.I. executive warns about the possibility of human extinction.
Predictions are sometimes simply impossible to make, Velíz writes, which doesn’t stop people from trying to make them. They can be harmful—perhaps a prediction will set your bail too high, or underestimate your suitability for a loan, or just give people the wrong impression—and yet the making of predictions is basically unsupervised: anyone can predict anything about anyone at any time. Right now, Véliz writes, “no one is informing you of the prophecies that shape your fate.” So her advice, over all, is to be wary of predictions and prophecies. Approach them with due skepticism; try to avoid making them yourself (“prepare, don’t predict”); and, if subjected to them, begin evasive maneuvers. “Surprise yourself,” she suggests. “Live in the present.” Thinking about what’s coming is inevitable, but “if you must wander into the territory of the future, don’t venture further than necessary. It’s safer to predict what will happen in an hour than in a hundred years.”
Personally, I feel that thinking about the future is interesting and useful. I also believe that it’s necessary—and that “wishful” prediction isn’t so bad. (We take the work of prediction more seriously when we have skin in the game.) Still, “Prophecy” persuasively describes how those in power seek to shape the world by predicting it.
It also articulates a fundamental problem with the future. The difficulty isn’t so much with what’s unknown as with what’s known. Whatever the future turns out to be, it will be contiguous with the present—an extension of the world in which we live now. So what do we know about the state of our world? Is it a good place or a bad one? Is it getting better or worse? About a decade ago, I wrote a piece investigating those questions. The best answer I found came from the late global-health statistician Hans Rosling, who maintained that the data showed that the world as a whole was “bad and better.” There was a lot wrong with it, and new things were going wrong all the time, but many of the old things that had been going wrong were also getting fixed. “Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator,” he suggested, her situation critical but improving.
What’s required of us, if we’re charged with that infant’s care? We mustn’t congratulate ourselves on what’s going right—we have to focus on what’s going wrong. We can’t be Pollyannas. We have to be vigilant and alarmed. And so we are: we are freaked out, as responsible stewards of an ailing world ought to be. This, however, has consequences for the kinds of futures we imagine. Predictions aren’t only tools for the powerful; they can help us imagine good possibilities. And yet those still-unknown possibilities, which could be a source of hope, are as nothing when judged against the emergency that’s already unfolding in front of us. It’s in this sense that the idea of the future—the one invented between 1517 and 1793—is a trap. Any realistic future, extrapolated from the present, will be a scary one, reflecting back to us our own warranted, present-tense vigilance. To imagine a good future, we need to be hopeful, utopian, unreasonable. We have to struggle against the very attitudes we must cultivate in order to bring it about. ♦