[Home]

A few words about predicting the future

In the strict sense of the word, investigating the future is not possible. It is said that you can never tell what the future is going to bring. And those who say it are right, of course. But it is perhaps worth remembering that the study of the past is by no means without its problems, either. We cannot go back into the past to see for ourselves, and much of the material we get from the past is only indirect proof of what has happened. Furthermore, the greater the distance we try to go back, the more likely it is that the data we can gather will be so scanty that history often becomes more a matter of educated guesstimates than watertight facts.

The future, on the other hand, is an excellent topic for research in that it is certain to come along sooner or later and prove whether our theories are right or completely haywire. The principles of scientific research are easily applied to the search for the sorts of patterns and conformities according to which the future will take shape. Something as absolute as "the truth of what is going to happen", however, must remain a very distant goal in even the prediction of the future, since not even the largest and most powerful cybernetic computers could hope to come up with anything like this, not even if you fed them with every ounce of data on people, corporations, nations, nature, the universe, and everything. Nobody is going to be able to prevent the phenomena of chaos theory creeping up and surprising us - from the smallest fragment of a half-baked idea can develop a world-shaking intellectual notion, an invention, or a change that affects us all.

Many and varying methods are used in the study of the future. The best-known of them is the Delphi approach. There we ask a number of individuals regarded as experts in their field for their input on how the future will look, and their grounds for saying so. All the answers are collected and each of the respondents then has a chance to look at the replies of all the others, after which they can change their own if they think it is necessary. The reader might at this point wish to consider the value of this kind of method, for instance in the forecasting of the coming week's weather. Delphi-type opinion studies using pundits are best equipped to measure "future expectations" in much the same way as the economic barometers which appear constantly in our news bulletins today. They may well shape the future, but they do not necessarily predict it.

A second popular approach to the question is to create scenarios - "scripts for the future". In this case we build several alternative scenarios, overall pictures of how things might go, based around certain topics or development trends under study. In the great majority of cases, what happens is that most of the parameters remain unchanged, and only certain key factors are changed, to provide alternative scenarios.

Scenario technique is seldom geared towards predicting what will happen as such. More often it is a way of understanding the nature and content of alternative paths, and of how change will influence us. Another starting-point for the scenario approach is often a desire to be prepared for the worst: there are a great number of possible futures out there waiting, and we should either be trying to reach them or doing our level best to steer out of their way.

One of the problems hampering many images of the future is the blinkered viewpoint. An impressive new invention or innovation is presented, along with its immediate impact, but no account is taken of how the invention will come to affect the individual or the society in a wider sense. Alternatively, the picture we are given is one that concentrates solely on sociological forecasts and ignores the scientific, technical, or economic perspective. Equally it might treat different branches of science as separate entities, with no cross-disciplinary communication and interaction, no "meetings of minds" between the chemist, the energy specialist, and the programmer. This one-side approach is understandably very much to the fore in science fiction, where the vision of the future is built to serve the needs of the plot, rather than any measure of probability.

The most solid information we can get on the future comes from the natural and the social sciences. We are already in a position to "predict" the risings and settings of the sun and the movements of any number of other heavenly bodies with such accuracy that we don't even stop to think of it as prediction or looking into the future. That is exactly what it is, however, and the development of confirmed or almost confirmed data and theories is always going to be the best platform for our analyses of what lies ahead. The more we know already, the less we need to leave to conjecture.

The behavioural sciences, inventions that have already seen the light of day in scientists' laboratories, economic laws, and prevailing trends all provide the foundations for the sort of visions of the future that have a high level of probability. Nearly all of the scenarios that are put forward in this volume are based on existing research results and have been extrapolated forwards using known patterns about the way things go. At the same time, the ideas that we have put on paper are guided by a belief in the ever-increasing speed with which research results reach the public and the markets, in a universal trend towards automation, in the steady reduction in payback times for research and development costs, and in an absence of catastrophes on a massive scale. Real catastrophes are usually very slow to happen. We do not react to them in time, because they lack the dramatic appeal, the newsworthiness, and the political value of sudden disasters that fall into our laps.

Of course it must be admitted that the frameworks of our scenarios are figments of the imagination of the authors. Many of the figures (often highly detailed ones) given must also be seen as no better than educated guesses. Notwithstanding all this, the ideas behind the events described are almost without exception feasible inside sound technological or economic frameworks, just as soon as the research projects concerned have continued far enough. "The possible", "the already known", and "the financially viable" form an equation that almost always produces a positive result.

Naturally many of the things will come to pass in a slightly different form from the way we have presented them. Some of the phenomena we have imagined may for some reason not "take off" as fashionable fads or crazes, which would be the condition for their success in the market economy. Equally, the lack of competition existing in many fields - and the attendant reluctance to change that this involves - will always be an obstacle to this kind of forecasting. Given these uncertain factors and the conscious risks we have taken, we estimate that around 30% of our scenarios are clearly misguided and false. Then again, we believe that at some time in the future we shall see 70% of the phenomena we have predicted coming our way within five years of the date we have offered. In other words: our aim in this book has been to create a statistically significant prediction, and not merely a collection of alternative scenarios.