A tangled web

Image: Screenshot from Web of Fate

A startup site called Web of Fate, launched in July 02008, crowdsources a timeline of users' predictions, goals and other ideas about the future:

Web of Fate is a social experiment that harnesses the collective intelligence of the web to visualize and uncover hidden relationships among future and historical events.

Maybe it's the liberal use of bold type that makes this read like it belongs in the voice bubble of a comic-book's mad scientist.

Web of Fate is ambitiously eclectic. It runs on user submissions, with four options; "make a prediction", "quote a prediction", "create a capsule", or "set a goal", thereby serving as a hybrid of prediction registry and to-do list. There is apparently a "semantic analysis engine" under the hood that produces links between the fragments of submitted content, but exactly what it does, and how it relates to grand questions posed on the site (such as "What can we learn from the past and make the future better?") is unclear.

The visualisation tool looks extremely interesting (see the image above); a cloud of prediction stems hover onscreen in a way that promises a dynamic exploratory interface (a la Visual Thesaurus), but although you can drag the nodes around, this yields no additional insights -- the function appears to have no informational referent. Also, it piles on the disparate elements (users' predictions, reported predictions, and goals) in a way one might hope would be thought-provoking, but which in practice generates more confusion than enlightenment. So a statement like "I will go to the gym everyday" (with no username or date given) sits alongside "$200 dollar oil prediction" (by the end of this year; from Daron in San Jose) and "By 2009, more than one third of IT organizations will have one or more environmental criteria in their top six buying criteria for IT-related goods" (submitted by a user citing IT research outfit Gartner). Those interested in accessing the material primarily through the visualisation may be disappointed when clicking on any prediction takes them to back to a page of static text, and similarly, any given category (users' predictions; quoted predictions; goals) is viewable only in lists, at this point.

A review of the site at Mashable (social networking news) says:

[M]y sense is that registered users will be quite pleased with what they’re offered. Given enough members, this place could become a real hotbed for forecasters.

I find myself wondering whether the conditions are in place, at the moment, for this service to generate that kind of momentum. In their current form, the range of functions seems too diffuse, the quality control too lax, and the interface too unwieldy, to attract and keep a core base of users, who may find more forecasting edification elsewhere at prediction markets like Predictify and NewsFutures, and dedicated "time capsule" functionality at future email services like FutureMe or EmailFuture. There's also the Long Now Foundation's Long Bets project [disclosure: I'm an advisor on it], which has since its inception addressed the quality control issue by requiring users to provide real names and front real money in support of their speculation. The tradeoff, however, is that it doesn't act as a repository where users can freely submit other people's ideas about the future whenever and wherever they appear. (However, Long Bets cofounder Kevin Kelly points out that such a registry has always been part of the plan.) I believe a reputable, well-designed prediction registry has long been needed and is technologically possible, but is yet to be done.∞

According to a Fast Company blog, Web of Fate is the brainchild of Arizona State University student Max Yuan, who, writes Francine Hardaway, "has a head full of projects I hope he has time to complete because they all seem great to me". I'm certainly pleased to see a prediction registry that enables submission of one's own ideas as well as reporting the prognostications of others; the latter an important prerequisite to improving accountability and quality in future-oriented public discourse. Web of Fate makes a brave effort to tap some of the potential for such a forum, but I hope Yuan can find the time to revisit and overhaul some elements of its design. Otherwise, I venture to suggest, this web will (to stretch the metaphor horribly thin) remain too tangled to catch the prey for which it was spun.

∞See futurist David Brin's 02005 article on this topic for more.

[Also posted at Long Views, 14/08/08]

Wanted: 25,000 miles of crime scene tape

Wanted poster, International Criminal Court: Future Generations Division
FoundFutures artifact produced for "Hawaii 2050" kickoff (Silver Room)
Layout and logo by Steve Kiyabu, August 02006

Distinguished climate scientist James Hansen has called for the chief executives of fossil fuel companies to be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

Hansen appeared before U.S. Congress on 23 June 02008, the 20th anniversary of his historic speech in the same forum expressing 99% certainty on evidence of the greenhouse gas effect. This time, he urged swift and far-reaching action by the next American president and Congress to bring the level of CO2 in the atmosphere down from the current 385 parts per million (and rising 2ppm annually) to 350ppm.

The Real News Network, an emerging user-funded news and documentary service I hadn't heard of before, released this report:

In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Hansen added: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the [sic] primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime." (Ed Pilkington, "Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientist", The Guardian, 23 June 02008 [print edition: "Sue fuel firm CEOs, urges climate change pioneer", p. 10]. A written statement by Hansen to accompany the speech is available at the Huffington Post and The Guardian.)

This is a bold call to arms on Hansen's part. Leaving aside whether or not you agree with it (which is bound to depend on how bought in you are on the risks associated with climate change), let's note a couple of points.

First, naturally he has been greeted with a mixed reception, variously pleased or disgusted with his sentiments. No surprise there. What does surprise me is that it appears to have been left mainly to the blogosphere to respond. As I write, more than two weeks after the event, a google search ["James Hansen" crimes] returns the Guardian piece (top hit) and a Telegraph article, both quality British newspapers, in the top ten. The top 100 hits, all relating to this story, are dominated by blogs, environmentally or politically themed sites, and news aggregators. American newspapers are barely represented -- exceptions being a critical editorial in the Washington Times, a Washington Post blog post on the story, and a NY Times blog addressing the speech and the coal industry's retort. To some extent, this reflects the shift afoot in how news breaks and circulates, away from traditional newspapers: witness this recently adjudicated Long Bet. Still, I find this curious -- it sounds like silence, from mainstream U.S. media -- given the prominence of both the audience (the House Select Committee On Energy Independence And Global Warming) and the speaker (among other things, he heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, and serves as Al Gore's science advisor).

Second, the idea of trying corporate CEOs for serious crimes, regardless of whether we like it or not, is an intriguing meme. For the state legislature's Hawaii 2050 kickoff, we at HRCFS staged four immersive scenarios to get attendees thinking more deeply about the variety of alternative futures which could eventuate over that period. One of them, the Silver Room (a "collapse" scenario, in contrast to continuation, discipline, and transformation scenarios) posited an energy crisis, followed by the military taking over to ration resources and maintain order [video]. The poster above was one decor item we installed as a clue to the mentality of this post-collapse society: in the wake of a crisis, prosperity is rewritten as prologue to disaster. Let the blame games begin!

Meanwhile, punitive responses to corporate behaviour are already sought in some circles. I came across this picture today at the Rainforest Action Network, documenting an activist intervention in Washington D.C. last November to highlight the notion of global warming as a crime scene.

Image from Understory: The Official Blog of RAN

So, Hansen's call is provocative, there is no doubt about that. But it's an idea that is unlikely to go away, I think, due to broad trends around (a) increasing comprehension of the way systemic risks and harms are distributed across space and time, and (b) increasing focus on corporate social responsibility.

We may not get a "Future Generations Division" of the International Criminal Court (as suggested by our poster) just yet, but people do seem to be awakening to the incremental, emergent consequences of habitual behaviours -- like smoking tobacco, which has recently been outlawed in many public buildings in Europe, North America and Australia. (There's an interesting analogy between tobacco and fossil fuel industries. Hansen: "Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link.") If the worst happens, and some of the more dire forecasts of climate change materialise, the environmental, economic, humanitarian and security consequences (distributed harms par excellence) could well see corporations, and their main representatives, called to account in ways that apparently seem ridiculous to many at the moment.

The biggest long bet

Big news today at The Long Now Foundation as we join Fortune magazine in announcing the largest "long bet" yet: a million-dollar wager between investment guru Warren Buffett and New York money management firm Protégé Partners LLC. Buffett, a critic of expensive financial services, is betting that the returns of the market over the ten years from 02008 through 02017 (as reflected by the S&P 500, a widely used stock market index containing the stocks of 500 large, publicly held companies) will exceed the payout of the expert hedge fund investors after their fees, costs and expenses are subtracted.

Long Now board member Kevin Kelly elaborates:

Buffett's million dollar bet was made on Long Bets, the accountability mechanism founded in 2002 by Stewart Brand and myself, and operated by Long Now Foundation. The intention of Long Bets is to encourage responsibility in prediction-making (by keeping a public roster of predictions), to encourage long-term thinking (by offering a opportunity to shape a long-term bet), and to sharpen the logic of forecasting (by recording the logic of predictions and bets.)
[...]
The hope of Long Bets is that these public wagers will prompt people to consider the implications of current developments in the near-distant future -- and then to keep their attention on what happens.

Buffett's bet is an ideal Long Bet. It makes a huge difference to anyone who invests in stocks (as do a large percentage of the US, either directly or indirectly) whether a boring index fund yields as much as fancy private hedge funds. The answer either way would be a huge influential signal. When economist Julian Simon won the famous bet against biologist Paul Ehrlich (Simon betting that the long-term prices of commodity minerals would decrease over ten years; Ehrlich betting they would increase), his win essentially eradicated the argument of resource scarcity from the environmental debate. Environmentalists then shifted their concern to the many other issues needed to foster a healthy environment.

This bet has a similar potential. But as in all great bets, its outcome is uncertain.

At stake is not just the money -- all of which goes to charity regardless of who wins. The true currency of Long Bets is reputation, and real-name accountability has been a core principle from day one. As Kelly suggests via the Simon-Ehrlich comparison, if Buffett were to win, not only would the opinions of the folks at Protégé be called into question, but so too would their business model.

Which would, of course, be equally true even if the bet didn't exist: the performance claims of hedge fund managers can, in principle, be tracked and evaluated on whatever timeframe and against whatever criteria one likes, big bet or not. What this bet does is the same thing they all do: it puts a symbolic frame, and specific, tangible stakes, around an existing (or potential) debate, with the specific intention to put it to the test, and to learn from that process in a public way. This fact highlights what Long Bets is really all about. In a sense, everyone makes hundreds of bets per day: in an uncertain world, everything we do, or don't do, is loaded with some degree of risk. These bettors, along with many investors like them (and by extension, millions of others on whose behalf they act) have billions of dollars riding on their decisions already. However, putting a frame around this aspect of their effort creates a focus for discussion. It's a tool for directing attention in a particular way, and fuel for the type of conversation that we ought to be having more often.

What else is long-term thinking but the cultivation of an underdeveloped mode of attention?

I've been working with Long Now, and especially Long Bets, since 02006, and am delighted to see an unprecedented big bet draw attention to a worthy forum. Also, as concerned as I may be about the long-term fate of the hedge fund manager, I'm particularly looking forward to seeing what other -- perhaps even more momentous -- issues may follow this into the limelight.

(Here's the Fortune article, and the bet.)

The Blog of the Long Now

I've recently started contributing to Long Views, the Long Now Foundation's weblog about long term thinking, art, and ideas. There you can find Stewart Brand's excellent summaries of the monthly Seminars About Long-Term Thinking, as well as other news and insights from what may the only organisation in the world specifically dedicated to fostering long-term responsibility.

My first few posts:
The Long You (3 July)
"The Iraq Gamble" (4 July)
Catastrophe a good bet? (6 July)
Slow Art (9 July)

Like the above, future posts from me are likely to revolve mainly around the Long Bets project (my current focus as Research Fellow at Long Now), and media, notably Long Shorts -- films exemplifying long-term thinking or a longer perspective.

On not thinking too hard

Some time ago, one Jose Garcia from a website called MemeTherapy emailed to ask me a couple of questions for a regular feature entitled "Brain Parade". Here's what transpired -- the questions he posed, and the answers I duly supplied:

Q: Putting aside a comprehensive vision of the future, do you have a single "pet prediction" of something that you think might happen over the next decade or two?

A: I think prediction will be widely discredited for evincing, in most cases, an unsound epistemological stance in relation to "the future" (which should usually be in the plural).

Q: Does the increasing willingness by many people to share private information online suggest a shift an attitudes towards privacy or could it be naivete?

A: Both things are happening. Attitudes are certainly changing, but there's also an element of naivete -- behaviour uninformed by foresight -- at play in our evolving info-sharing habits. Many web users don't yet realise the durability of the tracks they leave behind, and much of what people do with the web is not informed by forethought about how (or by whom) it could later be used. The fact that a large chunk of the adolescent generation is leaving records of its social life online may suggest that many would have to deal with some degree of embarrassment in later life, courtesy of all those crazy party shots archived on myspace. Or it may mean that, with more fragments of people's "private" lives readily available in the "public" domain, the content of what's cordoned off in the name of privacy shrinks (and with it, the causes of embarrassment). Meanwhile, we may also develop more sophisticated strategies for managing our electronic personas, similar to (but on a more modest scale than) the way public figures have people to manage theirs. Main point: the technology changes faster, so the attitudes to privacy tend to be negotiated in response, rather than beforehand.

"Function creep" is central here; info collected for one purpose being used in unanticipated ways later on. An offline example: the increasing prevalence of security cameras (in the city of London it's already reaching Orwellian proportions) makes many fragments of one's daily movements available to the various eyes in the sky -- and this is largely accepted in view of prevailing crime and terrorism concerns. Now, a centralised database automatically tracking individuals throughout the day, using facial recognition, generated simply by joining up separate surveillance mechanisms, might not be so welcome. But as it becomes cheaper to link up, and perhaps more costly politically not to be able to track people, the calculus changes. What may once have been unacceptable could come to be regarded as necessary. So too with online information: what I today share with you personally through my gmail account could soon be trawled as a matter of routine by parties I never thought would access it, if the political climate makes that shift viable.

So, current trends suggest that "naive" use of IT is paving the way for changed attitudes, mostly in the nature of a contraction, to privacy itself. (Interestingly, all technology use is naive in the sense that we don't know what surprises are in store will cast current habits in a different light.) I have heard one senior futurist describe privacy as a middle-class illusion and luxury whose days are numbered. However, it seems unlikely that issues framed as personal or privacy concerns would be conceded on a large scale without a fight, which raises the interesting possibility of a backlash.

Perhaps not surprisingly, my response to Q1 has not appeared in the "Pet Predictions" Brain Parade. But since the feature based on Q2 hasn't yet surfaced (Jose has -- much like me, it seems -- been too busy to post anything substantial since mid-November) I wanted to pick up that thread.

This is partly because I've been puzzled about my own reticence about getting started on this blog again after a break. It's not that I'm not having lots of interesting conversations, stimulating work, and exciting experiences. Quite the opposite -- but writing regularly is a hard habit to get into, and an easy one to get out of. So, appropriately, the most recent post on MemeTherapy as I write this is a Brain Parade around the question "Do You Get Writer's Block?" And I've been thinking, there could be a link between the privacy question, and the writer's block question -- which I wasn't asked, but if I had been, the answer would unfortunately have to be an unqualified "yes" -- and, come to that, the prediction question too.

The connection? I think as a blogger you need a certain shamelessness, or disregard for posterity, in order to say pretty much anything online, in a form that could come back to haunt you many years hence.

I spent most of last summer working at The Long Now Foundation on its still-dormant-but-hopefully-not-for-too-much-longer Long Bets project, which is ultimately about holding people responsible for their prognostications. That is, lots of pundits and commentators make predictive statements for rhetorical (or political) purposes that serve their needs in the moment, but that are forgotten over time. They can thus retain the impressive aura of providing incisive, foresightful analysis without being held to account, because by the time the decisive moment rolls around, their earlier remarks have been forgotten. A memorable example of this accountability principle in action (courtesy of the FAIR website -- Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) concerned Thomas Friedman's "rolling deadline" on Iraq, which sparked an interesting conversation internally at Long Now in relation to redesigning Long Bets.

For the record, it is my expectation that as smarter, deeper search tools become available, predictive statements will become more readily and more closely monitored, and the abuse of future discourse will be harder to get away with (...sure, you can quote me on that).

Even so, it's become apparent to me that whether or not you're in the prediction business, writing for cyberspace is not the same (from an accountability perspective) as writing in an earlier era. As much as I favour tightening the reins on people prone to abusing the ephemerality of public memory with manipulative or opportunistic prediction-mongering; if you think about it too much (and apparently, I do) it's also a little scary that anything you say can be held against you in the court of public opinion; not just now, but at any future time.

A dark lining inside that silver cloud could be the spectre of an informational variation of the Peter Principle, a scenario in which the most inoffensive, non-risktaking, vanilla-dull people who, by virtue of not doing anything very interesting with themselves, contrive to leave no online trace of political or personal indiscretions; and thus are best able to survive their perilous ascent up the ladder of public scrutiny, because they're the ones who have nothing to hide. (Of course it might be argued that there's more than a touch of this triumph of mediocrity in politics today...)

Maybe the key is not to think too hard about what you write, lest you fall prey to the paralysis of excess self-consciousness and karma vertigo; not to be perturbed by the cliches that crowd onto the blank slate before your eyes... (thanks to Jake Dunagan for a nice image that goes meta on writer's block).

Although I'd like to say I have the best interests of future generations at heart, I can't really claim to know what those are. An innocent and progressively well-intentioned remark today could be the stuff of Michael Richards and Mel Gibson levels of embarrassment in years to come!

So I'm blogging for today. And today, that's enough.

Welcome back to the sceptical futuryst.

Prediction will eat itself

Since early May, I have been working with the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to encouraging long-term thinking and responsibility, as research fellow on the Long Bets project. Long Bets is based on an ingenious, simple idea. If people want to make predictions about matters of long-term social or scientific importance, let them put their money where their mouth is. Stakes placed on bets, involving two contrary views of the future running head to head, are held in a long term investment fund, and when the matter is settled, perhaps years, decades or more down the track, the money goes to the winner's chosen charity. Money is also put up in support of predictions (one person's statement about the future, no opposing view necessary), which goes towards maintaining the service. The point is that all this behooves participants to think carefully about how posterity will judge their prognostications, and their audience benefits from the availability of relatively well thought-out, succinct supporting arguments.

Four years after the project was launched, the key to what I've been trying to do at Long Now recently is to take what is clearly a long-standing human interest in prophecy -- call it a predilection for prediction -- and leverage it into a more complex and nuanced appreciation of multiple possibilities. (Hence my preferred title for the field I'm in: futures. The "s" is for plurality, multiplicity, unpredictability. This condition is what makes choice possible.) Why would I want to do a thing like that? Because I believe prediction, without more, to be an inherently limited, and often erroneous, if not dangerous, stance towards the future.

A London Financial Times article (subscription required) was sent around at Long Now by Board of Directors member Peter Schwartz last week, on a recent book called Expert Political Judgment. Author Philip Tetlock is a psychologist "who has spent 20 years asking pundits to predict who will win elections, what countries will acquire nuclear weapons or enter the European Union and how the first Gulf war would end. He has tested 30,000 predictions from 300 experts against outcomes. Mr Tetlock finds that his respondents are not very good. They do better than a chimp who answers at random, but not much, and worse than simple forecasting rules based on extrapolation" (John Kay, "The world needs more foxes and fewer hedgehogs", Financial Times, 20 June 02006; see also this excellent review of Tetlock's book by Louis Menand, "Everybody's an Expert", The New Yorker, 5 December 02005).

For those who expect the future to be predictable, assuming that in principle it can be known but that they simply don't quite have the expertise, tools or funding to get at it, this conclusion may come as a surprise. GBN's Jay Ogilvy has made the point well: "modern planners have often assumed that, with enough Enlightenment science in the budget, the future can be predicted and/or controlled. Scenario planning is based on a contrary assumption, that the future cannot be predicted..." (Creating Better Futures, 02002, p. 12). And it's not just "modern planners" who hold this mistaken view; in my experience it's far more widespread than that. Yet, for many of the things that are most important to us -- social, human-level things like our families, communities, workplaces, and countries -- the future is in principle and by definition unpredictable; partly because the predictions themselves feed into the change process.

Tetlock's findings, which indicate that even experts aren't much good at prediction -- that those who ostensibly know the future best, in fact know no more than the rest of us -- are, however, very much in accord with one of the main lessons taught by a long-time academic futurist, Professor Jim Dator at the Hawaii futures program, where I study. Dator's First Law of the Future is, "The future" cannot be "predicted" because "the future" does not exist.

Now, if you're convinced that the future is predictable, you're not going to change your mind here (...I, er, expect). Fine. But stay with me for a moment. Assuming for the sake of argument the basic contention here is sound, what would this mean for Long Bets, and predictive discourse generally? Based on many, many conversations I've had on this point, at this stage quite a few people start to wonder what the hell is going on with a self-proclaimed futurist who believes there's no future to study. As well they may. What we look at, since the future itself is perpetually unavailable for comment, is images of the future. These are the beliefs, hopes, fears, desires, intentions, fantasies, expectations and, yes, actual images of one sort or another, that people carry around in their heads, and express in their art, stories, and above all their decisions; thereby bringing "the future" into being from among the countless possible futures that might have been. Returning to the question above, what this means for predictive discourse is that predictions can make a useful, interesting point of access into futures-oriented discussion (constituting, as they do, a major example of images of the future, albeit a conspicuously overconfident variety). It also means that predictions should not be mistaken for statements of fact about things that have not happened yet. Simply put, what people predict is a useful guide to what they believe and how they plan to act, but one of the dangers of prediction is that, while you're arguing over what the future will be, you're missing the more important discussion about what it could be, and other people may be making the crucial decisions without you.

What this means for Long Bets, as I see it, is that there's an important challenge in diverting some proportion of the prodigious amount of energy that people seem to devote to figuring out what the future "will be", and redirecting it into the exploration, invention and pursuit of what they would like it to be. Dator again: "The point is not to try to predict a better future, but to strive to create one." Similarly, sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling once said in an interview, "Future is not a noun, it's a verb." Long Bets version 2.0 should, then, be a useful broad-based resource featuring all sorts of different images (predictive expectations) of the future, which at first exploits the apparently timeless allure of "the future will be thus and so", but which deepens the discussion unexpectedly and problematises the predictive stance. People may come expecting a noun, but will end up getting verbed.