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]

When money falls from the sky

Deals in commodities of the abstract sort
Buys them in bulk but then he sells it short
Talent, genius, love / even signs of affection
He floods the market / there's no price protection
And when his master plan is unfurled / there stands
A handsome bid / on the weather systems of the world

~Andrew Bird, "Banking on a Myth"
Mysterious Production of Eggs (02005)

A few months ago I saw on DVD the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, about the late U.S. energy company (dir. Alex Gibney, 02005; if you missed it there's an excellent review here). One of the strongest impressions it left was of the ingenuity of the company's financial schemes -- such as "mark to market" accounting -- perceptions of which may reasonably run the gamut from clever, through audacious, to downright fraudulent. (Since it includes some murky, moral territory, it isn't always easy to say where one category ends and the next begins.) Part of Enron's inventiveness was manifested in pioneering weather derivatives, which allow traders to reduce risks associated with the unpredictability of weather conditions. (Conceptually related is the recent emergence in financial markets of catastophe bonds, or "cat bonds" for short, which do not necessarily pertain to weather events, but certainly can -- such as the Thames river flood bond issued by German insurer Allianz in 02007; I wrote about it then at the Long Now blog.)

Today, I came across this report on a similar instrument available through an online provider; currently limited "to accredited investors with a minimum net worth of $1 million" but perhaps, in due course, to become available more widely.

As businesses contemplate losing massive amounts of money from events like droughts and hurricanes, WeatherBill hopes to carve out a market in the growing field of weather-related risk-management products, offering what are essentially weather futures contracts to companies with an internet-era twist. The contracts pay off automatically without any kind of claims process based on objective weather measurements like the inches of rain a given area receives.
[...]
"Our business has all sides of risk—we've got customers wanting rain, drought, heat waves, frost, no frost. We even have people who want hurricanes," says [founder David] Friedberg.

~Chris Colin, "Doing Something About the Weather, Financially at Least", Portfolio.com (at Wired.com), 7 August 02008

There's something terribly fascinating, I find, about the commodification of natural processes, this gaming of life's details via insurance and financial instruments. I don't know if Andrew Bird, author of the elegant lyric at the top, had former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling in mind when he penned "Banking on a Myth". But there's an air of dramatic, even mythic resonance here, in the cavalier exploitation of complex systems for short-term gain. As Lester Pimentel's insightful review of the Enron doco notes: "[Former Enron exec Ken] Lay and Skilling are classic tragic characters: incredibly intelligent men felled by their own hubris."

I'm just experimentally putting pieces together for consideration here, not mounting a fully ramified argument; but I'd be really interested to know what others think.

Parables and horseshit

Today I was teaching Dator's introductory futures class (he's in France for ISU), and the theme for this week is the influential thesis of the 01972 Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth. Seeking an intuitively clear instance of the hazards of simple linear extrapolation ad infinitum -- perhaps the cardinal sin of poor futures thinking, alluded to here in the previous post -- what sprang to mind was an example that many futurists would recognise as classic: London's 19th-century horse manure problem.

I don't know where I first encountered it, but this story is a beauty. And, searching online this afternoon I found (via this blog post) an elegant retelling by a PhD candidate at UCLA, Eric Morris, in the Spring 02007 edition of Access [pdf download], the official magazine of the University of California Transportation Center. I'll quote it here at length:

In 1898, delegates from across the globe gathered in New York City for the world’s first international urban planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion. It was not housing, land use, economic development, or infrastructure. The delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure.
[...]
The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed.

And no possible solution could be devised. After all, the horse had been the dominant mode of transportation for thousands of years. Horses were absolutely essential for the functioning of the nineteenth-century city -- for personal transportation, freight haulage, and even mechanical power. Without horses, cities would quite literally starve.

All efforts to mitigate the problem were proving woefully inadequate. Stumped by the crisis, the urban planning conference declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled ten.

There are two points I want to draw out here about this anecdote.

The first point is, the very idea of nine feet or more of horse manure covering a city street exemplifies pretty vividly the concept of limits to growth. Any systemic process increasing overall instability is bound to end sooner or later. In the "four images of the future" framework we use at Manoa to stretch thinking beyond superficial business-as-usual extrapolation, a continued growth pattern in a social situation will face a corrective in the form of one (or more) of the other three -- collapse, self-discipline, or transformation. The grotesque absurdity of a city drowning in horse waste illustrates not just the limit of growth processes, but the limits of blinkered, continued-growth thinking itself. (One student today astutely observed that, as things turn out, we're probably buried at least that deep -- but just in other kinds of shit. Touché.)


The second point, going meta on the first, and to some degree at odds with it, is that however well the story illustrates the pedagogical point I had in mind, it may well be apocryphal rather than factual. I hadn't heard this version about the 01898 planners' shindig before, which adds a neat, plausible context for the factoid in question -- specifically, whether these retrospectively amusing predictions about fantastically high manure-piles were ever really made. (We're not doubting here the well-documented historical context which supposedly prompted them -- massive reliance on horses for transportation, unsound sanitation practices, etc.) Now, in principle, one could delve into the archives -- Mr Morris's "further reading" list at the end of the article looks like a recipe for hours of harmless amusement -- but thankfully others have given some thought to the factual basis of this irresistibly catchy story before. One myth-busting website argues as follows:

The details vary with almost every telling: the doom-merchant is a politician, scientist, city planner, or journalist; the doomed town is London, or various cities in the USA, or a particular famous street such as the Strand; the predicted date of the catastrophe ranges from the turn of the century to 1950; and the depth of the dung goes from knee-level upwards. The underlying message, though, is consistent: forecasting through extrapolation is risky, because it can't take account of technological revolutions. By implication, all predictions of disaster should be treated as mere alarmism; American conservatives, sceptical about the dangers of global warming and pollution, are especially fond of the dung parable. One detail is invariably missing from this story: the name of the failed seer. If the prophecy had ever really been made, someone would surely have uncovered its author by now.

The importance of attributing predictions is close to my heart, because reputation is really the currency of LongBets, which I have been working on at The Long Now Foundation. The project's aim is to improve the quality of forward-looking discourse by encouraging accountability in prediction-making.

But what's really going on here, with the persistence of this (quite possibly) cock-and-bull horse tale? Whether or not the prediction was actually made by a real 19th-century pundit and documented as such seems almost not to matter; because it doesn't stop the account from capturing our imagination -- in John Ford's phrase, we "print the legend". There are some stories which are so useful, interesting or crystal-clear in confirming what we think or believe about The Way Things Go that they persist, they have a memetic pull all their own. Whether or not they're literally true, it seems we sense they ought to be, and the truth of them resides at some other level. Another example, I think, is a story told by Long Now cofounder Danny Hillis, which illustrates beautifully the Foundation's animating idea of fostering long-term responsibility:

I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?

Another nice rendition of that story appears here, but includes the caveat that even the college's own website logs some doubt as to its veracity.

So, however much we might like to think of ourselves as relying on empirical evidence for our understanding of the world, in actual fact we flesh and blood types find ourselves depending to a great extent in everyday life on intuition, hearsay, factoids and anecdotes of varying degrees of trustworthiness. I don't mean to decry this situation, but simply to observe that, for various reasons which ought to be obvious, we are all to some extent pragmatists, and incessant fact-checking is by and large, and with good reason, reserved for the most ritualised corners of the laboratory, the courtroom, and the ivory tower.

It's not that truth is unimportant. But there are different types of truth. The horse manure story -- that once upon a time, a particular problem was set to swamp us, which, a short while later historically, seems barely imaginable -- is to me a parable that captures something true, and monitory, about the hazards of prediction, even if its historical credentials are doubtful. It's a micro-myth, a shortcut to a greater truth.

I take it as axiomatic that there are no future facts. Perhaps it's inevitable, then, that when it comes to futures, gaining insight sometimes involves using parables -- or even horseshit.

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.

Barbershop futures

A couple of months ago, I got a haircut, for the first time in over a year. (Stay with me now, there's a perfectly good reason why I'm opening with that piece of pure trivia.)

The gentleman who did the deed, who introduced himself as Wally, was originally from Hong Kong, and having come to America as a young man, had spent the past 25 years cutting hair in San Francisco. He was, he hastened to add, still poor -- but he cheerfully told me about his ambitions, his life, and the likelihood that he would keep cutting hair for many years to come.

We got around to talking about what had brought me to the city, and the fact that I was a student of futures -- no, not the financial kind, but "the future" plural -- alternative possibilities.

Wally's eyes lit up. "You study the future!" he cried. "Tell me about the future!"

Now, while his response was uncommonly enthusiastic, the misunderstanding that my interest in the future meant I would be willing or able to forecast what would happen in the news the following day, or the appearance of the next customer to walk through the door, was not at all unusual. It happens to me all the time. People hear that I'm in futures and, depending on some combination of how credulous they are, and how silly I seem (maybe it's the hair?), frequently an assumption is made that I'm about to make an outrageous claim arising from some cursory crystal-ball based research. They don't know anything about me at that point, so the ridicule is at least pre-emptive (sheesh! at least give me a chance to show how ridiculous I am). There's often a dash of hope mixed in there with the ridicule, too, which is interesting, like there's a private wish that I'll be able to let them in on some secret to predicting the future, even if they're already 95% sure I'm full of shit.

In any event, Wally's interest was genuine, and I was able to explain that my work in the field is not in fact oriented toward predicting The Future, but rather toward helping people consider a range of possibilities relevant to their situation, and thus perhaps to choose more wisely between them. I told him that I and my colleagues work with governments, communities, businesses -- any group interested in thriving in conditions of change -- dealing with process more than content. This is because first, even the broad themes can vary hugely depending on the client or topic in question, and as for the "content" of the future itself -- well, it varies hugely depending on a whole lot of things.

Wally was insistent. How could any of this apply to his business? Ah. This certainly got me thinking. I knew, and still know, nothing about the hair industry. But I ventured that something could happen suddenly to affect the viability of his business. He pointed out that people had been cutting hair professionally for six thousand years, and they weren't likely to stop next week. Touché, Wally.

I ruminated, partly aloud, partly internally, about things that could affect Wally's modest barbershop on Van Ness Street. Fashions could change; people might decide to cut their own hair, or not to cut it at all. Shaved heads, do-it-yourself style, could develop a mass appeal. Military conscription might consign a proportion of his clientele to standard issue, regulation-length buzzcuts. A widespread health problem, such as a lice outbreak, could have the same effect. On a longer timescale, humans might evolve hairlessness -- or elect to disable our follicles through some kind of chemical or electronic therapy. Wally remained unperturbed.

I noticed that he had posted a sign advertising scalp and face massage -- here, then, an alternative business model. We agreed that if, perchance, circumstance should pose an unforeseen disruption to his hair-cutting activities, he'd always have the massage to fall back on.

I left, 45 minutes later, hair a couple of inches shorter than intended (the added toll of engaging your barber in a conversation he wants to prolong) not entirely sure that I had demonstrated to his satisfaction, or to my own, the strategic usefulness of futures thinking for those in the haircutting trade. But he had, apparently, been persuaded that it was worthwhile, interesting and -- importantly -- possible to think about alternative futures. It could open up new avenues of exploration; not all of them, thankfully, based on catastrophic lice infestations or burgeoning military engagements. (Damage control and risk management are merely among the more easily grasped practical applications of futures thinking.)

What this encounter made me realise was, really, two things. The first is that I need to be careful not to become the proverbial hammer looking everywhere for a nail to strike. What Wally really needed after 25 years of steady but unspectacular business was not a futurist, but maybe a bit of local advertising and a more realistic price schedule (charging just $12 a haircut, in San Francisco, no wonder he wasn't getting rich). The second realisation, in contrast, was that futures can indeed be helpful, for almost anyone, in clarifying where they may be able to make a difference, and where they are less likely to do so.

To explain: that occasional dismissive reaction to my chosen specialisation, which I described above, is one end of a spectrum, the "you can't predict the future" end. The other end of the spectrum is the "future is self evident" end. It's possible for people to believe both these things simultaneously, and what's more, to be right. If they believed the former today about the price of oil per barrel in 2020, I'd have to agree. But if they believed the latter about the likely fate of a drunk stumbling on to a busy highway, I'd be inclined to share that view also. There are lots of layers of change occurring simultaneously, and to make sense of them requires sensitivity to the relative momentum and internal dynamics of each. To me, this field is in large part about exploring the massive grey area between the white of complete predictability and the black of complete unpredictability -- which are both categories, I would argue, of phenomena for which one can refuse to take responsibility. No wonder people rely on them so much.

Most change does not occur at these extremes, however. There's a certain amount of regularity in how things operate, and persistence in the patterns of change they adopt, and a certain amount you can do to influence them one way or another. And you might as well act consistently with what you'd like to see happen. As Wally put it; "If you plant roses, it doesn't come up vegetables". This was his own rather beautiful and profound expression of the principle that as ye sow, so shall ye reap. (He was elaborating his karmic philosophy that if he ripped his customers off, he wouldn't be able to sleep so well at night; which was reassuring.)

As to many of the things that matter to us, we can do something about them. The something (or various alternative somethings) we can do, and why and how, and to what possible ends -- identifying and acting upon these is, to my mind, the purpose of futures thinking.

Maybe I should get my hair cut more often.

/Barbershop futures revisited/

"The future of futurism"

"The future of futurism: Down with the techno-utopians! Up with the techno-realists!"
By Reihan Salam
Slate, Thursday, June 29, 2006

The following is an unedited copy of my response to the above article, posted as "There's more to futures than you think" to Slate's discussion board, "The Fray". Apologies for the overlap with content of recent posts here at The Sceptical Futuryst entitled "The meming of futures" and "Prediction will eat itself". Some of these points can't be reiterated often enough, it seems...

--

I enjoyed reading this article, but as a futurist in training it is disappointing to me -- and verging on extremely tiresome -- the way the futures field is constantly characterised as the preserve of predictors and pundits only.

The assumption made in this article is that all futurists are interested exclusively in peddling a singular image of the future. The images may differ from person to person, but in Salam's portrayal, every futurist has an agenda to convince as many people as possible that "the future will be x". This is certainly true of some self proclaimed futurists. But as a graduate student at the futures program within the University of Hawaii at Manoa, that has not been my experience at all.

For example, Professor Jim Dator, who founded and runs the futures program, which now sits within the Department of Political Science, taught what is thought to have been the first university level futures class back in 01967. He has also been Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies since it was founded in 01971. Dator has built his career largely on the task of disabusing people of the mistaken impression that a predictive, singular attitude towards "The Future" is a viable and appropriate way to look at the subject. (Dator's so-called "first law of the future" is that "'The future' cannot be 'predicted' because 'the future' does not exist.") Indeed, the very reason for calling the field "futures studies" or simply "futures", is that, since we don't know what could happen, we ought to consider many possibilities (hence the plural "-s"). This is a much more useful way to think about things that haven't happened, because it provides a basis for meaningful choices between genuinely different outcomes. Not all "futurists" think this way, but it's important to realize that simply because some people attempt to make a name for themselves as supposed crystal ball-gazing gurus of the yet-to-be, not everyone with a future focus does the same. For the same reason that one doesn't cite Holocaust-denying "historian" David Irving as an exemplar of the study of history, we ought not to cite Nostradamus wannabes ("alternative-denyers"?) as if they represented futures studies as a whole. They simply don't.

Dator is not the only one who makes his living as a futurist by deepening people's appreciation of the plurality of possibilities, and inventing or pursuing their preferred options. There are hundreds of others, attached to such organisations as the World Futures Studies Federation (has an academic focus) and the Association of Professional Futurists (has a consulting focus).

I'd encourage the author of this Slate piece to check the recent article by Jamais Cascio listing "Twelve Things Journalists Need To Know to be Good Futurist/Foresight Reporters". The first item on Cascio's list: "Nobody can predict the future." Journalists are indulging bad thinking and perhaps intellectual fraud by pretending otherwise.

Salam rightly argues that "we need clear-eyed futurists more than ever", but he attacks one of his targets for evincing "an unrealistic, blue-sky vision that discredits futurism". Lack of realism isn't the issue: wasn't ending slavery a "blue-sky vision" once upon a time? And how realistic was the 9/11 scenario in most people's minds, until it actually happened? No, lack of realism isn't the problem here. A lack of alternatives, rigorously thought out, is the problem -- and the best, clearest-eyed futurists can both discern and communicate multiple futures, instead of rallying converts behind a single one.

The starting point for Salam's article, about how easy it is to discredit futurists, is of course true if we consider only those who make a living out of prediction. Of course they're mostly wrong! But there's a lot more to futures than that, and the sooner and more widely this realisation dawns, the more productive all of our futures conversations can become.

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.

Wikipedia and the questionable wisdom of crowds

The aggregation of individual opinions, and the collectivisation of many small efforts, is a massive lever for -- and site of -- social change to which our culture is just now awakening, thanks to the evolving affordances of ICT. Wikipedia is the highest profile example at the moment. Its founder, Jimmy Wales, recently provided a very interesting take on this for the Long Now Foundation's Seminars about Long-term Thinking.

Now, in Chicago on 7 June there is a Summit about Prediction Markets -- another testing ground for the principles of collective wisdom (see this example run by the World Economic Forum). The Summit organisers have been distributing some interesting reading matter to delegates via a Prediction Markets google group.

Virtual reality doyen and film director Jaron Lanier's Edge.org article Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, argues that the "hive mind" of the collective works exceedingly well for some things, and very poorly for others, but that the current fad for "wikitopian" thinking overlooks or denies the latter. Among the adverse consequences of what Lanier describes as "inappropriate uses of the collective" are compromises on the quality of information (both the content and how it's expressed), and a culture of avoiding individual responsibility. Whether or not you're inclined to agree, it's a very well written and thought-provoking article.

And either way, it's also helpful to develop a vocabulary for the huge amount of activity going on in this area. A possibly useful new term in this connection is "Crowdsourcing" -- Wired magazine's coined buzzword alluding to the latest examples of the ancient idea that many hands make light work. Could there be a more appropriate way to learn more than through this this Wikipedia article?