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.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Monday, June 26, 2006
Mind fuel: ideas banks
I am a great admirer and supporter of initiatives, including but not limited to websites, that endeavour to explore and refine ideas. Voyaging through uncharted possibility space, especially in a collaborative setting, is one of the really great ways to while away the hours on this planet.
Check out:
Global:Ideas:Bank http://www.globalideasbank.org
A UK-based repository of social innovations, voted on by users for originality, feasibility and humour. (A nice example.)
Halfbakery http://www.halfbakery.com
A sandbox that is home to a lively, whimsical castle-building sensibility. (A nice example, which suggested to me that they could feature a long-term thinking section to help generate interest and ideas around projects that aim to encourage foresight, Long Now-style.)
The following also look interesting but I'm less familiar with them:
ThinkCycle: Open Collaborative Design http://www.thinkcycle.org
WhyNot? Idea exchange http://whynot.net
Premises, Premises: A peer-enforced marketplace for new ideas http://premisespremises.com
Check out:
Global:Ideas:Bank http://www.globalideasbank.org
A UK-based repository of social innovations, voted on by users for originality, feasibility and humour. (A nice example.)
Halfbakery http://www.halfbakery.com
A sandbox that is home to a lively, whimsical castle-building sensibility. (A nice example, which suggested to me that they could feature a long-term thinking section to help generate interest and ideas around projects that aim to encourage foresight, Long Now-style.)
The following also look interesting but I'm less familiar with them:
ThinkCycle: Open Collaborative Design http://www.thinkcycle.org
WhyNot? Idea exchange http://whynot.net
Premises, Premises: A peer-enforced marketplace for new ideas http://premisespremises.com
Friday, June 23, 2006
Gaming alternative futures (anything but text)
Last night I caught up with Jerry Paffendorf at an Irish pub in San Francisco. We first met in August 02005 at the World Futures Studies Federation conference in Budapest.
Jerry, who's as articulate, fastidious, and tall (my guess, 6' 5") as anyone I've met in the futures business, has been associated with the LA-based Acceleration Studies Foundation, and sweet-talked Jake Dunagan and me into starting a Futures Salon in Honolulu last year. However, these days he spends most of his time with The Electric Sheep Company (content creators for Second Life) as their futurist-in-residence. The virtual worlds scene is his bailiwick. He was in town for Supernova, a conference concerned with "how decentralization and pervasive connectivity are changing our world". Yes.
So, we discussed the future of scenario planning and agreed that basically, anything is preferable to the composition and transmission of alternative futures in a text-only format. What a shockingly low bandwidth way to try to have people experience genuinely different realities. With so many other communicative options out there, text seems to lack dimensionality.
With this in mind, the stark contrast of the immersive properties and potentials of virtual worlds really appear to come into their own. A user co-designed environment (like the forthcoming game Spore -- check out designer Will Wright's exceptionally informative talk on this) seems to be begging to be integrated with rigorous, realistic models of complex systems used by visualisation-based planning tool providers like MetroQuest. What would such a hybrid look, feel, and behave like?
I don't know. But you can bet it'd be a sight more interactive, compelling and just plain cool than a flat little verbal description. In immersive virtual environments, divergent scenarios can be gamed out by users, who would effectively run vivid social experiments tapping real human intentionality, but in a virtual lab, and evolving (up to) much faster than real time. The social-experiment recursion loop becomes a lot tighter; and a properly analytically informed, yet broad-based in participation, foresightful political process becomes viable for the first time ever.
What better way to breathe life into scenarios than to place life inside them? And what better way to explore and stretch our personal and collective capacity for coping with change than through games?
The rapid development and increasing sophistication of virtual worlds can be discerned in many indicators, if one cares to look; but one of my favourites is Jerry's report that the Salvador Dalí museum recently contacted Electric Sheep, expressing concern about digital versions of the late painter's images being offered in exchange for virtual currency at slboutique.com, a Second Life marketplace. Surely Dalí, a lifetime rebel against the confines of consensus reality, would have loved it -- the irony, I mean, of the legality of electronic versions of his mind-bending surrealist art being patrolled within an entirely virtual meeting place, that is also probably the freest collective visioning space ever known. Surreal, no?
The freedom to engage in social experimentation and expression is surely the single most precious, fragile, and yet unrealised element of our democratic political mythos. Gaming the future, insofar as it implies the possibility of actually doing what we have for centuries only told ourselves we do, could be revolutionary.
(NB The irony of me writing about the sensory impoverishment of text does not escape me; but nor can I escape it, for the time being. Hell, as a conoisseur of irony, sometimes it's nice to be able to give a little back.)
Jerry, who's as articulate, fastidious, and tall (my guess, 6' 5") as anyone I've met in the futures business, has been associated with the LA-based Acceleration Studies Foundation, and sweet-talked Jake Dunagan and me into starting a Futures Salon in Honolulu last year. However, these days he spends most of his time with The Electric Sheep Company (content creators for Second Life) as their futurist-in-residence. The virtual worlds scene is his bailiwick. He was in town for Supernova, a conference concerned with "how decentralization and pervasive connectivity are changing our world". Yes.
So, we discussed the future of scenario planning and agreed that basically, anything is preferable to the composition and transmission of alternative futures in a text-only format. What a shockingly low bandwidth way to try to have people experience genuinely different realities. With so many other communicative options out there, text seems to lack dimensionality.
With this in mind, the stark contrast of the immersive properties and potentials of virtual worlds really appear to come into their own. A user co-designed environment (like the forthcoming game Spore -- check out designer Will Wright's exceptionally informative talk on this) seems to be begging to be integrated with rigorous, realistic models of complex systems used by visualisation-based planning tool providers like MetroQuest. What would such a hybrid look, feel, and behave like?
I don't know. But you can bet it'd be a sight more interactive, compelling and just plain cool than a flat little verbal description. In immersive virtual environments, divergent scenarios can be gamed out by users, who would effectively run vivid social experiments tapping real human intentionality, but in a virtual lab, and evolving (up to) much faster than real time. The social-experiment recursion loop becomes a lot tighter; and a properly analytically informed, yet broad-based in participation, foresightful political process becomes viable for the first time ever.
What better way to breathe life into scenarios than to place life inside them? And what better way to explore and stretch our personal and collective capacity for coping with change than through games?
The rapid development and increasing sophistication of virtual worlds can be discerned in many indicators, if one cares to look; but one of my favourites is Jerry's report that the Salvador Dalí museum recently contacted Electric Sheep, expressing concern about digital versions of the late painter's images being offered in exchange for virtual currency at slboutique.com, a Second Life marketplace. Surely Dalí, a lifetime rebel against the confines of consensus reality, would have loved it -- the irony, I mean, of the legality of electronic versions of his mind-bending surrealist art being patrolled within an entirely virtual meeting place, that is also probably the freest collective visioning space ever known. Surreal, no?
The freedom to engage in social experimentation and expression is surely the single most precious, fragile, and yet unrealised element of our democratic political mythos. Gaming the future, insofar as it implies the possibility of actually doing what we have for centuries only told ourselves we do, could be revolutionary.
(NB The irony of me writing about the sensory impoverishment of text does not escape me; but nor can I escape it, for the time being. Hell, as a conoisseur of irony, sometimes it's nice to be able to give a little back.)
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Cultural fragments on systems thinking
"A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory: hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad."
~J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p. 98 (Booker Prize Winner, 01999)
I was struck by this passage when I read Coetzee's novel at the recommendation of my legal theory professor at the University of Glasgow in 02002.
It seems to me that to be able to alternate between the "schematic", systemic, relational view of aggregates and interchanges on the one hand, and the personal, historical, flesh-and-blood view of individuals' particular perspectives on the other -- that's a key challenge. Because, as the quote suggests, the schematic view alone is bereft of certain crucial, human details. But without it, there are many problems we couldn't begin to grasp.
Even rather complex notions can sometimes be stated so simply it's hard to believe. A pop culture take on the same idea:
Only when we get to see
The aerial view
Will the pattern show
We'll know what to do
~Nada Surf, "Inside of Love" (Let Go, 02002)
~J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p. 98 (Booker Prize Winner, 01999)
I was struck by this passage when I read Coetzee's novel at the recommendation of my legal theory professor at the University of Glasgow in 02002.
It seems to me that to be able to alternate between the "schematic", systemic, relational view of aggregates and interchanges on the one hand, and the personal, historical, flesh-and-blood view of individuals' particular perspectives on the other -- that's a key challenge. Because, as the quote suggests, the schematic view alone is bereft of certain crucial, human details. But without it, there are many problems we couldn't begin to grasp.
Even rather complex notions can sometimes be stated so simply it's hard to believe. A pop culture take on the same idea:
Only when we get to see
The aerial view
Will the pattern show
We'll know what to do
~Nada Surf, "Inside of Love" (Let Go, 02002)
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Wish you were now
FutureMe.org allows you to send yourself a letter to the future; an email to be delivered at some specific date up to 30 years ahead -- a bit of friendly advice from the past, a reminder, an announcement, an impassioned soliloquy, or whatever. It's a pretty nifty -- and incredibly simple -- communicative time capsule. You get exactly what you wrote (fidelity) and don't have to remember to do anything about it it (autonomy). A nice added feature on the site -- again, ludicrously simple -- is that you can opt either to make your message wholly private, or public but anonymous. So any of the public entries are available to browse, which is really interesting. Some examples I encountered at random:
Dear FutureMe,
This is a crude example of time travel
(written Sat Dec 31, 02005, sent Sun Feb 19, 02006)
--
Dear Princess Diana (FutureMe),
On this day, August 23, 2009, it's your 27th birthday. I'm sure you are happy and satisfied with what the good Lord has given you. . . . Your youngest brother is in college. You, look at yourself, you are so beautiful and long-haired lady now. Strive hard to take care for your family and be a good wife and mother someday. I love you and God bless... keep smiling!
Your past self(December 19, 02005)
--
Dear FutureMe,
Hey. What's up? This is the furthest I could send this right now. I wonder what things are like in the future while you are reading this. It really crazy that i at 18 can send this to you, who is really me at 48. 30 years in the future. Can you even beleive that you made it this far. Fuckin nuts isnt it.
(written Fri Mar 24, 02006, to be delivered Wed Dec 31, 02036)
--
Hola! It's You here, from "the past". . . . Anyway, you need to play the lottery from time to time. I have 2 sets of numbers scheduled for a fututre delivery to you. When you get these numbers in this future message, play them on the very next / upcoming drawing. Write them down & put them in your wallet, & make another copy or 2, & put them in other safe places. Then, on occasion, schedule other future messages reminding you to play the numbers. Can you do this? This is an experiment. Unfortunately you can't message ME from the future, & send ME numbers back here in the past. THAT would rock! So we'll try it this way. When you get the numbers, play them.
(written Thu Jun 2, 02005, to be delivered Wed Sep 9, 02015)
I'm intrigued by the idea of communicating over long timespans. Especially with oneself, which adds a layer of existential depth that's playful and serious in equal measures.
This would be a useful pedagogical tool for futures classes; not just the exercise of figuring out what you might like to tell yourself at various times in the future, but also the chance it affords to see how others have thought about it. It's a kind of barometer for attitudes to the future at a personal level.
Of course, with the passage of time, spanners might be thrown into the works at either the receiving end (say, when your email address changes) or the sending end (in the form of a disruption to the service itself). See this December 02005 article from Forbes.com, which is conducting its own experiment in "e-mail time capsules", for further reflection on these kinds of issues. At FutureMe.org, if you sign up, you can update your destination email address, which lets you deal with the former problem and puts the ball back in their court to deal with the latter.
In any case, it's ingenious, and I like it a lot.
At this moment, on the site, a line at the bottom reports "282,607 letters written to the future and counting..." Drop yourself a line sometime.
Dear FutureMe,
This is a crude example of time travel
(written Sat Dec 31, 02005, sent Sun Feb 19, 02006)
--
Dear Princess Diana (FutureMe),
On this day, August 23, 2009, it's your 27th birthday. I'm sure you are happy and satisfied with what the good Lord has given you. . . . Your youngest brother is in college. You, look at yourself, you are so beautiful and long-haired lady now. Strive hard to take care for your family and be a good wife and mother someday. I love you and God bless... keep smiling!
Your past self(December 19, 02005)
--
Dear FutureMe,
Hey. What's up? This is the furthest I could send this right now. I wonder what things are like in the future while you are reading this. It really crazy that i at 18 can send this to you, who is really me at 48. 30 years in the future. Can you even beleive that you made it this far. Fuckin nuts isnt it.
(written Fri Mar 24, 02006, to be delivered Wed Dec 31, 02036)
--
Hola! It's You here, from "the past". . . . Anyway, you need to play the lottery from time to time. I have 2 sets of numbers scheduled for a fututre delivery to you. When you get these numbers in this future message, play them on the very next / upcoming drawing. Write them down & put them in your wallet, & make another copy or 2, & put them in other safe places. Then, on occasion, schedule other future messages reminding you to play the numbers. Can you do this? This is an experiment. Unfortunately you can't message ME from the future, & send ME numbers back here in the past. THAT would rock! So we'll try it this way. When you get the numbers, play them.
(written Thu Jun 2, 02005, to be delivered Wed Sep 9, 02015)
I'm intrigued by the idea of communicating over long timespans. Especially with oneself, which adds a layer of existential depth that's playful and serious in equal measures.
This would be a useful pedagogical tool for futures classes; not just the exercise of figuring out what you might like to tell yourself at various times in the future, but also the chance it affords to see how others have thought about it. It's a kind of barometer for attitudes to the future at a personal level.
Of course, with the passage of time, spanners might be thrown into the works at either the receiving end (say, when your email address changes) or the sending end (in the form of a disruption to the service itself). See this December 02005 article from Forbes.com, which is conducting its own experiment in "e-mail time capsules", for further reflection on these kinds of issues. At FutureMe.org, if you sign up, you can update your destination email address, which lets you deal with the former problem and puts the ball back in their court to deal with the latter.
In any case, it's ingenious, and I like it a lot.
At this moment, on the site, a line at the bottom reports "282,607 letters written to the future and counting..." Drop yourself a line sometime.
Monday, June 19, 2006
Long-term thinking rocks
This short Oscar-nominated animation, The Rocks (Das Rad, Germany, 02003, dir. Chris Stenner, Arvid Uibel & Heidi Wittlinger: official website; IMDB listing) recommended by my Long Now colleague Alexander Rose a few days ago, whimsically but ingeniously evokes thinking about the difference between time on a human scale, and a geological perspective.
Another perception-shifting exploration of scale, but with a spatial rather than temporal focus, is the classic film Powers of Ten (official website; interactive Java tutorial; Simpsons couch gag). I think I first saw it at an exhibition at the John Hancock Building in Chicago, in 01998. The bird's eye view of the city afforded by that impressive structure's observation deck -- or indeed any aerial view of almost anything -- has a more or less similar appeal to the systems-oriented mind. What Powers of Ten is uniquely able to do, even if it shows severe signs of age stylistically, is to take you from the microscopic to the macroscopic in a vertiginous, brilliantly simple eight minutes of film. It's also a great insight into the power of logarithmic scale.
There is tremendous beauty and endless intrigue in this, as I rediscovered after downloading Google Earth a few months ago -- couldn't stop exploring, skipping between places I've lived in and visited over the last ten years.
Explore and enjoy.
Another perception-shifting exploration of scale, but with a spatial rather than temporal focus, is the classic film Powers of Ten (official website; interactive Java tutorial; Simpsons couch gag). I think I first saw it at an exhibition at the John Hancock Building in Chicago, in 01998. The bird's eye view of the city afforded by that impressive structure's observation deck -- or indeed any aerial view of almost anything -- has a more or less similar appeal to the systems-oriented mind. What Powers of Ten is uniquely able to do, even if it shows severe signs of age stylistically, is to take you from the microscopic to the macroscopic in a vertiginous, brilliantly simple eight minutes of film. It's also a great insight into the power of logarithmic scale.
There is tremendous beauty and endless intrigue in this, as I rediscovered after downloading Google Earth a few months ago -- couldn't stop exploring, skipping between places I've lived in and visited over the last ten years.
Explore and enjoy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)