The future of: futurism

In his last column for WIRED magazine, prognosticator Bruce Sterling takes on futurism itself. After tackling the directions the Internet is going to take us - more individualism, less institutionalism, low cost connectivity, ubiquitous creativity, collaboration and a blurring of where reality ends and virtuality begins - Bruce hones in squarely on futurism.

Though he starts off saying that futurism has no future, what he surely must mean is exactly the opposite. He points out, rightly, that prognostication is no longer the preserve of the elite and anyone with a Typepad account (his example, not mine) has a license to hold forth on the future. Surely this democratisation of expertise only means a blooming of creativity, collaboration and delivery - as has already happened in other fields (and everytime there has a democratisation movement in history).

In my opinion, there will also be a bigger fallout of this transfer of the wand from the pundit to the garden-variety blogger - there will be a explosion in the width and variety of predictions, a kind of explosion never seen before. The bell-curve of predictions which Bruce refers to (in the context of the Pew Future Of The Internet II study) will remain but the volume it harbors will increase manifold as will the elongation of its tails on either side.

This newly empowered collective of prognosticators is a powerful engine that can process a far greater amount of information about the future than has been possible before. The sheer number of people thinking about the future only means that a wider variety of possibilities - from the crazy to the crazily conservative - can be considered, imagined, fleshed out and championed. And the collective's processing power will only increase exponentially as more join the fold.

However improbable, or impossible, a particular version of the future is, you can bet your last penny that there's someone out there imagining it - and preparing to champion it - right now.

The result will be the unlikelihood of encountering surprise - pleasant or unpleasant - at least for a lucky few (not necessarily the same few all the time.) Bruce begins his column by saying that "The Internet has a habit of defying expectations." The same could have been said of the future until now - but I believe beginning now the future's ability to pull a rabbit out of its habit will progressively vanish.

Whatever happens in the future, there's going to be some blogger out there logging into his blogging account to say, "Told you so."

(Read more posts from "The Future Of:" series.)

Comments

[Jason Lonsdale]

I've just been re-reading William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" -theres a wondeful passage that discusses how much harder it is to imagine the future now, compared to (for example) our grandparents time.

Journeys into the future always start from the present day, which is why prognostications are great insights into the dreams and aspirations of the time in which they were made (think about the 1950's Jetsons-esque visions, the 70s/80s nuclear apocalypse future or the dystopian cyber-future of 1990's).

And the concept of "now" becomes ever more transient as the rate of change accelerates. The "now" that our grandparents knew for their whole lifetime was less dynamic than the past ten years of ours.

This makes predicting the future ever more difficult.

This won't stop bedroom futurists from trying, of course... and some of them will undoubtedly be right (I'm imaging a thousand monkeys sitting at a thousand Typepad accounts...)

[blaiq]

Jason, you might have hit the nail on the head with the thousand monkeys on Typepad example.

It's difficult having to disagree with William Gibson but they are different paradigms at play here. If you're saying it's getting insanely difficult for one person (or a group of people) to consistently predict the future with reasonable accuracy, then that's right.

But if one isn't attached to the idea of one person and whether he's right or wrong and surrender instead to the 'wisdom of crowds' - the thousand monkeys typing away on Typepad, Blogger and Wordpress - you have an empowered multitude that is painting as many different pictures of the future as there may be.

Of course, there remains the problem of which one is going to come true - we won't know that with certainty. But in almost all cases we will be aware of the relative posssibility of some event. Taking away the surprise element, which is what I was talking about.

It is to be forewarned and figure out the probablities involved, that prediction markets are taking off in such a big way. And one thing is certain : prediction markets will become ubiquitous - and reasonably reliable - in the future.

[Jason Lonsdale]

I see your point, but wonder about "the wisdom of crowds"... the crowds of the 50's anticipated jet-packs, silver suits and meals in pill form.

We're still waiting.

I think the wisdom of crowds is great at dealing with the "now" (economic markets etc) but is less adept at forecasting... which is why a clever individual can still make money on the stock market, for instance, by betting against the wisdom of the crowd.

Yes, we now have much better access to information and thus ideas can spread, merge and generally be democratized... and I do take your point that it is possible to aggregate and 'marketize' predictions. I am interested in the source of your confidence that "prediction markets will become ubiquitous - and reasonably reliable". The ubiquity I can see, especially in an ever-more-uncertain world, but I'm struggling with "reliable".

Where's the chaos, the chance?

[blaiq]

The wisdom of crowds is a much misunderstood term. It does refer to the result of a large group of people thinking - but only in special circumstances. Not as a least common denominator/aggregate as it is commonly and incorrectly reduced to.

I would strongly recommend James Surowiecki's 'The Wisdom of Crowds' to discover in what circumstances it works. In short, a prediction system with WoC requires diversity of representation, independence of decision and a particular kind of decentralisation.

Prediction markets are a special circumstance where the necessary conditions for the wisdom of crowds come together.

And the source for my confidence about prediction markets - James Surowiecki's book, the number of prediction market implementations currently ongoing and their results along with my own participation in many of these prediction markets.

The Iowa Electronics Market, HSX.com (which began as a game but due to the accuray of its results is currently being used by Hollywood studios to 'peek' into the future), Yahoo Tech Buzz (a predition market for technology run by O'Reilly Media and Yahoo) and NewsFutures (another prediction market about news events.)

In fact, several companies like Microsoft have already implemented them internally as they are a wonderfully cost-effective way to get information about the future.

Post 9/11, the Pentagon wanted to implement a prediction market to 'aggregate' the wisdom of crowds and find out the next likely target of terrorists. The system was squashed because of public protest. I know it sounds harsh to bet on which place is likely to be hit next - but it was a system that would have yielded the best possible results.

Your example about an individual betting against the wisdom of crowds is not proof of the system not working. For our discussion, we are talking of stockmarkets as information systems - giving us outsider observers a picture of the likely scenarios in the future. It works because the players are willing to gamble and take more or les risk than others, which evens out to give us a fairly accurate picture. Their personal profit and loss keeps the system running - it doesn't mean the system has failed.

I apologise for stressing on the "reliable" though. What prediction markets will do is give us an accurate probablity picture of what is likely to happen - of course, the only way to be sure about the future is to wait for it happen.

But the point I am making is that though we'll never know with relaibility what will happen in the future, in all likelihood prediction markets will present us with all the options and their likely probablities (however miniscule.)

In which case, we'll never have reason to be surprised that something happened. We'll only be surprised that something happened sooner or later than expected.

And of course like all prediction systems, a prediction market's accuracy will increase or decrease depending on how near or far the system is looking into the future.

[Jason Lonsdale]

Sounds like I need to read the book before continuing this conversation... (which I will, soon)

Meanwhile, here's some food for thought:

Malcolm Gladwell has written a great article on Epagogix and Blue Platinum (companies with proprietary artificial neural networks for predicting the success of films and songs respectively). Nothing to do with the wisdom of crowds, but rather creating algorythyms based on what has been popular in the past. Worth a read (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061016fa_fact6 plus a followup on his blog -http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2006/11/the_perfect_and.html

The Pentagon's mooted post-9/11 prediction market is an interesting thought... What if they had one pre 9/11? Would it have have even come close to predicting that terrorists would fly planes into buildings?... something which was unimaginable?

The independent National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States cited a "failure of imagination" as the most important failure, rather than one of information or intelligence...

[Jason Lonsdale]

There is a great post over at 'Creating Passionate Users' (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/01/the_dumbness_of.html) that discusses the misconceptions about "the wisdom of crowds" -worth a read.

[Jason Lonsdale]

sorry -that link was wrong -try this:

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/01/the_dumbness_of.html