Alex Pang's Future2: The Future of Futures

Redesigned Sigma Scan

I just noticed that Sigma Scan, a project I worked on for the British government a few years ago, has had its Web site redesigned.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet. I came to the conclusion last year that the ways futurists normally communicate with audiences has some serious limitations that are belied by the familiarity we and our clients share for things like scenarios and roadmaps; and that we have some great opportunities to push communication about the future out of texts and into things, or as I put it in another post, "to learn to talk about the future through things." Consequently, while I'm never one to dismiss a good Web site redesign-- and Sigma Scan is certainly easier to use now than it was-- I think we need to dive deeper into the user experience, and ask how people are actually using this information, and then ask how we can improve delivery of the content to better serve their needs in actual use contexts.

Leaning forward into the future

I'm not quite sure how much I can really do with this, but it feels like something I should experiment with in one of my workshops.

Just thinking about the past or future could literally move you. This mental time travel was revealed in a new study in which participants swayed backward when thinking of the past and forward with future thoughts.... The ability to subjectively travel through time, called chronesthesia, sets us apart from other animals, the researchers say. And now their results suggest our perceptions of time are tightly coupled with space.

"This is the first demonstration that when we think about time we physically move though space, whether that's engaged though areas of the brain or manifested throughout the whole body is an open question," said Lynden Miles of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Miles and Aberdeen colleagues Louise Nind and Neil Macrae fitted 20 participants with a motion sensor while they imagined future or past events. After just 15 seconds, participants who were recalling the past had swayed backward an average of about 0.07 inches (1.5 to 2 mm), while the future thinkers leaned forward about 0.1 inches (3 mm).

The question for me is, is this an effect that one can usefully exploit? I'm always thinking about how to tweak workshop designs to subtly (or not so subtly) encourage people to be more creative and future-oriented. Maybe putting paper spaces at a slight incline that encourages participants to lean forward a bit when they work on them?

Of course, all good scientific research requires a follow-up study.

Miles and his colleagues hope to study this same phenomenon in other cultures.

"We have a lot of language to suggest the future is in front of us and the past behind us," Miles said.

But in some other cultures, such as those who speak Aymara (an Amerindian language of the Andes), the future is described as being behind them with the past in front. If such individuals sway backward when thinking about future events, that might suggest this behavior is learned and a consequence of how people think and talk about time.

Welcome io9 and IEET

My "Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination" has been reprinted on science fiction blog io9. (Thanks, Annalee!) it's also been reprinted by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

If you're driving and can't read the piece, I was interviewed about the piece on the Australian Broadcasting Company's show Future Tense. Here's the mp3.

And again, here's a link to my more serious take on these issues.

To those who say there are no easy answers, I say you're not looking hard enough!

The title is from The Simpsons, the quote below is from Time:

[Acknowledging complexity] may wind up undermining part of the appeal of forecasts: how a single number can quickly jump from an economist's spreadsheet to a politician's stump speech or a businessman's PowerPoint presentation. "Forecasts satisfy a deep psychological need that we live in a somewhat predictable and controllable world," says Philip Tetlock, a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. "Those are essential stories. People just find the truth" — that the future is unknowable — "too dissonant."

The "reverse Lake Wobegon effect" in forecasting

Forex recently reprinted a July 2009 article from Time asking "Why Are Economists So Bad at Forecasting?"

A 2003 study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that the Blue Chip Consensus Forecast, which polls some 50 economists each month, is consistently better than any of its individual members. The researchers dubbed that result a "reverse Lake Wobegon effect": everyone was below average. During economic turning points — like the one we're currently in — the individual forecasts veered further off the mark....

The problem is twofold. First, it's hard to predict the future. Second, it's really hard to predict the future when so many parts of the economy are in flux. "This has been an extraordinarily difficult period for forecasters," says Harvard economist James Stock. "Our models aren't really designed for predicting massive changes." Philip Joyce, a professor of public policy and administration at George Washington University, figures that in normal times, budget projections a couple of years out tend to be pretty reliable, at five years less so and at 10 years not much at all. "But these aren't normal times," he says. "In recessions, even the short-term numbers aren't very good, because a lot of the factors that go into them are based on assumptions that the economy will behave within some narrow band of reality, and the way it behaves is outside of that band."

The fundamental problem is that economic models — series of equations meant to describe how different parts of the economy fit together — depend on historical data. If you want to know how high unemployment is going to be six months from now, you start with how high it is today. If the economy isn't stable and the old relationships don't hold as well as they used to, then the models break down. In recent years, there have been great advances in economic modeling, says Stock, but forecasts haven't necessarily gotten much better since the economy itself has grown more complex.

"i haven't f***** the past but i've f***** plenty w/ the future."

From the liner notes of Patti Smith's great Land. Maybe I'll adopt it as my new motto.

On explaining failure

Daniel Davies has a great piece in Crooked Timber on the failure of economists to forsee the current crisis:

[A]n important practical consequence of shutting out heterodoxy was that rather than having a few people to point to who predicted the crisis, the economic profession was left claiming that its true triumph was to be able to explain exactly why economists had been unable to predict it.

And of course, the old Peter Cook line has never been so relevant as it is to the economics profession now (“Sir Arthur, do you feel you have learned from your mistakes?” “Yes, and I’m confident that I could repeat them exactly”).

Also, this comment is striking:

Belgian economist Paul de Grauwe (one of those converted neoliberals) has made the following prediction – the more all economist’s projections for 2010 converge, the more the sense of false objectivity from that convergence will delay the realization that the thus converged projection is wholly wrong and unsubstantiated.

This resonated with me because it's a lurking worry I have whenever I read scenarios on technology or global change: they all tend to focus on the same sets of trends, big drivers, etc. Rather than be reassured that the nano-cogno-bio-IT convergence (the tech world's equivalent of the BRIC countries) is a real thing because everyone in the field talks about it, I worry that it's more likely that we're all missing the real story.

Maybe the cruelest thing I've read since the Evil Futurists Guide to World Domination

Rortybomb's (tongue-in-cheek) proposal to exploit cognitively weak customers' challenges with complex financial services. You've got to read the whole thing to really appreciate it.

Of course, unfortunately this isn't far from what some industries already do.

In addition to the moral point, it also flags a new study warning how "Dementia threatens aging boomers’ portfolios"-- the sort of problem that's only going to get worse with time, particularly as the aging in place movement grows.

China, future hegemon

Nobel laureate Robert Fogel has an article in the latest Foreign Policy arguing that by 2040 China is likely to dominate the world economy-- just as it did for eighteen of the last twenty centuries:

In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000. China's per capita income will hit $85,000, more than double the forecast for the European Union, and also much higher than that of India and Japan. In other words, the average Chinese megacity dweller will be living twice as well as the average Frenchman when China goes from a poor country in 2000 to a superrich country in 2040. Although it will not have overtaken the United States in per capita wealth, according to my forecasts, China's share of global GDP -- 40 percent -- will dwarf that of the United States (14 percent) and the European Union (5 percent) 30 years from now. This is what economic hegemony will look like.

Why will it do so well? Enormous investments in education; growing productivity and development in rural areas and in the agricultural sector; the systematic underestimation by Chinese officials of its growth rate; and the relative decline of the EU as a global economic powerhouse.

I'm not sure I agree with the piece's conclusions, but it's a provocative piece and worth reading.

A look back at Omni Magazine

A nice Slate article about Omni Magazine, which captures the zeitgeist of the magazine in the late 1970s and early 1980s very nicely:

Is a robot shoveling your snow? I once knew the answer to this question. For anyone who was raised in the '70s and never had a date in the '80s or who thought the 2000s would look like a cross between a Yes album cover and Journey concert T-shirt, Omni magazine was essential reading—one with a ready answer to all your robot and rocket questions. And to a 10-year old getting a subscription for Christmas in 1979, Omni was The Future.

The essay ends by wondering why the magazine failed in the 1990s. To me, the simple answer is that the future stopped being a place where the choices looked shiny and infinitely good, and started looking like a place where we wouldn't be able to just grow or innovate out of our problems. And those problems wouldn't even be interesting ones, like having to resist enslavement by alien robot viruses: they'd be ones like, how do we keep from drowning in our own car exhaust?

I often have this sense when I visit Disney's Tomorrowland. Yes, it's a cartoon vision of the future-- this is Disneyland, after all-- but it's also a brilliantly optimistic one.

via flickr

It's a future in which robots would be friendly, technology would be at once revolutionary and yet accessible, and the possibilities were unlimited-- the kind of future in which we would have to decide whether to start colonies on Mars or under the sea first.

via flickr

Tomorrowland opened in the late 1950s, and I have a very hard time imagining creating something like this today: I think it would never be credible in the ways it was in the opening years of the Space Age. Our vision of the future starts in a more problematic place, and only a few futurists believe that science will deliver miraculous-looking solutions to today's problems-- for example, that a few more turns of Moore's Law will create artificial intelligences that can figure out how to deal with global warming.

via flickr

Which is a shame. I loved Omni when I was a kid, and I would have liked to live in an underwater city. But I also think that we now know enough about how humans really think about the future, and about the future itself, to design ways to deal with the mundane yet massive problems we face.

"Growth of Citizen Science" reprinted

Educational Web site The World and I has reprinted the article that Darlene Cavalier and I wrote about the growth of citizen science. (It originally appeared in the New York Academy of Sciences magazine.)