On Futurists

Great quote the other day from someone in an audience: “I love listening to futurists, they are always interesting. And they are always wrong.” Fortunately this wasn’t about me. I was billing myself as a writer on this occasion but I take the point. Part of the problem is that futurists seem to believe in only one future. The one they have picked. Yesterday the future was rather bleak. Improbably bleak. But I don’t believe that there is ever one future.

The future is highly uncertain and therefore there must be more than one future. Moreover, we have the power to invent the future we want. As Barrack Obama said a few days ago” “We do not fear the future, we shape the future.” The other problem futurists seem to suffer from is that they get ahead of themselves. Quite often their ‘what’ is quite accurate but their ‘when” is usually way off. Their timing stinks and once again I think that’s because they assume a singular future. They assume, for example, that all newspapers will be e-papers in the future or that all music will be digital. But the word rarely works like that. It’s a marginal world out there and hardly anything is ever 100%. More often than not more than one proposition is true and it can take a very long time indeed — half a generation or more — for one idea to replace another.

3 thoughts on “On Futurists

  1. Richard – What’s your take on Philip Tetlock’s “Expert Political Judgement”?

    – The greater accuracy of “foxes” vs “hedgehogs” would suggest that we are better off making tentative, plural predictions rather than firm, singular ones (despite temptations to the contrary).
    – Something can also be made of the tendency of experts to predict too much change.
    – One thing that caught my eye was the negative relationship (only a slight one, mind) between the media profile of an expert and their accuracy of their predictions.

  2. Matt,

    I had to check this out, which is a scandal really, but there you go. I think taking one big bet is dangerous, although if you are really clever (or lucky) it might pay off… eventually. Taking smaller bets and adjusting your view all of the time intuitively feels like a much better idea, but this is not to say that I’m in favour of averaging out all guesses (Delphi method – sort of).

    I prefer the scenario methodology and I generally like at least four different scenarios to cover off a reasonable amount of ground. One thing I’ve been fooling around with recently is making each scenario multi-dimensional in the sense that you adjust the level of severity – smaller towards the middle, greater towards the edges. I think this might link to your point about experts predicting too much change.

    Personally I think futurists get a bit ahead of them in terms of timing (things will take longer than they think) but they also get carried away with the technology and underestimate the psychology, which partly links to history. If you look at now versus 20 years ago, for instance, there is indeed a lot of change but most of it seems to be in the surface. The fundamantals haven’t changed very much at all for most people. There is also the danger of experts being early adopters and making the mistake of assuming that they are themselves ‘normal.’

    As for media profiles of ‘experts’ what can I say? It seems to me that once you are on the media radar (you were in the right place once, possibly by accident) you can remain there more or less forever unless you say something very stupid because the media is basically lazy.

    BTW, something from my new book (not yet published) that might link to the small guesses idea …

    “The tendency of large groups to be smarter than any single individual (largely a statistical phenomenon) has been known for some time, although it took James Surowiecki’s book, The Wisdom of Crowds, to place associated ideas like prediction markets on the corporate radar. Problem solving (and to some extent idea generation) is more productive when more minds are given the problem…. One recent spin-off from this is that, if you give an individual several guesses, the combined average is also likely to be far more accurate than their first guess. The theory, still untested at this stage, is that the phenomenon is not purely statistical but is indicative of how the human brain works. Our brains constantly create, test and reject new ideas and hypotheses about how things work – or could work – and it is through this process of experimentation that we refine our thinking.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *