Futurology has a reputation right up there with fortune-telling as a discipline. Flying cars, anyone? But that hasn’t stopped “trend analyst” Richard Watson trying with his new book Future Files, which attempts an omnibus analysis of where the world’s going over the next 50 years.
Obviously, attempting such a broad look at future history is a hugely ambitious undertaking, as Watson himself acknowledges. As such, the book is more Watson’s attempt to provoke thought as to what might happen over the next five decades. But even given all that, and to give credit to Watson for making the attempt, this is an incredibly flawed book. It is bedevilled by a lack of technical expertise, historical context, and an extraordinary level of credulity towards hype merchants of all kinds.
Perhaps the key thing that makes the future different from today is the development of science and technology; from that, predictions of
its social consequences flow. But Watson shows his profound ignorance of the fundamentals of science in one amazing paragraph:
For instance, “Other possible upheavals would be a collapse in consensus about one of the major ideas of nineteeth and
twentieth-century science. There are lots of contenders to be debunked, but surely the most high-profile must be the theories of Darwin, Einstein, and Freud. Again, I will probably be labelled as nut for even suggesting that a theory such as natural selection could ever be overturned, but this merely demonstrated the strength and power of conventional wisdom and the sheer force required to displace such ideas.
It’s hard to know where to begin with this. The idea that Freud’s work represents part of any scientific consensus shows a complete ignorance of modern psychology. Modern evolutionary theory, while still based on Darwin’s key observations, has progressed enormously in the past century and a half as new information (notably, genetics) has come in. And, finally, Watson seems to think a physical “Theory of Everything”, uniting quantum theory and relativity, would in some way “debunk” Einstein’s work. Such a discovery would no more debunk Einstein than Einstein debunked Newtonian mechanics. Special and general relativity provided a model of things that were not explainable in terms of classical mechanics – but the first of these to be detected was a minute deviationin the orbit of Mercury, and this anomaly was not even quantified until a century after his death. Newton’s laws were, and are, more than accurate enough to describe a huge variety of physical phenomena, including everything the civil and mechanical engineers have ever tackled! As the Wikipedia puts it:
No physical theory to date is believed to be precisely accurate. Instead, physics has proceeded by a series of “successive
approximations” allowing more and more accurate predictions over a wider and wider range of phenomena.
A new physical theory – perhaps the long-sought Theory of Everything – would be more of the same.
It doesn’t get any better in his breathless treatment of technology. It’s a regurgitation of Kurzweil’s knowledge-free fantasies in “The Age of Spiritual Machines” (though, thankfully, we don’t get inflicted with the rapture-of-the-nerds theorizing of “The Singularity…”). And then there’s global warming and the energy shortage. There is voluminous good material as close as your friendly local internet on this topic, and Watson spends bugger-all time on any of it. His one major point is that he regards the problem as overrated, waving the problem away on the basis of humanity’s ability to innovate in a crisis. There’s actually some merit to this, I think, but such a cursory treatment is unworthy of such a serious topic squarely within the remit of the work.
My expertise in cultural, economic, and business trends is considerably more limited, but even here there were any number of things that I’d like to dispute, or at least dispute the significance Watson assigns to them. For instance, the book makes a big deal over the move of large retailers into, well, retail banking. But retailers have always played a significant part in the credit market – anybody remember Myercard? Heck, Geoffrey Blainey’s book Black Kettle and Full Moon goes into some detail of the pivotal role that storekeepers played as credit providers in pre-Federation Australia. More profoundly, Watson completely ignores the power of economic growth to help tackle many of the issues – such as how to care for our aging population – facing us.Perhaps it’s his view that economic growth is coming to a screeching halt. How Watson squares this with his belief in what represents fairly radical (and unrealistically optimistic) technological development I do not grasp.
While not every trend analysed in Future Files is as poorly done as these, the bulldust level is so high as to make it entirely unsatisfactory even as a discussion starter on the future. Far more interesting is the meta-question its failure raises – is there significant value in attempting such a project – a synoptic, broad-brush, overview of future history?
For what it’s worth, I don’t think there is. If you’ve got an original idea about a single future trend – much as I can’t stand it, perhaps Kurzweil’s “The Singularity” is such an idea – and explore it in depth in book-length form, that’s entirely different. But thought experiments involving the construction of future societies is an exercise much more successfully tackled by science fiction writers.
If, after this review, you’re still interested in Watson’s ideas, he was interviewed on LNL a few days ago.
Nice work if you can get it! And because the gladioli champion is so wonderfully over-paid in comparison to myself,I guess his guest are already in a future that doesnt include me.And I think the future will probably let go of Einstein as a good story once told, but a bit , outrageous on its edges..and the edge effects keep getting in everyones pre or de scriptions of the future.I hope people get sick and tired of money or whatever form it may have in the future.
Having surfed in here from Making Light, coincidentally, I notice that Vernor Vinge, who I think was the person who thought up the concept of “the Singularity”, is a novelist published by Teresa and Patrick Neilsen Hayden’s company Tor books. What the hey. It’s a small world.
I read about Vinge in Damien Broderick’s The Spike, which is an extrapolation of Vinge’s Singularity idea. Basically, the idea of the singularity is that around 2020 (I think) or so, things are gonna get so weird that we can’t even predict how weird they’re gonna get.
I think things are weird enough, personally.
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009335.html#009335
The future is now.
Sounds like an interesting read.
My objection to the technological singularity hypothesis is not that it can’t happen, ever, is that there’s no evidence that it’s anywhere close to happening now.
I speak as one who was once the Qld Department of Education’s representative on the local branch of the World Future Society. That was about 20 years ago.
Unsurprisingly there is not much similarity between what has happened since and what the WFS was thinking about then. Don Stammer used to do a column in the BRW. One of his favourite themes was that looking back each year you could see that the most important factor influencing the share market was an “X” factor that had been entirely unforeseeable.
Still futurology is supposed to allow us to choose between alternative futures. Nothing wrong with trying to work out where you want to go, but it needs more competence than Watson seems to have at his disposal. I heard him on LNL and was underwhelmed.
Try all you like, there’s still no futurology that’s funnier than the Futurists.
My only disappointment is that Marinetti never got to do a guest spot on ‘The Jetsons…’
GEORGE: Jane, how do you STOP this crazy thing?!
MARINETTI: You don’t *stop* it, you bourgeois fool! You let the glorious machine rend you to pieces, thus clearing away the old order, and making room for the coming of Futurist Man!
GEORGE: But, we’re in the future right now. The show is called the Jetsons.
MARINETTI: Bah, you call *this* a future?!
I have the advantage of being able to look back 50 years and that gives me some credibility in being able to look forward to the next 50 and make some predictions. But very importantly it is essential that we actively try to anticipate the near future. Most noteably because we now, more than at any other time in history, need to decide how our world will be performing 50 years and 100 years from now. Global warming is the thing you see. It is very much the fear of failure in prediction that is causing much of the government paralysis in establishing action plans for our future environment.
Looking back I would say that what has happened in the last 50 years is as much remarkeable for what has changed as it is for what hasn’t. And most of the things that have changed can be seen as optional participation. Apart from computing and manufacturing, medicine is probably the only area of change where advances have dramatically altered the way that things are done. But even there the impact on peoples lives is occasional rather than a central focus. Computers are, of course, a major shift in the way things are done. Micro controllers are infused into every piece of equipment produced nowadays and the impact varies from profound: computer controlled machinery; computer augmented medical equipment; to trivial with computer driven entertainment devices of every description. And of course there is the television set.
In my life the things that have altered significantly are the way clothes are washed, the way that dishes are washed, the way that the machinery that I use to earn a living performs automatically, and the way I entertain my self when at rest, have improved out of sight. Everything else is periferal and optional. We still go to school in the same way (perhaps driven rather than walking), we still dress in the same way, we still eat in the same way, we still get drunk in the same way. But that brings up the very significant behavioural change of drugs.
As for flying cars, very much my current passion since my younger daughter put me to the task of producing one, they are very close. Not the levitating kind seen in star wars (this will have to wait until dark matter can be contained) but the small flying winged variety. For anyone interested, google the Cafe Foundation to see what the state of the play is.
The next 50 years I believe will only see a gradual change. Things will look significantly different but the underlying function will be very much the same. There will be many technology advances but the way in which they are applied is very much a commercial function rather than an aspirational one.
I recently read The Shock Of The Old by David Edgerton and he argues that it’s not invention or innovation that matters as such with technology but use. For example, maintenance is frequently overlooked as a technological factor in systems.
And how anyone can suggest that consensus will collapse in regard to the theory of evolution is completely beyond me. This guy is not some I.D. shill is he?
JPZ: The Jetsons in the Episode of Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law, ‘Back to the Present’ from Wikipedia
Fair point, Brian. However, I think trying to predict most things (particularly cultural) 50 years out is all but impossible. And, clearly, to do a reasonable job I think one needs to think about a range of different scenarios, with lots of “if/then” going on.
I would add to your comment, Robert, that the range of different scenarios are likely to all become real at the same time, but with different groups. You could imagine a very high tech future for the US military and be reasonably safe. You could imagine a different robot filled future for the very wealthy and be proven correct. You could predict no change at all and be very safe for huge parts of the world. I don’t think that there is any one true future picture.
What I will predict is the automatically guided car. The components are all available, if some country decides to assemble them. The autonomous plane is already a reality but before long will be available in the under $100,000 dollar department. And robotic assistance as in the process of expanding in scope and scale. Computers have already made most of their impact and people are starting to say I’m fine with what I have, this is fast enough. Software to extend peoples creative scope is the most unpredictable dimension because very clever people can create explosive improvements without any prior indication and without much supporting structure.
A pet product concept of mine has been what we called the “medical wand”. This was to be a multisensor (ccd, infrared, pressure, sound, movement, orientation)microprocessor in a hand piece, attached (now cordlessly) to a pc based medical database and dianostic software package, and with the internet to the whole world’s medical knowledge base. As a home appliance this concept has the ability to dramatically reduce the number of medical visits along with making them more focused and better supported with definitive information, as well as allowing remote diagnosis via the internet. This product has been possible to achieve for over ten years, but what stops this from happening is that it is a mutli technology device and the scale of the development is beyond any one company. This is, again, by way of saying that what can happen and what will happen are worlds apart.
Drivers can’t cope with cars which run on the ground, how the hell would they cope with flying ones?
Predicting the future accurately is impossible. Even if you give some credence to fortune tellers, their predictions are so nebulous to be of any use to the person having their fortune told, when they’re not downright fraud.
We have enough problems working out the past. For some periods we have not enough information eg parts of ancient and medieval history, while for others we have far too much to make sense of eg most early modern and modern history. In any case, if one could write the definirive history of anything, history writing on that subject would come to a stop, wouldn’t it, because there’d be no need to write any more.
In regard to the future – nobody predicted the end of the Cold War, or 9/11. If you can’t predict major events like that what hope has anyone of accurately predicting the future?
Helen,
The technology allows for the planes to fly themselves completely from take off to landing, and the control is far superior to a pilot flying the plane. You will get in and say “take me to grandma’s”, the system will check the route for weather and traffic, it will obtain a clearence and once you have steered the plane onto the takeoff area (which will only be 50 or 100 metres long) and verified that there is nothing in the way, it will take over and fly the route while receiving updated weather and safety information all the way. Airliners are doing this now. The pilots are there to load the data, manage the machinery, and take over if things go wrong. The full system for completely autonomous flight is not in place yet, and by that I mean the groundbased flight path serving dubbed “the noodle in the sky” flight path along which planes will fly in future, but it is heading in that direction. What makes this all possible is the gps navigation system that is appearing in cars nowadays. In reality driving a car is far more hazardous than flying a plane. In a car danger is only ever a few seconds away. As for cars driving themselves, google “automotive radar” and you will see some of the technology that is waiting to be implemented. But particularly there is a system that works as a radar for hazard tracking, distance keeping, and it also receives data from the car in front and passes it through to the car behind. This linked with advanced cruise controls and abs braking systems forms part of the system. The other parts are optical tracking systems that are used routinely in manufacturing, and the lane makers that are on most roads these days will in future contain small electronic tags that can be read by vehicles and offer back information such as which road, which lane, what speed, and what is the next intersection. The thing that holds all of this back is government. The market will not work if government won’t cooperate. The technology is “now” but it could take government 50 years to come up to speed on the potential for such complex interrelated systems to reduce travel times, fuel consumptions, and accidents.
Interesting comments, BilB. Yes global warming is one area where we do need to look at likely scenarios.
My earliest memory is from 1941 when I was 18 months old and ended up in hospital with badly blistered legs up to the knees when I’d walked into a smouldering turkey’s nest. I was 5 years old before I lived in a house, then we got a kerosene refrigerator while keeping the Coolgardie safe (it was an advanced design compared with the primitive examples you see when you google – it’s now in the Miles Historical Village), then 24 watt electricity when I was 11. TV and the photocopier were still some years away.
So what has happened in the last 60 years or so was not even remotely predictable back then. One prediction that did not come to be were the mass leisure that was supposed to flow from automation. Another was the nuclear holocaust. I fully expected not to be here now and my brother who was born in 1948 said it was thew same for him growing up.
You’ve missed one of the really important ones. Described as the “most significant medical advance of the 20th century” the contraceptive pill changed gender relations and made the 1960s possible.
Brian,
Spot on, there were a few that I missed after I thought about it, but that is a biggey that I completely missed. The cell phone would be another. Yes it would have been hard to predict the calculator while using a slide rule. I’ll bet, though that you did not feel particularly disadvantaged as a kid growing up that way. In the mid seventies I lived for nearly 2 years in a 6 foot square trailer parked beside the boat that I was building in a derelict timber yard in Glebe, just a few miles from the heart of Sydney, and they were some of the greatest years of my life. As you point out much of the technology has only altered our enjoyment rather than improved it.
By the way I shared your burns pain. At a similar age I slipped while climbing up the lighted copper to get to the laundry taps and plunged one whole leg into the boiling water.
Paul, my favourite quote about history and the future is (via Wallerstein)
When you ask historians why it is important to study history they typically say, “So that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past”. But then if you ask them exactly which mistakes we are in danger of repeating they usually come up empty.
I think this is because their main focus is on the past, not the present or the future. In my view historians tend to live in the past, futurologists in the future, whereas clearly the only place to be is the present, albeit with an eye to both the past and the future as “We look before and after, And pine for what is not” (PB Shelley, To a Skylark).