The art, science and politics of predicting the future
How the work of postwar futurists can help us avoid a looming techno-dystopia.
I want to tell you a story about a man who I think is one of the most under- appreciated people in the history of technology. Not because he invented a machine that changed the world, but because he’s given us a way of thinking about the future that may save us all.
Roy Amara was born in Boston in 1925. After graduating high school in 1942 he cut his Engineering course short to serve in the US Navy during the second world war. With the war over and having been honourably discharged, he finished his studies at MIT and completed a post-grad at Harvard, but his time in the Pacific Fleet had led to a love affair with California. It was this that led him, like many pioneers, to move west to find his destiny.
After a short stint as a high-school teacher, Amara joined the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), founded in 1946 as a non-profit think-tank set up as an R&D lab looking at the huge influx of new technologies that emerged in the wake of the war. He spent 18 years at the SRI, which in that time invented the (computer) mouse, the idea of videoconferencing, and became one of the first nodes connected to ARPANET — the proto-internet developed to connect scientists and researchers across America.
By the late 1960s, it was clear that the world was struggling to keep-up with the pace of technological change. Society at large was becoming fearful of the direction that advancements and science and technology were taking us. From the mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons and the close connection between technological advances and war, to conservative dismay at the sexual revolution sparked by the invention of the contraceptive pill. The latter half of the decade marked the end of a period of unabashed enthusiasm for science and technology, despite being capped by one of humankind’s greatest achievements.
“Fear is a natural reaction when our environment changes around us faster than we are able to adjust to it, and when we’re afraid, we are at risk of adapting in destructive ways.”
It was at this time that Amara and a group of his contemporaries reasoned that fear is a natural reaction when our environment changes around us faster than we are able to adjust to it, and that when we’re afraid, we are at risk of adapting in destructive ways. Their belief was that the most effective way to prevent this was to give us the tools to plan for it, but to do that, we have to find a way to look into the future and try to work out where we’re going.
The problem for serious academics is that predicting the future was the domain of charlatans and ‘a thoroughly disreputable business’ — according to Amara’s colleague Paul Baran — and so a motley crew of technologists, scientists, philosophers and artists founded Institute for the Future (IFTF) in 1968, to make a reputable business out of soothsaying.
Amara left his job at the SRI to become the first president of the IFTF in 1971, and thus, futurism as a rigorous discipline was born.
In his 19 year stint as president of the foremost fortune-telling company in the world, Amara’s achievements were legion, but the one I’m interested in appeared fairly early in his tenure. In 1974, following a series of ‘stimulating conversations’ with his friend and colleague Dr Robert Johansen, Amara published a paper that tried to set down why futurism was important and how it should be studied.
“The future isn’t something that just happens, it is the decisions we make now that do more than anything else to shape the future that we end up in.”
In The Futures Field: Functions, forms and critical issues, he laid out a framework for structuring and systematically exploring the business of looking into the future, rooted in the idea that the future isn’t something that just happens, it is the decisions we make now that do more than anything else to shape the future that we end up in.
So in order to make better decisions now, we need to start looking at where those decisions might take us. Amara describes three different approaches to predicting the future, each requiring a unique skill to execute:
- The exploration of possible futures (the art of futurism)
- The exploration of probable futures (the science of futurism)
- The exploration of preferable futures (the politics and psychology of futurism)
It might seem simple, but I believe that like all great ideas, buried within this short paper from nearly 50 years ago lies the key to unlocking a way to plot a course out of what appears to be an inevitable march towards dystopia.
Stumbling into a techno-dystopia
Skipping forward to 2019, we find ourselves in a world at the mercy of a small number of monolithic technology companies that are plotting fundamental changes to the way we live, work, and interact with other people, and they’re not always plotting these changes based on what is good for us.
At Google, Facebook and Amazon the key question has rarely been on the ‘why’ of their business, it’s all about the ‘how’. How can we index the world’s information? How can we get as many people on our platform as possible and keep them on there for longer? How can we build a store that sells everything and anything to anyone?
Find a Big Hairy Audacious Goal and shoot for it. Throw thousands of engineers, scientists and business people at the problem. Grow, scale, eliminate the competition; rinse and repeat.
Our probable future
The four biggest companies in the world by market cap are Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Alphabet (Google) – with fifth place often taken by the youngest of the tech ‘Big Five’, Facebook. The engineers and scientists at these companies now run the show, and the future they’re building for us doesn’t look like it’s designed to act in our best interests.
Take breakthrough technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence as examples.
Global R&D spending in AI will be over $35 billion globally in 2019, and the ‘big five’ (the four above + Facebook) will likely make up over 20% of that. If we take a look at how AI is being used most successfully by these companies and their contemporaries right now, we’ll see a grim pattern.
Behavioural-targeting algorithms on social media, on the surface used to ‘tailor’ our feeds, but too easily abused by bad actors to manipulate our feelings, alter our beliefs, undermine democracy and keep us trapped inside filter bubbles that reinforce our biases and tell us what we want — or more accurately, expect — to hear.
Recommendation engines, analysing the things we’ve purchased — as well as the things our friends, family and neighbours have purchased — before pushing products on us that we haven’t asked for, undermining the art of discovery and the joy of a recommendation from a friend. Mercilessly manipulating our desires.
Finally, AI is taking the greatest threat to human/machine relations — the automation of work — to whole new levels. In the current probable future, we won’t need humans to talk to us when we call a company, and AI enhanced art and music will make everyone pitch perfect and algorithmically ‘creative’.
“The engineers and scientists at these companies now run the show, and the future they’re building for us doesn’t look like it’s designed to act in our best interests.”
We’re half way through handing over control of our beliefs, our desires and our jobs to this seductive new technology.
Interestingly — and as Amara observed — when artists explore the future, they take a different path. Free to explore all possible futures and unconstrained by technology, they are compelled to find the rough and troubling edges of technological futures.
In Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie ‘Her’, he is naturally drawn to the drama, conflict and challenges that an almost perfect conversational AI would create. Thanks to Jonze, there are new questions that will be asked as this technology becomes more sophisticated. Given some idea of the potential consequences of getting it wrong can help us consciously choose a better path for humans.
The motivational power of fear
In many ways, where we find ourselves in 2019 is a lot like the world of the early seventies. We may not have crowned a decade’s worth of rapid progress by landing on the moon, but since the mid-noughties our lives have been changed immeasurably by the internet and connected technology.
Smartphones and the cloud have made us accessible everywhere and given us access to everything we need wherever we are; Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have changed the way we access and share the news, they’ve even changed the kind of news we see; YouTube, Netflix and streaming TV have drastically changed the way we think about, consume and commission entertainment, while inventing formats and genres of their own along the way.
Meanwhile, nearly 20% of adults in Europe are socially isolated, extremism — fuelled by filter bubbles and fake news — is on the rise across the globe, our experiences, data and even our DNA is being turned into a commodity sold on the open market to help businesses predict our future behaviour and adapt accordingly.
“How are we reacting to these unexpected consequences of all this progress? With fear. Delete Facebook! Delete Twitter! Protest Uber! Ban Airbnb!”
We feel helpless and hopeless because the platforms that were supposed to democratise and free us have actually ended up magnifying the impact that the controlling forces of the world have on us as individuals.
How are we reacting to these unexpected consequences of all this progress? With fear. Delete Facebook! Delete Twitter! Protest Uber! Ban Airbnb! We’re trying to atone for mistakes we’ve made in the past, but if we can learn anything from Roy Amara, it’s that we should be looking to the future, not the past, for answers.
It’s likely that plenty of the platforms we see as existential threats now won’t exist in 10 years, because history tells us that we’re on the verge of a new period of exponential change. AI, robotics, gene-editing, AR, VR — and a whole host of things that we don’t have names for because they haven’t been invented — will propel us into and through a new period of change at least as profound as the last one.
The art of the possible
We’ve talked about the Big Five and the march of seemingly unstoppable breakthroughs in technology and science leading us down a predictable path: our probable future.
When this probable future doesn’t line-up with a future that is positive for all of us — our preferable future — it inevitably meets with resistance. There’s resistance from regulators and politicians, but most importantly, there is resistance from people. The people are ultimately the collective consciousness that will do all it can to steer the world towards a preferable future.
A 2018 global brand study by Edelman showed that 64% of consumers would buy or boycott a brand solely because of its position on a social or political issue. It also revealed that over half of people believe that brands have more power to change society for the better than governments.
Blindly following the lead of technology companies is not only going to make the world a worse place, it’s also going to mean you’re going to suffer when people turn against the platform.
We can move the needle from probable-dystopia to something that will thrive and grow through the next period of exponential change by exploring the art of the possible, through the lens of what is good for people.
“So we want to try to make the world a better place? If so, our decisions and actions in every aspect of our life and our work should reflect that.”
The first chapter of Roy Amara’s paper is entitled ‘Form follows function’ — but he was not talking about product design. When we’re looking at the future, we need to begin with the question of why we’re doing it. If we want try to make the world a better place, our decisions and actions in every aspect of our life and our work should reflect that — it’s these small steps that will set us on course to a future that we want to live in.
A parting thought, for anyone working in creative fields: don’t get sucked-in trying to work out how to use some cool new bit of technology because a client wants it, or it feels edgy. You can be the conscience of the engineer, so long as you’re willing to ask — of yourself and your work — not just the exciting questions, but the difficult ones.
An edited version of this article was first published in Creative Review on 29/07/2019.
