Making Sense of the Future by Rick Szostak

Author:Rick Szostak
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

Predicting plausible futures

DOI: 10.4324/9781003186854-4

4.1 How to identify plausible futures

We should begin by recalling two important points that we made in the introductory chapter. First, we simply cannot predict the future with great accuracy. Attempts to do so in the past have been very hit-and-miss. Not surprisingly, most forecasters get some things right but others wrong. We can, though, predict plausible futures. That is, we can project some existing trends into the future and imagine what the world would look like in a few years if these continued. Since the world is complex, we should try to look for trends across diverse phenomena and imagine how these might interact. We should doubt that the future will unfold exactly along the lines of any plausible future we may outline – in part because each trend is unpredictable, and in part because there will also be surprises (see next chapter). Yet we can be confident that the future will bear some important resemblance to at least some of the plausible futures we might identify.

Second, we can then investigate how we might nudge plausible futures toward the desirable futures that we wish. The great advantage of identifying plausible futures is that we can then essay to accentuate the characteristics of those futures that we like while mitigating their negative features. We will be far better able to bend our actual future to our collective will if we have thought in advance about how to deal with plausible futures.

One problem here is that humans value certainty and thus are attracted to prognosticators who pretend to an unattainable degree of confidence regarding the shape of the future. The laws of probability suggest that, if there is a sufficiently large body of forecasters operating fairly independently, one or two of these will just by chance get most of their predictions right. They may then be hailed as visionaries, but are highly unlikely to be able to reproduce this success in the next time period. Beware of those who predict the future with extreme conviction – even if they have had some success in the past with predictions. It may be even more dangerous, though, to give up on trying to see into the future at all.

Our first task in this chapter is to identify trends that might reasonably be expected to extend into the future. As in the preceding chapter, we benefit from having a finite (but large) set of phenomena for which we can attempt to discern trends. We will proceed to identify a set of plausible trends.

Second, our interest in interactions leads us to ask whether the trends we have identified are likely to be supported or discouraged in future by interactions with other phenomena. Will existing trends in climate be exacerbated or attenuated by political and economic interactions? We will combine these first two stages of analysis as we discuss particular trends below.

We should appreciate that even in our world of change, some things do not change. We continue in most countries to drive on the same side of the road as our grandparents did.

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