Our biases about the future

Never do we consider “futuristic” to just mean in the future without any big change

Nobody can predict the future. That’s hardly worth caveating. But we can think about it realistically. We can think through ranges of possibilities and constrain those ranges to those scenarios that are more probable.

Photo by Ben Sweet on Unsplash

This type of exercise happens all the time — in business forecasting, policy planning, budgeting of any kind. As a financial executive in my business career, I’ve spent twenty years doing it for the various companies I’ve worked with. If we acquire X company and use Y amount of debt to do so at Z interest rate, what will the cash flow of the combined business be in five years? What will its sales be? That sort of thing.

But for lack of practical need — for lack of relevance to the present — those exercises rarely venture beyond a five-year horizon. Sometimes they go as far as ten or twenty. Maybe a few policy forecasts go to fifty years out. Almost never longer…in any context.

When we start talking about the future in terms of hundreds or thousands of years from now, our minds move quickly into the fictional and fantastical. We think of Star Trek and Star Wars. Or we think of Terminator and The Walking Dead. “Futuristic”, to modern culture, is synonymous with “super high-tech”, with “space fantasy” or, oddly, along a different axis, “dystopian” or “utopian”.

Photo by Logan Voss on Unsplash

It’s a strange mix of “possibilities”, if you can call them that, a mix that noticeably excludes perhaps the most obvious possibility. Never do we consider “futuristic” to just mean in the future without any big change. Life in the future that’s kind of like life now. And — dare I say it — with each passing year, life just like in the past.

All of this is to say we clearly have biases about the future. That in itself is an odd thought: to have biases about something that doesn’t exist or hasn’t happened. Yet we clearly have them. And before we can engage in a meaningful discussion about realistic futurism, we need to address these biases: recognize them first, and then try to overcome them.

Let's start with six big ones, biases I believe nearly everyone today holds about the future.

1. We mistake the period of change we live in for the long-term norm. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, a period of perhaps 10-12 human generations, science and technology have advanced steadily. Because this period is much longer than several human lives, we see the change that occurred within in it as a constant that will be ever-present. This is a phenomenon I like to call “mistaking the rising wave for the flat ocean.”

2. We are spoiled by change. Technological change has generally brought good to our lives: convenience, coolness, abundance. And that has happened throughout all of our lives — every one of us living today. We’ve come to expect it. We’re spoiled by it. It’s not pleasing to consider a future where such change slows or stops.

3. Any change is better than no change. When we imagine futures without a focus on technology, and even often when we do, we tend to go two ways. The future will be better than today. It will be utopian, or nearly so. Or, the future will be worse than today, or outright dystopian. Never do we consider the future (beyond a few years from now) to just be the same as it is today, to be “topian”. (Is that too boring?)

   As an aside and perhaps as proof of this bias, “topian” is not even a word in the English language in this regard, so I coin it here!

4. We mistake technological advancement for new discoveries in fundamental science. We continue to make advances in exploiting the laws of physics to make better and better technology. We wrongly assume that, in the background, science is making concomitant advances in discovering new laws of physics — or ways to break the existing laws of physics — that can someday be exploited for more technological gain. That, of course, is not happening.

5. We struggle to appreciate timescales much longer than our own lives. One hundred years is a long time for humans. Longer than our own existences in just about every case. But one hundred years is hardly a lot of time, even within recorded human history, which itself is nothing in the scheme of our species’ history, which is nothing in the scheme of….you get the point. The scale of time in this universe can boggle our minds, and so we often ignore it, focusing instead on timescales realistically that are fractions of our own lives: years and decades mostly.

6. We mistake the unknown for anything goes. The future is not known. Anything can happen, as the saying goes. But anything still needs to be constrained by what is physically possible in this universe. However, we often suspend that constraint in thinking about the future, hoping — nay, expecting — that sometime in the unknown events of the after-now we’ll find a way to overcome pesky physical laws.

We can all be forgiven for harboring these biases about the future. We’re all guilty of it. And even when we agree with them and overcome them, it’s easy to fall back into daydreaming and old habits. I love Star Trek and would gladly live in that future. If only gravity plates and warp speed could be real! Maybe…they could be....Alas!

Recognizing and working through these biases, and many others I'm sure we'll turn up, are going to be continuous struggles as we progress our discussion of realistic futurism. It's part of the project!

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