The irresistible impulse to predict

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, speculation, prediction, futurism

The second chapter of The Skeptics' Guide to the Future: What Yesterday's Science and Science Fiction Tell Us About the World of Tomorrow, by Dr. Steven Novella and his brothers Bob Novella and Jay Novella, begins with a quote by the sage of the ball park, Yogi Berra: "The future ain't what it used to be."

I can think of three facts about the 1969 landing on the Moon by astronauts of Apollo 11, that were not anticipated by science fiction writers, nor by futurists in general:

1. Between 10% and 30% of Americans believe it was all a hoax.
2. The sponsor was not a corporation nor a "rich industrialist" but the Federal government.
3. The world watched Neil Armstrong climb down the ladder on color TV.

It took only 50 years for a few "rich industrialists" to gather both the financial muscle and the personal will to start spaceship companies, and at present there are three! In the golden age of space fiction, mainly pre-1960, nobody dreamed the combined Mercury-Gemini-Apollo programs would cost about a trillion dollars (in current dollars).

What did science fiction get right? Arthur Clarke foretold telecommunications via synchronous satellites in 1945, 12 years before Sputnik 1 surprised the world. On the dystopian side, George Orwell wrote in 1948 of a pervasive surveillance state (he was mixing Stalin with his expectation of immense progress in video technology); now it is upon us. More prosaically, in 1911 Hugo Gernsback wrote of video chatting; of course the inimitable Hugo made dozens of predictions in everything he wrote, so getting it right once in a while is simple statistics in this case.

What approach do the Novella brothers take? I'd call Skeptics' Guide a catalog of futurist ideas sorted by plausibility. I am amused by the title of Chapter 3, "The Science of Futurism." To me, that's an oxymoron. Science is about what we know, or think we know. Stuff that hasn't happened cannot be a scientific subject. To me, futurist speculation is fun, and when folks in a position to know more than most of us about technological and sociological trends speculate that one or another trend "has legs" and is likely to affect all of us, it's worth taking note. Some decent fraction of the time, the speculation turns into fact.

The authors sagely note that it's hard to distinguish robust trends from fads. I look back at a number of things I once thought were "neaty-keen!", that have vanished from the scene, with decidedly mixed feelings. I tried out a Segway at a science park once. I like them. The business model was fatally flawed, though, and my insurance company would probably have charged me more than the cost of the machine...per year. So as much as I hope for the rapid development and spread of self-driving autos, I suspect I won't live to see them "take over" (but I'll get one of they do!).

Or maybe I'll live long enough for many more trends to play out. The next-to-last chapter deals with indefinite life extension. Scale that back to "let's make it possible for most people to live 100-120 years in good health", and I have a decent chance to use or own (if we still own cars in 2040) a self-driving car, and to have not a robot butler but instead several (affordable!) robotic appliances, such as one that can make a decent omelet. Maybe I'll live to see actual, true, artificial general intelligence (AGI). My goal post for AGI is that a mechanism, entirely without "handlers and minders", does research, produces something new, and obtains a patent. A secondary goal post: one that can carry on a discussion on numerous subjects, and hold its own at a meeting of an intelligent, well-read Book of the Month Club.

Of course, artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) is beginning to do some very interesting things. One is the language understanding behind "art generators" such as Dall-E and "text generators" such as ChatGPT, and the object recognition behind image sharpeners such as Sharpen AI. Would life in a settlement on Mars such as the one shown here appeal to you? I prompted Dall-E to create this image. It's a portion of a larger image I "created" with "outpainting". ANI is beginning to push our culture in new directions.

After the introductory part of the book, each of the four sections deals with matters that are less and less likely. The last section discusses the impossible, at least until new laws of physics are discovered: time travel, transporters, and faster-than-light travel for example. My, how prone we are to wrestle against the constraints of the universe!

The point is often made that fiction writers and futurist writers cannot escape putting today's people into their future scenarios. A small number of people are fanatical about "living forever", but do they have a way to predict the social disruption that would result, if even 0.1% of humans became effectively immortal? The authors discuss both positive and negative views of this, and are careful not to draw conclusions. It would be a Black Swan moment for the human race. While I'd like to "not die", I am not willing for evil people to live long enough to get really, really evil. Imagine if Stalin or Mao Zedong were still alive...

As good as the writing is, the book is rather insipid. The authors didn't want to be sensationalists. They succeeded at that.

Yogi Berra also said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."