Making Predictions
Ten thousand years ago, humanity transitioned from hunter-gatherer tribes to farming settlements, towns, and cities. This became known as the agricultural revolution, and is marked in history as the beginning of civilization. Two hundred years ago, the technological power of science was discovered, increasing the production of goods by thousands fold. This was the industrial revolution, and it again changed civilization. Now, we are in the midst of a third revolution, the digital revolution, which started when the use of computers began to spread, and is still in progress today. With every revolution comes a shift in the way people live their lives and view the world. This can be frightening, but by keeping a clear head and drawing on the knowledge we have of history and the enterprises underway today, we can weather the storm and rest in the knowledge that things will probably end up even better than before.
We humans have a tendency when thinking about the future to shrug and say, “who can know what will happen tomorrow?” The weather report is notorious for incorrect predictions, and every single poll was wrong about the most recent U.S. presidential election. But there is nothing magical about the future. It is true we cannot be sure of the details of what will happen tomorrow, but reality is not random. Random is a word that means “something a human brain cannot find a pattern in.” Nothing is truly random; that would be quasi-real. Instead, it is probabilistic. The more you know about how things work, the better you will understand the probabilities, and the better you will be able to predict the future.
Thousands of years ago, a solar eclipse was a mind-bending experience. The sun was not supposed to go dark, so when it did, it was seen as an omen of the most terrible things, such as the end of the world. When they would happen, only the gods knew. But once intelligent and learned people started to chart the paths of the moon and sun through the sky, they gained the ability to predict when the next eclipse would occur. Nowadays, using computers and Newton’s Law of Gravity, we can predict the time and length of a solar eclipse, as well as the track it will take over the Earth, a hundred years in the future, to the exact minute.
In his science fiction series of short stories, Foundation, the author and futurist Isaac Asimov proposed a fictional branch of psychology called psychohistory, which could predict the future of human history with mathematical equations. In the story, the psychologist Hari Seldon is able to predict the fall of the galactic empire and set events in motion so that over a thousand years, a new, grander empire will rise from its ashes. Each of the short stories in the series tells of a turning point in history, a “Seldon crisis,” predicted by Seldon’s model, such as an approaching war or a dictatorship trying to build its own empire, and how it is solved by those who trust in the mathematical power of psychohistory.
The better versed we are in the tools of science and mathematics, the better the educated guesses we can make about the future. The most knowledgeable collaborations of experts today have predictive ability about halfway between solar eclipses and psychohistory. We can make models of complex systems like the Earth’s climate for the next hundred years at a low resolution and an uncertainty of only a few percent. Though we cannot say with certainty what the future of humanity will be like, the more we know about history and philosophy, and the more practiced we are at critical thinking, the clearer it appears.
In this new series, Visions of the Future, I’ll talk about the ways I think things will change in the future as a result of the digital revolution. Some are positive, some are negative, and some depend on whether people can adapt their views. For the series, I make the common sense assumptions that people crave freedom and true knowledge. Because of this, though there might be periods of oppression and backward slippage, the long-term march of history is toward a better standard of living for all.
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