Why you can’t predict the future

I’m reading Ray Kurzweil’s ‘The Singularity is Near‘. It’s an interesting book. Fascinating, even. It’s full of insight and explanations of some of the most important technological advances in human history – and some of its predictions may well come to pass in some form or another. The man, frankly, is amazing.

But I’m reading it as speculative fiction rather than as a guide to the future, because I simply don’t believe that you can extrapolate like that.

Essentially, Kurzweil’s premise is that the way things are going, what with the exponential acceleration of technology, we will at some point in the very near future reach the point where artificial intelligence and human intelligence combine to provide a utopian world, where our thought, wealth and creativity will know no bounds.

I suspect an obstacle around the corner.

The most compelling and convincing parts of the book are diagrammatic. Points are plotted along a curve, representing specific (and carefully selected) events and technological milestones in our history – and then that curve is extended upwards, on into the future.

But of course, one of the problems of prediction is that while you can extend backwards and identify a narrative that neatly fits a curve, as that history was unfolding each point along that curve could have easily been replaced at any moment with a completely different ‘natural’ next point.

History is not causative – or at least, not in such a deterministic way.

The computer scientists of the 1950s who predicted that by 2005 there’d be five computers in the world, and they’d be the size of skyscrapers, were just as good at predicting the future as Kurzweil. That was, at the time, the most obvious extrapolation of the trends. The inescapable future of computing.

But the most obvious extrapolation of the trends are never where we end up.

Kurzweil quotes McLuhan, but he clearly hasn’t internalised his message. The fourth Law of Media is Reversal.

Whatever it looks like a technology is about, and wherever it looks like we’re going to arrive as a result of it, is generally the opposite of what its effect will actually be – and you simply can’t predict the way in which that opposite will manifest.

So while Kurzweil is clearly a genius – off-the-charts smart, creative, inventive, and able to express his beliefs about the future in a convincing, well-evidenced and coherent way – I’m equally convinced that he cannot help but be wrong, simply by nature of the fact that he is predicting the future.

But that’s not to dispute his broader thesis of human evolution in response to technology. That’s more or less what this book I’m writing is about. But you don’t have to become a fortune-teller in order to support that theory. You just have to look around at the present with your eyes open. There’s enough evidence of profound change all around us without having to start making up wide-eyed, fanciful, sci-fi, near-future predictions.

And, importantly, when you look at what’s around us, you get a much more complete and far messier picture of what actually goes on in reality. You start to notice that the technologies are not evenly distributed. That most people miss out. That developments in the technological assistance of human cognition are not unproblematic. That human beings are not developing in a uniform way. That sometimes events conspire to change our course.

Wars happen, tyrants prevail, natural disasters occur, religions exert influence, politicians change laws, dissenting voices are heard, priorities are re-appraised. In other words, profound change happens in an unpredictable and non-uniform way. Those changes upset and alter the predicted outcome of any set of determining variables.

And you simply can’t adjust your predictive models for the inevitable unexpected occurrence – because we don’t know what that unexpected occurrence might be. It’s an unknown unknown.

It’s fascinating, of course, to paint a picture of a bright new tomorrow or a brave new world, and I can think of few people who could do it in a more engaging and compelling way than Kurzweil.

I’m not saying that he’s likely to be wrong. I’m saying that it’s important that he must be.

Technological determinism insists that history is what happens to us as a result of technological advancement. But if we genuinely understand the technologies that surround us – and the ways in which they work on us – then we can have agency in what happens next.

That’s essentially what I’m arguing for: a clear and intelligent response to a deep and engaged understanding of the parameters as they exist right now. The future’s uncertain, and that’s good.

If you understand that we are different, and why we are different, then we can begin to choose in what ways we can be different. We can actually have a hand in selecting our responses and adaptations – they aren’t just a pre-destined result of the curves made from dots on a graph.

In other words: the future’s not for predicting – it’s for inventing.

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