David Brin: Why Do We Need to Forecast the Future?

David Brin is an American scientist and author of science fiction; he has received Hugo, Locus, John W. Campbell Memorial, and Nebula Awards. He has shared his insights with corporations such as Google, Procter & Gamble, and SAP, with NASA, and even the United States Department of Defense. According to D. Brin, he usually asks questions and does not give answers to his clients, since the skill to ask relevant questions is of paramount importance.

VALSTYBĖ: You have consulted a few of the world’s largest corporations. What can be predicted considering the future by a writer, that can’t be predicted by corporate executives earning tens of millions of dollars? 

All human civilizations invested heavily in prediction of the future. In the past, to forecast the future, shamans read goat entrails or watched the distribution of the stars. This process has changed today, yet shamans have survived under different names, from stock market analysts to politicians and business leaders, whose job is to appraise possible scenarios of the future as accurately as possible in order to employ available opportunities and resources accordingly. Besides being a writer, I have been trained as a scientist, and I tend to distrust those professions since their predictions, as often as not, are based on intuition, not science. But, as is known, even science can be murky as it looks ahead, while intuition sometimes tells a lot more.

The answer to the question why my predictions are appreciated by corporate executives earning millions of dollars is rather simple: they seldom dare to peer beyond the five-year horizon.  I must make it clear that in such cases not so much possibilities of specific events are predicted, as of the trends, which will have major impact upon the lives of humans and the planet. It is rather negative trends, not positive ones that are normally sought for in the future, so that possible issues and risks are known well in advance. A commonplace example: George Orwell's classic novel “1984” was a "self-preventing prophecy" that stirred millions into action, working to prevent the author's vision from coming true.

VALSTYBĖ: What are the most common questions asked by representatives of the largest corporations? What are they trying to learn from you? Do they want to know predictions about the evolution of the technology, or do they want to learn how the new technology might influence people’s lives and lifestyles in the future?

In the near term, they always want hints about business opportunities and dangers.  For example, what trends might make the current motif for cell-phones obsolete?   Will rising world education levels, decentralization of skills (when anyone may do anything), and the rise of desktop manufacturing (for example, 3D printers) mean the return of cottage industry, replacing large-scale manufacturing? Will biological synthesis follow its own Moore's Law pattern, the way computers have, leading to an Internet of organic chemistry?

The biggest forces are social. What will happen when the 20th Century's relentless drive to "professionalize everything" comes to an end? Will we see a rising era of amateurs who won’t have a thorough understanding of anything because half of the work will be done by computers? Will ubiquitous cameras - getting smaller, faster, cheaper and more mobile each year - lead to a Big Brother state, to increasing proliferation of pictures on Facebook, or to hyper-empowered individualism?  And if all individuals will be able to get a live view of any of the remotest corners in the world? Will this lead to tyranny by mobs, when someone is wrongly accused and he or she is watched by the enraged who seek to do away with him or her? Or maybe the world will just become a safer place to live?

Paradoxically, I do not offer answers, only a lot of questions to my clients. It is the skill to ask relevant questions that is essential.

VALSTYBĖ: Is it possible to state that the vitality of a corporation directly depends on its ability to identify how the world will change over the next decade? Is knowledge of the future important to individuals?    

Kings rule. Then comes the time for them to die. We strive to learn how the world will be changing but we’ll never know it for sure. Corporations may corroborate their predictions by collecting and analyzing Big Data, by engaging in activities ranging from social modelling to artificial intelligence, however, no matter how effective these predictions are, sooner or later, they are doomed to fail and corporations to collapse. And there is just one trait that helped corporations and human beings survive for thousands of years. That trait is resilience. It is not enough to have knowledge of the future; one must be resilient to survive.

It is only natural that both small and large corporations aspire to know the future. It is capacities and resources made available for the search of the future trends that make a difference.

VALSTYBĖ: What do you think about a vision that in the year 2050 nobody will be able to lie, ‘cause a sensor embedded in the clock or in any other part of the “body” will work as a lie detector, and consequently mendacious populists will lose any chance to win elections?

My 1980 novel Sundiver dealt glancingly with a future in which it became difficult to lie, because all citizens could track lies and deceptions. Recent scientific work suggests that something like this may be coming.  In which case, we will have to decide what kind of society we want when such technologies are around.  We have several options.  If we try to ban the technologies, that will only ensure that in the end only governments and, for example, secret services will get them. Or we may all grab these methods and then use them against each other, dissolving into a morass of accusations and recriminations. A war of all against all. Statistically, a person tells a lie three times in a 10 minute conversation. The third option is to use such technologies by cultivating a general social norm of forgiveness for small mistakes… because we will all need it. Catching dangerous or malicious lies, we may also forgive and shrug-off the inevitable foolish exaggerations and slips of the tongue that are deeply part of human life.

VALSTYBĖ: In your opinion, what changes are there in store for us before, say, the year 2050? People with artificial body parts and cyborgs all around? A world without disease and with immortality? How about a vision, where everyone is living in a virtual world, where androids do all the work in the “real” world?

The most spectacular change, awaiting all of us in the future, is the ability to process information. The amount of knowledge accumulated by mankind is enhancing at a breakneck speed; in a few decades, the rate of knowledge accumulation will be hardly conceivable. Just one technology - artificial intelligence - could arrive from any of six different directions making acceleration of knowledge accumulation even faster. Is our brain capable of handling such amounts of information? Some researchers propose that human intelligence will develop alongside the increasing amounts of information in order to be able to process it. But if our brains fail to handle information, we’ll need help – the organic brain will be either supplemented with technical gadgets or linked with external components, such as computers, etc., much as our ancestors did when they added another layer - when mutation and evolution gave them the spectacular prefrontal lobes, and it was their way to survival.

VALSTYBĖ: Which of the currently emerging technologies will lead to major changes in how we work, how we consume, and how we produce goods?

Desktop fabrication will probably not eliminate manufacturing, mass-production and delivery systems. But it will become a commonplace factor, when people can upload design patterns and create their own small parts or machines and print these using 3D printers or similar technologies. Even factory-produced items will undergo change; they will be personally tailored to the needs of particular customers, being more unique and individual. Impatience with old-fashioned delivery systems may provoke the return of pneumatic tube transport for small or medium-scale packages. If asteroidal resources become available, all metals will plummet in price, including gold and platinum.

The late 20th Century obsession with efficiency in production and delivery improved profit margins and quality in many industries, like automobiles. Mere efficiency, however, is not enough, therefore dependence on trans-oceanic shipping will reduce, and local self-sufficiency will be a counter trend of real value.

VALSTYBĖ: Let’s go back to the year 2050. What cars will we drive then? Some people say that we’ll have better perfect batteries for electric cars, others say that the future belongs to hydrogen powered electric cars. What is your opinion? Maybe we won't have cars at all?

I portray hydrogen powered cars being used by 2050 in my novels EARTH and EXISTENCE. There are real potential advantages… but not in the near term.  The required infrastructure, if we copy gasoline distribution, would be insane. Hydrogen will make sense only when solar power becomes so plentiful that you fill your tank at home.

The big news has been the spectacular improvement in electric cars. The motors and control systems were more than ready and battery improvements, including super-capacitors, are clearly on the horizon.

Many science fiction authors speak of the self-driving car, indeed, Google driverless cars are already running on our streets.  Science fiction tales envisioned that it would require "smart roadways" with embedded cables and centralized computer control. But onboard vision and analysis systems have progressed to the point where cars can see us, anticipate trouble and avoid accidents. The implications are astounding.

VALSTYBĖ: Another tough question – oceans and human future. Will we have cities underwater? Will we be able to get our hands on the resources lying deep in the oceans? Or maybe asteroid mining is the future?

Asteroid mining is a dream that only a few of us shared in the 1980s. Dreams of underwater cities and ocean settlement go even farther back. Both frontiers offer the potential for spectacular benefits that might enrich human society far beyond any memory of poverty, if we do it rightly. Both must overcome serious obstacles that modern technologies can’t negotiate.

In accessing the vast resources from asteroids - which include almost everything we currently tear out of the Earth through mines - we must first decide to be ambitious. To become again a civilization that invests boldly in space. Sadly, that dream has been almost crushed by cynicism. Even exploration of the outer space has become an almost forgotten thing. The sea is an immense problem and opportunity, and to reach the treasures hidden in the depths of oceans we must apply plenty of science and environmental effort. The danger is that we might cause much harm, deliberately or unintentionally, seeking benefits. About 75% of the ocean floor is "desert" areas, poor in nutrients and almost barren of life. Ways may be found to "fertilize" some stretches, creating new fisheries and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in an effort to stop climate change. This, however, requires formidable research so we may forecast an impact of such actions.

VALSTYBĖ: With the beginning of the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, many science fiction writers predicted that by the year 2000 we will have colonies on Moon, and a lot of people will be live in space stations orbiting Earth. That didn't happen. Why?

When the year 2001 came around, I had to answer many questions like: "where are the moon bases we were promised?" But watch again the classic film by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey. It portrayed a civilization that by the year 2001 had made greater leaps in spaceflight than we've achieved. But society had progressed much less on a human plane. It conveyed a world commanded by patronizing, smug white-male-American bosses who operated in habitual secrecy. Now, you may claim that was accurate! But put aside the reflex. Today's world - for all its flaws - is far more open and diverse. Neither the story writer nor the film director expected or imagined such changes.

Though we don’t possess space technologies to travel in the solar system today, nevertheless, most of the world's children now can get access to education, live in homes with sanitation and electricity. If we have wisdom to keep on improving society, we will, sooner or later, conquer the solar system filled with opportunities and wonders

VALSTYBĖ: Last but not least, the most important question for us - what kind of future do you predict for small countries, such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania?

Globalization has been a mixed blessing. Great positive benefits followed the wave of export-driven development as any nation of the world, not only successive ones, had a chance to work hard and send their children to school.  This has lead to a spectacular growth of a world-majority middle class, and those educated children will demand more improvements in society, still.

Globalization also carries dangers: ecological, ethical, and a risk of cultural homogenization as regional and local differences are drenched in a Standard International Culture. Corporate consolidation makes competition difficult for small countries or small businesses or individuals. Oligarchy is a mistake that plagued every society across 6000 years.

But we have seen that there will be opportunities, too. Smaller nations - like individuals - must be agile. Opportunities may be sudden and short-lived, the way Finland strode across the world stage of telecommunications for a time. You must not miss them. More often, there will be opportunities for alliances our parents could never have imagined. A Lithuanian artists' collective might collaborate with a consortium of independent neural-interface designers in San Diego, plus fabrication experts in Malaysia, and create a new kind of passenger seat for Google automobiles without ever learning of the identity of the original designer… an artificial intelligence residing in one of Google's laboratories.

Small countries will probably also be the drivers for innovation in governance. You will not get fresh ideas about constitutional freedom from major powers like the United States, China or Russia. Just give a glance at the tiny Iceland experimenting with governance. One always ought to search for new ways how citizens could exercise sovereignty, creative freedom, etc. Survival is possible not only owing to state-of-the-art technologies, but also to high culture that is able to reach out globally.

VALSTYBĖ: Thank you.

Interviewed by Karolis MAKRICKAS

Quotes

Small countries will probably also be the drivers for innovation in governance. You will not get fresh ideas about constitutional freedom from major powers like the United States, China or Russia. Just give a glance at the tiny Iceland experimenting with governance. One always ought to search for new ways how citizens could exercise sovereignty, creative freedom, etc. Survival is possible not only owing to state-of-the-art technologies, but also to high culture that is able to reach out globally.

Corporations may corroborate their predictions by collecting and analyzing Big Data, by engaging in activities ranging from social modelling to artificial intelligence, however, no matter how effective these predictions are, sooner or later, they are doomed to fail and corporations to collapse. And there is just one trait that helped corporations and human beings survive for thousands of years. That trait is resilience. It is not enough to have knowledge of the future; one must be resilient to survive.

It is rather negative trends, not positive ones that are normally sought for in the future so that possible issues and risks are known well in advance. A commonplace example: George Orwell's classic novel “1984” was a "self-preventing prophecy" that stirred millions into action, working to prevent the author's vision from coming true.

All human civilizations invested heavily in prediction of the future. In the past, to forecast the future, shamans read goat entrails or watched the distribution of the stars. This process has changed today, yet shamans have survived under different names, from stock market analysts to politicians and business leaders, whose job is to appraise possible scenarios of the future as accurately as possible in order to employ available opportunities and resources accordingly.