While contemporary visions of the future aren’t new, past visions of the future are. Indeed “yesterday’s tomorrows” is a new genre with a growing body of material, including several books, such as “Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future”.

The heydays of science fiction are 50 years old. That’s a lot of future in the last century. Now that everyone is a futurist, we are creating mounds of future past visions of the future, if you can follow me. The future dates quickly. There’s nothing that says “yesterday” quite like an old portrait of the future.

Someday social scientists will key into the remarkable record of aspirations, assumptions, biases, and gestalt that visions of the future represent for each generation. They’ll no doubt  pour over ancient copies of  The “Usborne Book of the Future”, a great treasure-trove of yesterday’s tomorrows. First published in 1979, it illustrates the forecasted world of the year 2000 “and beyond.”

Tom Morton very generously scanned in the entire book and posted it on the blog Pointless Museum.

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Long Now board member Peter Schwartz’s The Art of the Long View has topped the list of the most important futures works ever, in a worldwide vote by members of the Association of Professional Futurists (APF). Congratulations, Peter!

The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World was first published in 01991, and describes a process for creating and using scenarios to help decision-makers navigate change, as incubated at Royal Dutch/Shell, and nurtured to maturity at Global Business Network (founded in 01987 by Schwartz together with Jay Ogilvy, Lawrence Wilkinson, Napier Collyns and Long Now’s Stewart Brand).

The honouring of Long View as the most important futures work by a group of futures consultants is, it seems to me, testimony to the role it played in popularising and legitimising scenario-based thinking and planning in organisations. Quite a few other books explaining and illustrating the development and use of scenarios have been published both before and since, but Schwartz presented a systematic, accessible, and reproducible approach to using scenarios that has garnered a wide audience and aged well. (Also among the book’s less celebrated impacts was my suggestion for the name of this blog.)

The Association of Professional Futurists announced the poll results last month (January 02007). APF is dedicated to “support[ing] professional futurists by advancing professional excellence, facilitating network and community building, and promoting the unique value proposition of futures work”. Founded in 02002, it has some 200 members worldwide comprising professional futures practitioners in consulting, business, and education sectors.

Other top-voted futures works were Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era (2 vols) by Wendell Bell; the multi-volume Knowledge Base of Futures Studies edited by Richard Slaughter, The Limits to Growth by the late Dana Meadows et al, and the State of the World series by The Worldwatch Institute.

[Disclosure: I’m an APF member, but as part of my ongoing effort to fit in with U.S. culture, didn’t bother to take part in the vote (:]

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One of most needed (but still absent) instruments for long-term thinking is a predictions archive. Stewart Brand and I fist conceived of the Long Bets project as a supplementary agency that would work best as part of a great prediction registry. The registry would include any and all predictions about the future. The ideal archive of predictions would include the thousands if not millions of predictions generated each day as a by-product of our ordinary speculations and inadvertent forecasts, not just those designated as a deliberate prediction. 

Like everything else it touches, the Wikipedia has the power to make hard things easy. I recently discovered Wikipedia  pages for the subject of future years — such as 2020 or 2029 and so on — can serve as a germ of what Fringehog calls a Futurepedia.

As an example there is a fantastic prediction made on the pages of 2010, concerning the pronunciation of the year 2010 and beyond.

According to a recent press release, David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, has predicted that the change of pronunciation to “twenty X” will occur in 2011, as “twenty eleven”, explaining that the way people pronounce years depends on rhythm, rather than logic. Crystal claims that the rhythm or “flow” of “two thousand (and) ten”, beats that of “twenty ten”, but the flow of “twenty eleven” beats “two thousand (and) eleven”. Alternatively, Ian Brookes, editor-in-chief of Chambers Dictionary, suggests the change will occur in 2013. And finally, the UK Times has suggested 2020 as a final timeframe for the change, saying “If people can have “twenty-twenty” vision, then surely they should also live in the year “twenty twenty.”

Some suggest that after the “twenty X” pronunciation for current and future 21st century years has taken hold, future references to early 21st century years will change accordingly from the previous “two thousand (and) X” method; thus, they say, future generations will refer to the date of the 9/11 attacks in the United States as September 11, “twenty oh-one.”

Wikipedia’s entry for the years 2020 include vernacular predictions for that year such as:

* By mid-decade, Alpine glaciers are likely to contain only half their 1970’s volume.

* NASA expects to land another group of astronauts on the moon.

* Voyager 2 is expected to stop transmitting back to Earth in the 2020s.

* Futurist Ray Kurzweil puts 2029 as the year most likely for the Singularity.

These forecasts can be thought of as the official future — what conventional wisdom expects. Even though no one thinks Ray Kurzweil is conventional, I would argue that anything that persists on Wikipedia can be thought of as conventional wisdom by definition.

If expanded greatly the official future timeline might prove to be a useful document of what we expect.

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The Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM) trades real money in bets on future cultural events. Prediction markets sell contracts for an easily decidable future event (someone wins an election, a commodity hits a certain price, a movie sells X number of tickets). If that contract comes true, the different between what the price of the contract was when bought and its full price will be pocketed by the winner. So if $1 contracts for Bill Clinton winning the election were selling for 35 cents when you bought them, you would have profited 75 cents after the election.

Outside of the IEM most US predictions markets trade with token money to escape uncertain gambling and investor laws, which may prohibit real money trades. But in all prediction markets the price of a contract is decided by the collective demand, or in other words, by the collective mind. Outcomes with low expectations earn a low price. If you are a contrarian you can buy low value, low-expectation contracts, and if conventional wisdom is wrong (at that time), you’ll gain.

But the odd thing is that in these markets, the conventional wisdom of the crowd is usually right.

Even with token money, prediction markets have proven to be extremely reliable forecasters. Using real money, the Iowa Electronic Market for presidential elections has been uncannily accurate for many decades. According to Business Week article 12 years ago,

[IEM] predicted the vote totals of the past two Presidential elections within two-tenths of a percentage point, outperforming national polls. It also has closely tracked elections overseas, never wavering from Boris Yeltsin, for instance, as he won reelection in Russia.

in October 2006, CNN Money reported IEM’s predicted outcome for the mid-term elections, which was then a month away:

The Iowa Electronic Market, which offers contracts on the outcomes of political and economic events, says the percentage of investors in the 2006 Congressional Control market believing Republicans will hold full control of Congress has dropped to 39 percent from 58.5 percent on Sept. 28, when news was revealed about Rep. Mark Foley’s correspondence with pages. Those believing the Democrats will take full control of Congress have risen to 22.9 percent from 11.2 percent Sept. 29, the day the Florida Republican resigned.

The IEM market detected the swing in political moods that resulted in the Republican loss of Congress.

A few years earlier, in the summer of 2004, the IEM favored a Bush re-election win even when the pundits and polls showed Kerry in the lead. This out-of-sync prediction so puzzled many observers that some wondered (Salon article) if the IEM was systemically biased towards Republicans. But again, it was not bias, but simply accurate prediction; the IEM was uncannily accurate in forecasting Bush’s win.

So what about this year’s presidential election? What does the oracle of the IEM say about the prospects of a Democrat or Republican president in 2008? As of yesterday, here are the price of contracts for each.  It is still a close race, with the price of a Democrat president (blue) slightly higher than a Republican one (red). Of course we are 9 months away.

The price of party candidates is a lot more interesting. Below is the graph of the price of each of the major Democrat nominees winning the nomination. The recent double reversal between Clinton and Obama is clear, as is the sinking possibilities of the other contenders.

But the zig zags of the Democrats pale with the mess in the Republicans. Their prices are all over the map with very little clear trajectory, until very recently. For the first time, the price of a Republican candidate (McCain) breaks the 50 cent (half of the $1 value) threshold, while the others are sinking rapidly. According to the collective wisdom of the IEM, as of yesterday, the only other Republican in the race is Romney.

Anything can happen in the next 9 months. The IEM doesn’t see the future. It is merely a very quantifiable measure of aggregate expectations now. But because real money is at risk, people tend to bet on what they think will happen, vs. what they want to happen, and in aggregate, this method seems to yield better forecasts than polls or pundits.

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The Economist has a nice piece on the future of forcasting. Good reading for the upcoming seminar with Paul Saffo and later with Nassim Taleb. The article does a good job pointing out the value of certain types of short-termism:

The next rule is: think short-term. An American practitioner, Faith Popcorn, showed the way with “The Popcorn Report” in 1991, applying her foresight to consumer trends instead of rocket science. The Popcornised end of the industry thrives as an adjunct of the marketing business, a research arm for its continuous innovation in consumer goods. One firm, Trendwatching of Amsterdam, predicts in its Trend Report for 2008 a list of social fads and niche markets including “eco-embedded brands” (so green they don’t even need to emphasise it) and “the next small thing” (“What happens when consumers want to be anything but the Joneses?”).

It also points out the value in prediction markets which are similar to our project Long Bets, but capitalize on the wisdom of crowds principle where people buy shares in an idea to give it a probability:

The most heeded futurists these days are not individuals, but prediction markets, where the informed guesswork of many is consolidated into hard probability. Will Osama bin Laden be caught in 2008? Only a 15% chance, said Newsfutures in mid-October 2007. Would Iran have nuclear weapons by January 1st 2008? Only a 6.6% chance, said Inkling Markets. Will George Bush pardon Lewis “Scooter” Libby? A better-than-40% chance, said Intrade. There may even be a prediction market somewhere taking bets on immortality. But beware: long- and short-sellers alike will find it hard to collect.

Ironically Long Bets has a bet on living at least 150 years…

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The Human Exemptionalism (or sometimes ‘Exceptionalism’) Paradigm is the idea that humans are somehow separate from nature or that we have transcended it in some way through spirituality, technology or consciousness. It is a paradigm that is shared between many of the religious ideologies of the world as well as many devotees of science and technology. Both types of adherents believe humans have been given, either through a higher power or our own ever-growing ingenuity, a special place in the world. Often, part of this paradigm is that we have made our lives so easy and safe that we are no longer subject to evolutionary pressures. It is another symptom of the short-sightedness of our culture.

Fortunately, it has been increasingly under attack. Founding Environmental Sociology in the ’70s, William Catton and Riley Dunlap proposed what they called the New Ecological Paradigm, which recognizes that humans are simply another part of nature, albeit a stunningly unique and fascinating one. In that same decade, E.O. Wilson coined the term (and started the discipline of) Sociobiology, a somewhat controversial field. Despite hurdles, it is gaining ground. Frans de Waal is a primatologist doing amazing work on primate social behavior. His book, Our Inner Ape, is a fascinating look at what we humans can learn about ourselves by looking at chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest relatives. There was also the Mike Judge movie, Idiocracy. And before all of them, of course, we had Buckminster Fuller.

(more…)

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Seth Shostak from SETI published this piece yesterday on the time related difficulties in finding life outside the solar system (and holding a conversation with it). He even through in a nice mention of Long Now:

“There’s a similar argument to be made for communication. We seldom initiate information interchange that takes longer than months (an overseas letter, for instance). More generally, we seldom begin any well-defined project that lasts more than two or three generations. The builders of medieval cathedrals were willing to spend that kind of time to complete their gothic edifices, and those who bury time capsules are occasionally willing to let a hundred years pass before the canisters are dug up. But what about a project that takes several centuries, and possibly millennia? Who’s willing to do that? Only Stewart Brand’s “Long Now Foundation” seems to have the guts for this type of enterprise, proposing to build a clock that will keep time for ten thousand years.”

Jill Tarter from SETI also discussed these issues in her Long Now Seminar back in 02004.

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I was recently reminded of this great prediction article by John Watkins published in the 01900 Ladies Home Journal.

Particularly interesting for how much it gets right and wrong, sometimes in the same prediction. Some examples of the 29 predictions:

• There will be air-ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic. They will be maintained as deadly war-vessels by all military nations. Some will transport men and goods. Others will be used by scientists making observations at great heights above the earth.

• Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances. Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.

• There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other. Russian will rank second.

You can see an image of the actual article here, or a transcribed text version here.

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Futarchy is an untried form of government proposed by economist Robin Hanson, in which officials define measures of national welfare while prediction markets determine which policies are most desirable. In Hanson’s words, “we would vote on values, but bet on beliefs.”

Futarchy is based on the assumption that poor nations are poor because their governments adopt flawed policies, despite expertise recommending otherwise. Although this assumption may be problematic, in that it boils economic stagnation down to sheer misjudgment, the question of how to render governments accountable to public opinion regarding the future is a valuable one. Futarchy intends to address this by having democratically-elected representatives formally define and manage after-the-fact measurements of national welfare, while allowing market speculators to determine which policies are expected to raise national welfare (Hanson). According to Hanson, “the basic rule of government would be: when a betting market clearly estimates that a proposed policy would increase expected national welfare, that proposal becomes law.”

Hanson was also involved in the creation of the Foresight Exchange (see image), an online play predictions market in which current market prices reflect consensus about the future, and FutureMAP, a (now cancelled) DARPA research project into the use of prediction markets for shaping government policy.

It’s possible to imagine participation in something like the FX as a civic duty in Futarchic societies, and specialized predictions markets emerging around particular issues, geographies, etc. For more information, including Futarchy’s potential shortcomings, refer to “Shall We Vote on Values, but Bet on Beliefs?” and visit Hanson’s website.

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Good Magazine ran an interview recently with a man they call The New Nostradamus. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita uses a mathematical model that is based entirely on game theory to predict the outcomes of political conflicts. He takes a very literal interpretation of the phrase “political science” and focuses his analysis strictly on issues of strategic interest, ignoring any cultural or historical aspects of the parties involved. He believes that the theory of rational choice can accurately predict the actions of any political actors as long as the data underpinning the determination of interests are correct. An analysis of his model’s predictive abilities done by the CIA found it to be accurate 90 percent of the time.

In the article a few of his predictions are discussed, but what is interesting is that he also makes a number of prescriptions. In fact, while there is a list at the end of the interview describing some of his accurate predictions, the discussion with him fails to clearly separate predictions from prescriptions. In the interview, he proposes a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and criticizes the outcome of negotiations with Kim Jong-Il of North Korea for not conforming to his model.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the recent agreement that the United States reached with the government of Pyongyang closely resembles the one that Bueno de Mesquita’s model suggested: Kim agrees to dismantle his existing nuclear weapons but not his existing nuclear capability. “He puts it in mothballs with IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspectors on site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And in exchange, we provide him with $1.2 billion a year, which we label ‘foreign aid,’ of course.” The “foreign-aid” figure published in the newspapers was $400 million, which concerns Bueno de Mesquita. “I read that and I said, I hope that’s not the deal because it’s not enough money. He needs $1.2 billion, approximately, to sustain the loyalty of his cronies in the military and so forth. It’s unpleasant, this is a nasty man, but we’re stuck with it. The nice part of the deal is that it’s self-enforcing. Each side has a reason to credibly commit to their part of the deal.”

It would appear that what he has actually developed is a highly sophisticated system of conflict mediation. His model assumes that people are selfishly rational and always gravitate toward very predictable terms in an agreement. It would be very interesting to show these predicted outcomes to two negotiating parties at the outset of their talks. Would they get to the same results faster?

Bueno de Mesquita acknowledges the power of what he is able to do with his work, which seems to play a big role in his approach. He will not call elections that he claims to know the outcome for because he does not want to influence them and he will not help organizations affect or manipulate government policy. Clearly, predicting the future is a complicated and controversial venture. It toys with our sense of continuity and our theories of causality, let alone the concept of free-will. It also seems that as people get better at it, we may be raising questions faster than we can answer them.

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