Do We Think Too Much About the Future?

How’s that going? Two facts stand out. First, since no one actually knows the future, guessing, speculating, or simply making things up remains the state of the art for almost everyone involved in describing it. (Prediction markets, the biggest recent innovation in forecasting, are based on the recognition that experts are often wrong.) And second, our views of the future tend to be dark, and seem to be getting darker. Young people, in particular, increasingly report that they’ve “lost the future” as something to look forward to; they feel trapped in a world careening out of control. A survey conducted by Pew Research found that only fourteen per cent of Americans would transport themselves to the future, if given the choice; nearly half say that they’d prefer to live in the past. Looking ahead, we see mostly malevolent inevitabilities—climate change, oligarchy, autocracy, A.I. overlords, and the like. The open future has closed up on us; we’re back in the end times, where we started.

Maybe the whole enterprise was doomed from the start: this is the implication of “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI,” by Carissa Véliz, a philosopher at the University of Oxford. Putting visions of the future at the center of society seemed reasonable, Véliz argues, only because so many took a “naive view of prediction,” imagining “predictions as quests for truth.” In fact, “predictions are power moves much more than they are attempts at acquiring knowledge”; often, they are actually “commands disguised as descriptions,” made by those who know that “the most effective way to predict the future is to determine it.”

Véliz indicts the process of prediction on two levels. To begin with, making good predictions is simply more difficult than we’d like. Would-be predictors face “data troubles” (numbers can be incomplete, deceptive, or outright fraudulent); “social troubles” (people are weird); “scientific troubles” (“We cannot predict through any rational or scientific methods the future of our scientific knowledge”); “coincidental troubles” (“flukes that forever alter the path ahead”); and “ironical troubles” (by “selling risk management,” predictors can actually increase systemic risk). These are all reasons to take any given prediction less seriously.

In addition, however, many acts of prediction aren’t what they seem to be. A prediction is often presented as a sort of would-be fact—a statement of what the predictor believes will, to some degree of probability, be true. But predictions are often twistier than that. At a minimum, Véliz suggests, most are “wishful” (“You want the horse you bet on to win”). Others contain hidden structures of motivation. If the forecast has a ten-per-cent chance of rain, you’re unlikely to take an umbrella, and yet, if it does rain, you may angrily conclude that the true chance was higher than ten per cent; as a result, Véliz writes, many weather apps deliberately overstate the probability of rain. Similarly, she notes, “when storms approach, responsible authorities tend to overreact, because the bad consequences of overreacting are less bad than those of underreacting.” These sorts of factors affect predictions large and small: you might sense them at work when your mechanic proposes replacing a part that may soon fail, or when an A.I. executive warns about the possibility of human extinction.

Predictions are sometimes simply impossible to make, Velíz writes, which doesn’t stop people from trying to make them. They can be harmful—perhaps a prediction will set your bail too high, or underestimate your suitability for a loan, or just give people the wrong impression—and yet the making of predictions is basically unsupervised: anyone can predict anything about anyone at any time. Right now, Véliz writes, “no one is informing you of the prophecies that shape your fate.” So her advice, over all, is to be wary of predictions and prophecies. Approach them with due skepticism; try to avoid making them yourself (“prepare, don’t predict”); and, if subjected to them, begin evasive maneuvers. “Surprise yourself,” she suggests. “Live in the present.” Thinking about what’s coming is inevitable, but “if you must wander into the territory of the future, don’t venture further than necessary. It’s safer to predict what will happen in an hour than in a hundred years.”