Technology foresight: The difficulty of peering into the future

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, technology foresight emerged from the future studies and technology forecasting fields and seeks to apply outcomes from these fields to policy- and decision-making (see the earlier posting for a discussion on what technology foresight is). A major concern for policy-makers is the quality of outcomes from future studies and technology forecasting fields. Regrettably, there are a number of self-proclaimed “futurists” that have cast shadows of doubt over these fields. An important consideration for any technology foresight activity is then how to ensure reliable information and how to identify questionable predictions or forecast. In this post, I’m going to focus on the negative. I discuss a few high profile futurists who tend to be very prominent on the Internet and other very accessible resources, whom scholars have been very critical of, and for good reasons. The point I wish to make is that when considering what to base future-oriented policy decisions on, it is important to evaluate the methodology and substance of the informational inputs used. This posting is not intended to be critical of the futures and forecasting fields as such. Indeed the futures and forecasting fields have developed a number of rigorous and objective methods to produce highly reliable data. I will discuss those in future postings when I get more into methodologies.
Ray Kurzweil is perhaps one of the world’s best known “futurists” whom many commentators and scholars have questioned. Among Kurzweil’s well known predictions are the imminent “technological singularity” and his related prediction, i.e. as one consequence of the technological singularity, that humans will overcome death in the near future. Kurzweil bases his predictions on an extrapolation of the well known Moore’s Law (ML) concerning the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit. For Kurzweil, ML demonstrates an example of exponential development which results in increasingly accelerated technological advancement. From Moore’s Law, Kurzweil derives his “Law of Accelerating Returns” (LAR). Kurzweil’s LAR does two things in regards to ML: it extends ML to technologies other than transistors, and it equates increasing transistor density with increased technological capability. Both of these assumptions are highly dubious. Furthermore, Kurzweil assumes that ML is on par with a natural law while many scholars and commentators have suggested that the reliability of ML is more a product of its inadvertent normativity rather than any descriptive properties, i.e. that ML pressured technology developers to sustain the “law’s” predictive power rather than the other way around (van Lente & Rip, 1998; Gardiner, 2007). In any event, Kurzweil’s attempt to derive various future predictions based on his reading of ML makes for some very questionable futurism.
Whereas Kurzweil’s weakness lies in his theoretical assumptions, John Naisbitt, the “Megatrends” guy, has mostly been criticized for his methodology. John Naisbitt has written, or co-written, a series of books named Megatrends this-and-that since the early 1980s. Most of them, if not all, have been bestsellers. His first book, titled Megatrends: Ten new directions transforming our lives, was criticized for the fact that Naisbitt did not reveal much about his methodology other than that it was based on “content analysis” of a bunch of newspapers and such. He has addressed the methodology issue to some degree, but it hasn’t really changed his approach; his books are still mostly a summary of things that are being discussed in select information outlets with only a superficial analytical component at best. Naisbitt tends to be a dedicated optimist; it seems that all trends indicate a fabulous future that we’re all just going to love (for ex. he seems to miss things like recessions and terrorism)! The result is that Naisbitt’s books tend to come across more like propoganda, striving for self-fulfillment, than realistic visions of the future. The most striking example of this is his and Doris Naisbitt’s recent China’s Megatrends: The 8 pillars of a new society which has been widely criticized for presenting an overly optimistic government-sanctioned view of modern China. For the Naisbitts’, it would seem that dissidence is almost non-existent in China and that the Chinese are grateful that the government assumes the tedious, but necessary, role of separating the wheat from the chaff on the Internet for them, or what we (at least I) would usually refer to as censorship.
A third somewhat visible “futurist”, and collaborator on Kurzweil’s “Singularity University”, is Dr. James Canton of the Institute for Global Futures who published The extreme future: The top trends that will reshape the world in the next 20 years in 2006. It contains such prescient items such as that in the future criminals will create fake-bank webpages to steal our information (if I really thought that this was not a current concern in 2006 I almost would have deserved to have my information stolen). His blog on the Institute for Global Futures website is a real gem. For example, on May 10, 2009, Canton posted an item about the “Ghost Hack that is now embedded in about 100 million computers, perpetrated by an Asian secret organization”. Scary stuff! Unless you’ve seen the 1995 anime film Ghost in the shell, of which this is essentially the synopsis. Canton is not a very prolific blogger (I guess he’s too busy on the speaker circuit). His most recent blog post is from November 24, 2009 and warns us about the megacity explosion; “Over 50% of the planet lives in MegCities (sic.) today. We are forecasting over 65% by 2025.” Canton is so way off here that I really have no idea what he is talking about. Megacities are defined as urban areas with a population of 10 million or more (Canton includes this definition in his post). According to UN data from 2009, there are 21 urban areas in the world that meet that criteria. The combined population of these urban areas accounts for, at most, about 8% of the total world population.
There are at least two properties that all of the above futurists (and others of their ilk) display. First is a tendency toward sensationalism. Their predictions are meant to evoke more of an emotional response (whether it be intense optimism or desperate gloom) than a rational reflection on how to plan for the future. The other is that their methodology is mostly limited to selective and superficial environmental scanning that is more oriented toward reinforcing their own theories or sentiments regarding the future than providing objective data. Nevertheless, these authors, if by no other means than their popularity, do demonstrate the increasing recognition of the importance of long-term future-oriented planning. However, they also show us how important it is to critically evaluate any information that is intended to inform policy-making processes.
Gardiner, B. (April 24, 2007). Does Moore’s Law Help or Hinder the PC Industry? Extremetech.com. Retrieved August 29, 2010.
van Lente, H. & Rip, A. (1998). Expectations in technological developments: An example of prospective structures to be filled in by agency. In, C. Disco & B. v.d. Meulen (Eds.) Getting new technologies together: Studies in making sociotechnological order. Berlin: de Gruyter. Available on Google Books