Tech

History predicting the future


The future has a History. The good news is that it’s one of those things we can all learn from; The bad news is that we very rarely do. That’s because the most obvious lesson from future history is that knowing the future is not necessarily very helpful. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying.

Take The famous prophecy of Peter Turchin for 2020. In 2010, he developed a quantitative analysis of history, called climatology, that allowed him to predict that the West would experience political turmoil a decade later. Unfortunately, no one has been able to act on that prophecy to prevent damage to American democracy. And of course, if they did, Turchin’s prediction would be relegated to the ranks of future losers. This situation is not an aberration.

Rulers from Mesopotamia to Manhattan sought knowledge of the future to gain strategic advantages – but again and again they failed to interpret it correctly, or they did not grasp it. captures the political motives or speculative limitations of its creators. More often than not, they also choose to ignore futures that force them to face uncomfortable truths. Even the technological innovations of the 21st century have not changed these fundamental problems – the output of computer programs is, after all, only as accurate as their input.

There is an assumption that the more scientific the prediction approach, the more accurate the forecast. But this belief causes more problems than it solves, especially since it often ignores or excludes the living diversity of human experience. Despite the promise of smarter and more accurate technology, there is little reason to think that an increased implementation of AI in forecasting will make forecasting more useful than is already available in the past. throughout human history.

Everyone it’s been a long time was trying to learn more about the shape of things that were about to happen. These efforts, although aimed at the same goal, have differed over time and space in a number of significant ways, the most obvious of which is methodology — that is, How predictions have been made and interpreted. Since the earliest civilizations, the most important distinction in this practice has been between individuals with an intrinsic gift or ability to predict the future and the systems that provide the rules for calculating the future. . For example, the predictions of seers, magicians, and seers depend on these individuals’ ability to access other dimensions of existence and receive divine inspiration. However, divination strategies such as astrology, divination, algebra, and divination depend on the practitioner’s proficiency with a complex theoretical (and sometimes computationally) rule-based system. high school) and the ability to interpret and apply it to specific cases. The interpretation of dreams or the practice of necromancy may lie somewhere between these two extremes, partly depending on innate ability, partly on acquired expertise. And there are plenty of examples, past and present, involving both strategies for predicting the future. Any internet search for “dream interpretation” or “horoscope calculation” will get millions of hits.

Over the last century, technology has legitimized the second approach, as developments in IT (predicted, at least to some extent, according to Moore’s law) provide a variety of tools and systems. more robust system for forecasting. In the 1940s, the MONIAC ​​analog computer had to use actual colored water tanks and pipes to model the UK economy. By the 1970s, the Club of Rome could turn to World3 computer simulations to model the flow of energy through natural and human systems through key variables such as industrialization, environmental loss, and climate change. Population growth. Its report, Limits to growth, became a bestseller, despite the constant criticism it received about the assumptions at the core of the model and the quality of the data fed into it.

At the same time, instead of relying on technological advancements, other forecasters have turned to a community sourcing strategy that predicts the future. For instance, public and private polling relies on one very simple thing – asking people what they plan to do or what they think will happen. It then requires careful interpretation, whether based on quantitative analysis (such as a poll of voter intent) or qualitative (such as the Rand Corporation DELPHI technique). The second strategy exploits the wisdom of specific crowds. Bringing together a group of experts to discuss a certain topic, that thinking is likely to be more accurate than an individual prognosis.

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