Soapbox Post

I write this during the cloudiest New England June in decades. Boston has seen more gray skies than any year since 1903, and average temperatures have dipped 13 degrees below what the Farmer’s Almanac predicted. Fortunately, there are encouraging signs. The Weather Channel forecasts that the two-week gloom will brighten to a partly cloudy Sunday with a merciful 30% chance of precipitation. New Englanders’ hearts are lifting at the news, but, however welcome the sun, what we really want to know from weather forecasts is when to bring an umbrella or, better still, brace for the next nor’easter.

Forecasts can be useful tools, but we still need to remember to bring the umbrella. Recalling Hurricane Katrina’s humbling lesson, forecasts alone cannot avert a tempestuous future. Looking beyond the next hurricane, we confront a shifting and potentially dangerous world, where technological developments will be key in defining who we are, what problems we face, and what solutions we use to face them. Technological forecasts promise a window onto these developments.

One might then ask, “Is forecasting technology really like forecasting the weather?”

During a long flight last week I listened to a Science and Society Podcast that optimistically forecast our ascent into the technological sublime. William Halal, author of Technology’s Promise and leader of TechCast, a think tank charged with “Tracking the technology revolution,” told me to expect a cure for cancer by 2023, the ability to grow organs that are genetically identical to their recipient by 2026, and, just nine short years later, a worldwide life expectancy of 100 years by 2035. TechCast’s rigorous expert-based methodology comes with quantitative confidence levels for each of these forecasts—63%, 60%, and 64% to be precise. I marvel over these prospects, and, if I were a smart company, could imagine taking away strategic advice to make a tidy profit.

How should someone interpret a 72% chance of climate control by 2015? Is that like the weekend’s 70% chance of sunny skies? One way to address this question is to refine what we mean by ‘technology’. There are two modern day usages of the word. One is the package of plastic and metal that is an iPod, Kindle, Tesla Roadster, or what have you: Technology as an isolated object or, more generally, technique. Let’s call it little ‘t’ technology. Another, broader meaning of technology is the omnipresent if somewhat nebulous network of productive technologies within which we are immersed (indeed produced) and cannot escape: Big ‘T’ Technology as the system or modern form of life.

Techcasts’ technological forecasts are of the former, little ‘t’ kind. The great majority of its 70 categories focus on hardware like maglev trains and smart phones or software like artificial intelligence or online publishing. Forecasting technology of this type strikes two notes of caution.

First, making a fetish of technology means seeking out the big, exciting breakthroughs. Although TechCast says it does not make predictions, the difference between forecast and prediction dissolves when a roster of 100 experts work through a rigorous Delphi methodology in an attempt to produce an accurate, scientific product wreathed in quantitative confidence levels. The goal for this type of forecast is about moving the unknown to the known, burning the fog from future objects and moving them into the shiny bin of expectation, due date and all. This kind of forecast can be interesting, even useful. There is a danger, however. If we pay too much attention to reducing uncertainties we are more likely to be surprised by the equally inevitable surprises. These no doubt include the individual technologies—both fantastic and banal—that slip by unforeseen, but also the interaction of those technologies to produce Technology with all of its political, social, and cultural ramifications. Experts in technology may exist (though even here the reach of their flashlight must remain unknowable), but there can never be experts in Technology.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, Technology (and therefore technology) is itself politically, socially, and culturally laden. Cloud seeding and climate change aside, humans don’t choose the weather. But they do choose what technologies to produce and pursue. To say that timing the technically inevitable is best handled by experts is not only to downplay the difficulties of that endeavor mentioned above but also to move them out of public debate where they belong. If the technology revolution deserves the title, might not we learn something from the revolutions of 1776 or 1789, or the largely undemocratic industrial transformations of the 19th and 20th centuries? Ironically, the more clearly experts see the future, the more politicized that future is wont to become.

Enthusiasts and profiteers might be satisfied with forecasting technology like we forecast the weather, but forecasts needn’t be closed, expert-driven exercises aimed at driving away uncertainties. Rather than trying to pin down the arrival of new technologies, for example, the Institute for the Future’s Ten-Year Forecast Program “anticipates discontinuities and emerging dilemmas” that “demand new ways of thinking about complex problems.”  Moreover, the Ten-Year Forecast recently opened itself to Superstruct, “the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game.”  The idea behind the game was to open public dialog onto the world of 2019. Six-thousand collaborators signed up to construct manifold futures far too big to be the domain of experts alone. Let’s forecast to be sure but as Superstruct imagines, let’s not just envision the future, let’s invent it.

About the Author:  Chad Monfreda is a Ph.D. student in ASU’s School of Life Sciences and a CSPO research assistant.