How many times have you relied on a weather forecast only to find yourself woefully unprepared for what really happened? The same risk holds for predictions about future trends.
An article by Stuart Blackman in The Scientist says: “Ill-judged predictions and projections can be embarrassing at best and, at worst, damaging to the authority of science and science policy.”
It can sometimes feel as if cures for diseases are forever 10 years off, while nuclear fusion seems to have been 50 years away from practical reality for about half a century now.
Here is a table from the article:
It’s easy to be wrong when making complex forecasts. Too many variables—including those unforeseen by the predictor or anyone else—can enter into the equation and send actual events off into a completely different direction.
This doesn’t mean that scientists and others should stop issuing projections altogether; obviously there is value in making and monitoring such outlooks. But it does call for an attitude of humility and a recognition that numerous other possibilities are just as likely to occur as whatever the predictor is proposing.
In fact, the more specific a prediction gets, the more likely it is to be wrong. So when you hear someone say, for example, that the Singularity will occur by a certain given date, make sure you have your BS detector up and running.
Blackman offers a nice list of guidelines on “How to predict responsibly.” They include:
1. AVOID SIMPLE TIMELINES
2. LEARN FROM HISTORY
3. STATE THE CAVEATS
4. REMEMBER WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW
Read the whole article to get extended commentary about each item above.
So, what can we do? We need to know the weather, right? I mean, we can’t just walk outside wearing shorts in the middle of winter and say we didn’t know better.
The challenge, as always, is to sort out the reasonably plausible projections from those that are less likely to occur. That’s not an easy task, but if anticipating and prudently preparing for a potentially unstable future seems worth doing—and obviously it does, to us at the IEET—then it’s a job that must be tackled.
We here at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies cannot actually see into the future and know for sure what will happen if certain choices are made. Neither, of course, can anyone else. The best we can do is to study the past, keep abreast of ongoing research activities and relevant current events, create models (or “scenarios”) of various possible outcomes, and then try to convince those in positions of power and influence to adopt policies that seem most likely to shift results in a positive direction.
Some people enjoy speculating that a particular powerful technology will suddenly and immediately transform the world in such a way as to render moot all previous political considerations, but it seems to us that those ideas are exactly that: speculation. That scenario is no more certain than any other; clearly, it is worth exploring, but it would be a big mistake to make that the final word and forgo examination of other less millenarian but probably more likely outcomes.
Given that we live in a real world, not a science fiction world, where real governments and real companies make real decisions that affect real people—and knowing that we can’t say for sure when or if any spectacular new technology will turn everything upside down overnight—it is up to us to be engaged in current political debates and work out the best possible environments within which transformative technologies might emerge.
Mike Treder is the Managing Director of the IEET, and former Executive Director of the non-profit Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.