If there's a common trope about "futurism," it's that it gets everything wrong.

From jetpacks to vacations on the Moon, any discussion of futurism in broader culture very quickly turns into a listing of the various crazy things that "futurists" (whether or not they'd call themselves that) have said over the past century. Sometimes it's an easy one-off article, sometimes it's an entire book
or blog devoted the topic. Done well, it's a kind of indulgent ridicule: those futurists sure are whacky, but charmingly whacky.

Anyone who has read my stuff will know that I'm not really fond of being called a "futurist," although it's the most widely-recognized name for what I do. I don't make predictions, and I don't talk in certainties; I'm all about trying to illuminate surprising implications of present-day processes. I don't expect that the scenarios I offer will be right, but I do want them to be usefully provocative.

But that doesn't mean that I'm irritated by the focus on futurists being wrong (although I will admit to being tired of the "jetpack" trope; can't we come up with another stereotyped prediction?). I wrote a piece awhile back about "legacy futures," and pay close attention to the responsibility foresight professionals have to acknowledging when they get things wrong.

So when the term "forensic futurism" showed up today (see the extended entry for how & why), it hit me as something both useful and meaningful.

It's not enough simply to point and ridicule about whacky futurists. Those of us in the discipline really need to examine why serious forecasts can turn out to be terribly wrong. This takes two related forms:

A new volume on the evolving role of digital reputation, The Reputation Society: How Online Opinions Are Reshaping the Offline World is now out (also in Kindle format). Edited by my former Worldchanging colleague Hassan Masum (along with his colleague at the University of Waterloo, Mark Tovey), The Reputation Society includes essays by a wide array of writers, including Craig Newmark, Cory Doctorow, Alex Steffen, and me. My contribution, the cleverly-titled "The Future of Reputation Networks," is a set of scenarios of how online reputation systems might evolve over the next 10-20 years.

I use a classic two-dynamic scenario structure (whether the reputation networks are broad or narrow, and whether the reputation scores are directly assigned by users or "emergent"), resulting in four fairly different worlds.

In the extended entry you'll find one of the four scenarios, "Augmented Relationships."

Continue reading "Scenarios of Ill Repute" »

I've been mulling something of late, and it hasn't left me in a tremendously good mood.

Take a look at these two sets of graphs:

The first one is from the US Energy Information Administration, a group within the US Department of Energy tasked with coming up with independent statistics and analysis on US and world energy use. This chart is from the "International Energy Outlook 2011" report, released last September. It shows the breakdown of fuels used to generate electricity, given fairly conservative projections of growth and changing energy mix.

It shows that, by 2025 -- a little over 10 years from now -- coal will provide 10,200 terawatt-hours (TWh) out of a total of 28,700 TWh produced around the world, annually. By 2035, it's up to 12,900 TWh out of 35,200 TWh.

The second graph is from an article by David Roberts in Grist last year, "The Brutal Logic of Climate Change." Based on work done by leading energy/climate researcher Kevin Anderson (former head of the UK's Tyndall Energy Program), it shows how soon we as a planet need to start reducing carbon emissions, and how rapidly they need to decline given different "peak emissions" points. That's to avoid a 2 degree C increase in global temperatures, now understood to be a potentially catastrophic level of warming.

Here, we see that if we have peak emissions of around 65 gigatons of CO₂ equivalent in 2025, we have to be down to under 20 GtCO₂e by roughly 2035, and to zero GtCO₂ shortly thereafter. In energy terms, we'd have to go from this:

to this:

Basically, we have to replace over 21,000 TWh of electricity generation from coal and natural gas (yes, natural gas is less-harmful than coal, but still has a greenhouse impact) with an equivalent amount from some mix of renewable, hydro, and nuclear. And do it in 10 years.

Except it will have to be more than that, at least another 15,000 TWh more, because we'll have to replace all of the gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles on the roads around the world with alternative forms of transportation, all of which has to be electric (or human/animal-powered). And also add however much new power is required to run the various production lines day and night to make all of the needed photovoltaics, wind turbines, electric buses, and such.

For comparison, the world added... 15 TWh in solar in 2010.

Set aside issues of politics and economics, and simply look at raw logistics: is it even possible to undertake that kind of shift in 10 years?

As the second set of graphs above suggests, if we start before a 2025 peak, we'll have somewhat less carbon-based energy production we'd have to replace, and somewhat more time in which to do it. Not much, though -- even peaking in 2015 only pushes the deadline(!) out to 2050, if we're lucky (the red & blue lines in the graphs show alternative scenarios from the IPCC, none of which are very pleasant).

But given the current global political environment, it's difficult to imagine a real agreement to eliminate carbon emissions, taken seriously by all parties, showing up before the end of this decade.

So here are our three scenarios:

1) We manage to get a real global agreement in place within the next five-eight years, and spend the subsequent 25 or so years undertaking the largest industrial transformation imaginable. Politically implausible.

2) We don't get a real global agreement in place before 2025, and have to cut emissions by 10% per year (as Roberts notes, the biggest drop we've seen is 5% after the USSR's economy collapsed). Physically implausible.

3) Neither of those happen, and we start to see truly awful impacts, mostly in the developing world at first, all of which make the world politically more hostile and economically more fragile -- and make it more difficult to cut carbon emissions effectively.

This is why I think geoengineering is going to happen. Desperate people do desperate things, and when you hear sober scientists say things like population "carrying capacity estimates [are] below 1 billion people" in a world of 4 degree warming, it's hard to argue convincingly that the uncertainty and risks around geoengineering are worse.

Anyone who thinks that geoengineering is a way to avoid cutting carbon is an idiot. Geoengineering is a tourniquet, a desperate measure to stop the bleeding when nothing else can work in time. If Anderson's analysis is accurate (and, if anything, it may be optimistic), it's hard to see how we can avoid taking these desperate measures.

After a few years of cajoling, the organizers of the BIL conference (in particular, one Simone Syed) have finally broken me. I will be speaking at BIL 2012, on Saturday March 3. BIL will take place at the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, and is open to the public. BIL runs in rough parallel to the (*much* more expensive and *much* more formal) TED conference; the pun at the heart of the conference's name ("BIL and TED" huh huh, huh huh) should give you a good reading of the original organizers' demographics and cultural background. But I digress.

I'll be giving a short talk -- 15-20 minutes seems to be the guideline -- on an as-yet undetermined topic. Here's where you, gentle reader, come in: what should I talk about?

There are some obvious choices, based on stuff I've written about or talked about at length before: geoengineering, human augmentation, ethics and robotics.

There are some choices based on stuff I've been mulling for awhile, topics that could either be a big smash or a big flop: social futures, the process of futurism/foresight thinking, what a successful sustainable future could look like.

Then there are the concepts I've written about or talked about, but are kind of outside my usual ideaspace: teratocracy, "we are as gods (but mostly like Loki)," the Fermi Paradox.

Again, it's only 15-20 minutes, so whatever I talk about will inevitably be more superficial or less detailed than one might wish.

Any suggestions?

Technology foresight has been stuck for the last 10-20 years; we need to be paying more attention to social-cultural futurism.

Foresight is not about making predictions. Rather, it's a tool for identifying dynamics of change, in part by exploring the implications of those changes. This is a point I've made often enough that even I'm sick of it -- but it remains an idea that not enough people understand. It's next to useless to say "X will happen;" it's much more valuable to say "here's why X could happen."

One of the trickier aspects of this formulation of foresight is the need to keep an eye on how the dynamics of change themselves are evolving. It's easy to get locked into a particular idiom of futurism, calling upon standard examples and well-known drivers as we work through what a turbulent decade or three might hold. It's comforting to be able to go back to the old standbys, confident that the audience can sing along.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the role technological change plays in futurism. The big picture visions of what the next 20-50 years could hold in terms of technologies haven't changed considerably since the beginning of the century, and (for the most part) since the early 1990s. Moreover, what we've seen in terms of real-world, actual technological change has been largely evolutionary, not revolutionary. Or, more to the point, the revolutions that have occurred have not been in the world of technologies.

Here's what I mean: if you were to grab a future-oriented text from the early part of the last decade, you'd find discussions of technological concepts that radical futurists and "hard science" science fiction writers were seeing as being on the horizon, developments like:

Cyberculture legend RU Sirius, editor at the Acceler8or webzine, interviewed Joel Garreau and myself about the Prevail project. (Short summary for those who missed the earlier post: Prevail is an Arizona State University-sponsored non-profit organization looking to build collaborative knowledge about transformative technologies and culture.) In a series of back-and-forth email among the three of us, we discussed everything from the logic of transhumanism to the power of the Occupy movement.

In one of his comments, Joel gives one of the best summaries of the Prevail perspective I've yet seen:

In other words, we can't wait for someone else to give us the future; we have to make it ourselves.

The title of this post is one of my comments from the interview.

It was a good conversation. Thank you to RU for inviting me along, and thank you to Joel for tolerating my presence!

Not literally, of course. But if we think about the future as something that infects us, we gain a new perspective on our world.

Human civilization has a weak immune system when it comes to futures. We can sometimes recognize when something big is imminent, and act. We rely on clumsy, inefficient tools like finance, religion, even "look before you leap" to make us look forward and consider our choices. So more often than not, we're taken by surprise, shocked when something big happens "out of the blue." We haven't prepared for big changes. Our immune system needs to be strengthened. But how do we do something like that? (I suspect you know the answer.)

First, a digression: a biological immune system works by encountering a pathogen, then generating antibodies to fight that pathogen. The body now recognizes that pathogen, so if it's encountered again, the body is ready to fight it off. That's roughly how it all works. Now, some pathogens can be deadly, and getting infected the first time doesn't help the immune system if you're dead! But there's a trick. We figured out that infecting the body with a weakened form of a pathogen still triggers the body's immune response, generating antibodies. A vaccination makes the body sensitive to the appearance of a pathogen, and ready to fight--even if you never actually encounter that bug!

In my view, futurism ("strategic foresight," "scenario planning") is a vaccination for our civilization's immune system. It strengthens us. By introducing us to different possible futures, we become sensitive to those potential outcomes, and able to recognize their early signs. We can think about how we would respond to different futures, and argue about what would be desirable *before* it happens... if it happens. That "if" is important. Most of the forecast futures *won't* happen, and even the "real" future won't look exactly like our scenarios. It will have bits and pieces from multiple forecast futures, and some items that we didn't catch. We'll still be surprised by some things.

But it turns out that planning for a set of different possible futures is a good way to prepare, even if the real future is different. There's usually enough overlap, enough "economies of scope" allowing plans and solutions built for one issue to be effective for another. And even when reality takes us by surprise, the very act of thinking about, preparing for different futures gives us a better perspective. We're more attuned to how seemingly unrelated factors can combine, leading to novel outcomes. We're sensitive to the power of contingency. Diversity of ideas strengthens us; we're more flexible and adaptive. We can't let ourselves get trapped by thinking about just one future.

Sadly, many of our world's business, government, and cultural leaders see thinking about the future as silly, or unprofitable, or dangerous. Forecasts that violate dogma or ideology are ignored. Scenarios that demand big changes to head off disaster are rejected as "impossible." Our civilization's body is rejecting its own immune system. We're making ourselves vulnerable because we don't like what we see. But as Bruce Sterling said, "The future is a process, not a destination." We can change this. We have to act to build the future that we want.

On Monday, December 12, I'll be doing a session of Swedish Twitter University.

The concept is that I will prepare 25 tweets, each an individual thought (so not broken up over multiple entries), on my topic. There's an associated hashtag (in my case, it will be #STU06), and in between posts I'll be answering questions that come up from those following the "class."

It's actually a cool idea, one that takes advantage of the Twitter format in a way that isn't simply trying to reproduce another medium. It pushes the "instructor" to be pithy and concise, and to pare concepts down to their basics.

Previous Swedish Twitter University classes include Rachel Armstrong's "Beyond Sustainability," Natalio Kasnogor's "To Boldly Go: Computer Science's Quest to Make Living Matter Algorithms-Friendly," and Jonas Hannestad's "Nature As Technology: Strategies for Nano-Scale, DNA-Based Communication." Pretty heady stuff.

The class starts at 8pm GMT/12 noon PST (my time). Here's the key info: