IdeaFestival

Wild Cards and Black Swans: How to get the future right and the past wrong

The Long Now Foundation held a couple of public lectures recently on how we get the future right and the past wrong.

LIFT blogger and digital archaeologist Nicolas Nova points out Paul Saffo's January Long Now presentation on being a better futurist.

What makes forecasting hard, according to Saffo, isn't predicting the outcome, but accurately mapping the edges of what might happen. Since change is linear - we can't take one event and extrapolate into the future - what might happen must sometimes be imagined. Saffo:

Science fiction is brilliant at this, and often predictive, because it plants idea bombs in teenagers which they make real 15 years later.

The Long Now Foundation links to a helpful Harvard Business Review piece authored by Saffo that describes "six rules for effective forecasting." An executive summary of that article is here.

Financial analyst Nassim Taleb, who will be at the IdeaFestival in September, followed Saffo in February and discussed "retrocasting" - essentially, how we get the future wrong by misjudging the past. "Black Swans", those history making events that sail into the present, Taleb explained, are often "wrongly retro-predicted. We pretend we know why the big event happened, and so entrench our inability to deal with the next world-changing improbable event." I liked this thought:

We compute probability from the success of the survivors instead of paying attention to what didn't happen, but might have.

There are two places whence random things occur, according to Taleb. They are "Mediocristan," which is a realm of random events dominated by the average, and "Extremistan," where spectacular successes and the long tail dominate. Taleb:

You can say there will be a few monsters and lots of midgets and the world will be changed by the monsters, and that’s all you can say.

According to the blog entry for the event, Benoit Mandelbrot convinced Taleb that energy powers Mediocristan, while the main dynamic of Extremistan involves the uncertainty of information. Anything social, anything that involves the brilliance and bane of language, anything you might read on IFblog, hails from Extremistan.

Audio, video and blog entries from the Saffo and Taleb Long Now seminars may be found here.

Thanks Nicolas for the pointer!

Wayne

Nassim Taleb, Paul Saffo

Stars dim for Arthur C. Clarke

In an essay published today in the New York Times, science writer Dennis Overbye reflects on a life - his life - guided in part by the visionary science fiction of the late Arthur C. Clarke.

I’ve lived in Clarke’s universe ever since I was in eighth grade and a classmate slipped me a paperback edition of Clarke’s 'Reach for Tomorrow,' a collection of short stories. Until that point my biggest ambition was to play second base for the New York Yankees.

But here is the heart of the essay:

In his short story 'The Nine Billion Names of God,' published in 1953, Clarke wrote of a pair of computer programmers sent to a remote monastery in Tibet to help the monks there use a computer to compile a list of all the names of God. Once the list was complete, the monks believed, human and cosmic destiny would be fulfilled and the world would end.

The programmers are fleeing the mountain, hoping to escape the monks’ wrath when the program finishes and the world is still there, when one of them looks up.

'Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.'

That was a typical Clarke ending, and it seemed only natural upon his death that nature might want to reciprocate.

And as Overbye points out, it did. Having traveled a colossal distance, on the morning of his death the remnants a gamma-ray burst lit up an area of the night sky in the region of the constellation Boötes before dimming again. Fitting.

Wayne

Arthur C. Clarke

"Here comes everybody"

What happens to culture when everything that can be known is known?

The experience design blog Putting People First has posted news about one of my favorite social technologists, Clay Shirky, who was one of the earliest people to seriously study ubiquitous information, and who is out with a new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.

A Guardian blogger has this to say about the Shirky.

And a quick look around turned up a video of him speaking to the New American Foundation. In the clip, Shirky uses three real life examples to go inside the dynamics of groupless group activity. I particularly like his suggestion that "the Internet is not an improvement to society, but a challenge to it."

You'll need to go elsewhere for easy and comforting rhetoric. Shirky is no cyber-utopian.

In an earlier treatment of the issues involved, Robert Frenay has called this state of affairs "feedback culture." And what makes it so interesting is that far from simply a study of technology, useful concepts have and will continue to be borrowed from the arts, anthropology, economics, biology, and physics.

When everything that can be known, is known, a description of what that means must come from everyone.

Wayne

Clay Shirky

What kind of job title would you give a futurist?

Unsatisfied with his current job title, worldchanging cofounder and research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, Jamais Cascio wonders what should go on his business card. "Futurist?" "Scenarist?" "Foresight engineer?" "Tomorrow Scout?"

Wayne

Wikipedia: futurist

"Tipping Point" toppled?

Malcom Gladwell's idea that certain influential people can be trend makers has come under fire from Duncan Watts, a network theorist, in a recent issue of Fast Company.

In the past few years, Watts--a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo--has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random.  Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure....

Actually, if you believe Watts, the world isn't just complex--it's practically anarchic.

Influential people can, of course, help a trend along. Watt's point is that they cannot by themselves will a trend into existence.

Part of the reason is that we live together in an increasingly interconnected world. Reading the article, I realized that Watts was the author of a New York Times article that I blogged about last spring. It described a music download experiment that demonstrated that given our preferences and the knowledge of the preferences of others, predicting what music would become the most popular was a practical impossibility. Given constant feedback, huge variability takes hold in such systems.

While Gladwell also points out that the social environment must be ready to accept certain trends for them to "tip," the idea that certain tastemakers can cause that to occur is taken to task by Watts.

Watts is the author of the book, Six Degrees.

Wayne

Wikipedia: Cybernetics, Complex adaptive systems

Eight different worlds

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku talked about the multiverse at the last IdeaFestival. But in thanking a recent speaker at an Amsterdam event, Inspire! reminded me that we are already, in a sense, exploring many worlds:

Joseph Pine... talked 1 hour about the emerging Multiverse. The multiverse comprises of eight different (physical/virtual) worlds: Physical Reality, Augmented Reality, Augmented Virtuality, Virtual Worlds, Mirror Worlds (Google Earth), Warped Reality, Alternate Reality (Games/ARGs) and Physical Virtuality (3D printers).

Joseph Pine is the co-author of The Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business A Stage and Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want.

Wayne

Holography: all the world's a screen

Referencing a piece on All Things Considered, "A Glimpse of Things to Come in which futurist Syd Mead is featured, the blog Business Communicators of Second Life suggests that mainstream holography might be less than 15 years away.

Piffle.

Ray Bradbury's been there, done that.

Wayne
 

(Business) power to the people!

It's that time of the year. What will 2008 hold? BusinessWeek is out with its predications, suggesting that next year will be all about change. Innovation is the watchword. What interested me most was the suggestion that consumers will replace competitors as the chief focus of company strategy, something I touched on yesterday.

The reason? Consumers are "more knowledgeable and more powerful than competitors."

Wayne

No future for Futurology?

Suggesting that there may be no future for futurology, Nicolas Nova links to an Economist article, The World in 2008. Key thought from the Economist:

The word “futurologist” has more or less disappeared from the business and academic world, and with it the implication that there might be some established discipline called “futurology”. Futurologists prefer to call themselves “futurists”, and they have stopped claiming to predict what “will” happen.

According to the piece, futurists should think short term and possess a healthy regard for uncertainty.

Wayne

Phenomenal future

In the context of the future, what does "data" mean? Blogging briefly about a 2003 book on foresight research, Foundations for Futures Studies, Nicolas Nova makes a simple point that I really hadn't considered before.

The book attempts to lay groundwork for "future research epistemology," describe methodology and give an account of solid work in the field. If I understand the post, it's essentially an attempt to add rigor to foresight research. Nova wonders what "data" means since, obviously, the future is in important ways about what people think might happen.

The suggestion reminded me of work in phenomenology, which is a branch of philosophy dealing with human experience - of how things appear to us - and of those mysterious forces called the mind and will, which may or may not be mapped, and with which we summon what's yet to come. Phenomenology is cartography.

Wayne