Why is the future absurd?

[nancylebov]

A comment I posted at Overcoming Bias.

Part of why the future looks absurd is that people want novelty--not absolute novelty and not all the time, but a lot of smart and weird people are working on making changes, some of which will catch on. A futurist isn't going to be smart and weird enough to predict all the possible changes being offered or which ones will have a long term effect.

It's not just that technological change builds on itself, so does social change. I don't think it was completely obvious that the civil rights movement would contribute to gay marriage becoming a serious political issue.

No matter how hard you try, you are of your time. You can expand the range of your imagination, but the future outnumbers you.

I'm still working on the question of why the future isn't just unpredictable, it's absurd. Maybe there's something about human cultures which requires limiting both what people do and what people can imagine *anyone* doing to a small part of the range of possibilities.

Comments

[zenlizard]

I always thought the future looked absurd because people in general are absurd.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

As I see it two things went into the big change which make it hard to predict what will happen next. The big thing that caused things to change, in my opinion, is a technological one. This was not the sole cause, but it enabled all the other ones. Increasing knowledge of inheritance made it possible to conceive that homosexuality was inborn rather than a moral failing. There has been much speculation about this through the centuries, but before inheritance was better understood the ideas had little chance of catching on. If the scientific knowledge had come later then I think we would be talking about some other rights movement inspiring the gay rights movement and the early bits of it would have been crushed as the earlier gay rights movements in places like Germany were wiped out.

So what is next? Well if we could predict what would be discovered next about human psychology and mental chemistry we could probably predict that. It could be that some person will do a careful study of the mental health of poly people and find that the downsides are cultural rather than inherent to the living arrangement. Or it could be that the seeming thrust of science currently will lead to certain animals having something like human rights on the basis of their mental capacity and emotions being to similar to humans. But we do not yet know where science will go.

Though right now I'm terribly interested in how mental pain is being discovered to be extremely similar to physical pain. That will probably have profound moral/social implications.

[avram]

Or if it had been discovered earlier, doctors would have considered homosexuality a genetic disorder instead of a psychological disorder, as it was up till the '70s.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

1) Technology is used for unintended purposes. Sometimes these are minor: using car engines and dishwashers for cooking, for example. Others are major: business use of computers.

2) People mistake cycles for trends. "Yes, every bull market in history has fallen. But this one won't because...."

3) People look at the wrong indicators. Which is how futurists and sf writers confidently predicted a long life for the Soviet Union.

4) People don't notice things have changed. In the 1950s, Arthur C. Clarke wrote stories in which England was still a major power on Earth and also one in space. England was no longer a major power. (Oh yes -- noticing the other parts of the United Kingdom is for the most part new.)

5) People look in the wrong places for similarities. The USSR's planners figured they could use the same strategy which had worked in Eastern Europe: control the cities, and the countryside will follow. The people who planned US invasion of Iraq looked for inspiration at the US successes in Western Europe. It would have been more realistic to look at the results of US interventions in less-developed parts of the Americas such as Haiti. (Cuba is about the nearest thing to a success story....)

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

One thing that science fiction has proved over and over again is that the future is not "predictable," as in, famously, nobody predicting the microcomputer revolution or teh Interwebs.

But one thing that has occurred to me in recent years is that, even if someone had been able to predict these two technologies, they would not have been able to predict the ways in which they heterodyne with other social changes. It is, at least theoretically, possible to imagine the effect of one technology -- a number of Analog writers were startlingly accurate on the nuclear weapons standoff that became the Cold War, before anybody had exploded even one atom bomb. But nobody predicted the effect the bomb would have on youth culture in the '60s.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Mmmm. Need to clarify that: some writers had predicted the rise of youth culture. But nobody had put it together with bomb-paranoia to get the political flavor of '60s youth culture.