On Predicting the Future

I am not sure whether the universe is deterministic, but it seems to be mostly determined by cause and effect, and I have never seen anything that did not appear to have a cause. If everything does have a cause, and we can determine all of the causes that are having effects on a time and place, then it should be possible to predict what will happen. In theory it is quite simple, but in practice it isn’t quite so easy.

I have read a fair amount of literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that tried to predict the future. I have also written some of my own imaginings of the future. While I can’t be sure about some of the more recent material, the old literature has been proven to be quite wrong. Now and then there is a detail that came out right, but the main points are all wrong. I will give H. G. Wells credit for trying so hard, and he got a few things right, but he was pushing a socialist, anti-business idea that I partly agree with, but he didn’t consider how things had gone in the past. Nor did he consider the possibility that the extant trends would change.

Karl Marx made similar mistakes in Das Kapital. It appears that he assumed that the trends that he was looking at would continue unchanged without the imposition of his ideas.

SPECIFIC PREDICTION

Prediction mathematical series: This is a place where prediction is possible over a short span. It isn’t reliable for a long time, but projections of stock averages from the complied data are possible, but when one takes the prediction too far the predictions become meaningless. This principle also applies to other kinds of predictions, such as technological developments and social trends.

SOCIAL TRENDS

If one takes a little while to consider the matter, then it is clear that humans have not changed in their basic nature as far back as there are records, and from earlier archeological records suggest that people were the same for a long time before that. So if you want to predict that humans will become completely generous and communitarian, then you almost certainly will be shown wrong by events over whatever time you choose to predict up to a half million years. I’m not saying that humans will never change, but apes are apes, and it doesn’t make much difference what they look like. Altruism is wonderful, but I come first.

We can predict social and political trends next week, and we can develop a reasonable guess of what might happen in a few months or even next year, but going forward twenty years all we can say with any confidence is that humans will still be humans. How they will act in reaction to specific situations is unknowable, and some of what we regard as essential now was considered unthinkable at some time or place in the past.

TECH

Technology is somewhat less perplexing, but barely more predictable. In Heinlein’s 1952 predictions there are a couple of real laughs: “A thousand miles an hour at $0.01 per mile will be commonplace” gave me a laugh, and it should have produced a laugh in 1952. “The cult of the phony in art will disappear. So-called "modern art" will be discussed only by psychiatrists.” This is a good joke now, and reactions will vary over time. Trying to predict the future of any fine art is entertaining, but he was completely right on “Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.”  

If you are going to try to predict the future, then look first at the past. Imagine yourself living in your country two hundred years ago or three hundred years ago. Then imagine yourself being transported two or three hundred years into the future to the present time. How much trouble would you have with understanding what was going on? Then take that thought experiment further by imagining yourself an equal distance in the future.  (And keep in mind whether you are trying to make a point about the present or you want to actually figure out what will happening the future.)

As an example, let us imagine what the typical lifespan of humans a thousand years from now. Just looking at trends in medical arts, we can be confident that some humans will have lifespans of several hundred years, but that will not be common to all people, because some people will be kept alive who will lack basic health, and they may have spread their genes, thus harming the gene pool. It is possible that gene therapy may develop to the point that a defective gene will be replaced in every cell, which would get defective genes out of the gene pool entirely, and this would lead to everyone having an extended lifespan. The past trend has been erratic, so using a mathematical trend wouldn’t work, and there are other matters that muddy the waters. For example, there may be a major pandemic that will kill off a large percent of the population, especially those more prone to a variety of diseases. One of the leaders in longevity studies (Aubrey de Grey) has predicted that the first person who will live to the ripe old age of one thousand is alive now. My prediction is based on extrapolation of medical arts, cleaning the gene pool through pandemic, and hope of r the best. I think that the average life expectancy at birth will be about one hundred years, and the life expectancy at age twenty-one will be between two and three hundred. That is a somewhat conservative prediction, and the actual average life expectancy at birth in the year 3013 might be unchanged from what it is at present or lower than that or even higher than my guess.

In a related guess I think that the world population will be somewhat less a thousand years from now in the range of three to five billion. I am hoping for a great pandemic that will get the population down under two billion, but there will be growth after that, Even without the pandemic, I don’t think that the present population is sustainable over the long run. A major disruption in food production would have devastating effects, and there are many possible disruptions.

I have convinced myself that predictions should be avoided, especially when they stretch over a long period. Consider how it is with weather [predictions: accuracy is no better than it was fifty years ago, because there are more variables than can be determined. It is possible to predict the weather for a few days, but weeks away – forget it, and no one would even think about predicting the weather in five hundred years.