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The Future: Good or Bad?

This is a PAST event. See "Meeting Notes" section for audio, video, documents and other information.

Original event date/time: Friday July 25th, 2008, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Now that the part of the brain responsible for optimism has been identified, it seems fair to ask, when we look into the future, are we really looking at the future, or are we looking at biases in our own brains?

Abstract:

Now that the part of the brain responsible for optimism has been identified, it seems fair to ask, when we look into the future, are we really looking at the future, or are we looking at biases in our own brains?

Optimism/pessimism is one such bias. One thing I've noticed, having been a "futurist" for a while, is that people tend to gravitate towards extremes -- so we get the wildly optimistic (Kurzweil) and the wildly pessimistic (James Howard Kunstler). Sometimes, a person's bias can be traced back to their life story -- people who have experienced a lot of success tend to be optimistic, people who have suffered and experienced a lot of failure tend to be pessimistic. I've heard if you ask a severely traumatized person what they will be doing in 5 years, they will say, "I'll probably be dead." Thankfully, this is rarely the case. But it shows you how people project their future by looking at their past. Ray Kurzweil has a history of tackling unbelievably difficult problems and succeeding -- he's invented reading machines for the blind, machines that compose music, and various other things. So his life history is one of solving difficult problems, with effort -- cause for optimism. He believes that human inventiveness can tackle things like aging and mortality. This is unlikely (but not necessarily impossible) -- that's why I consider Kurzweil an ultra-optimist.

Of course, sometimes there is no obvious reason why a person has the bias that they have. I don't know why James Howard Kunstler has a pessimistic bias. But I do know, if Kurzweil is right, Kunstler must be wrong, and vice-versa -- their visions of the future are mutually exclusive.

What other biases to we humans have, that might distort our perception of the future? It turns out, there are many. We'll discuss them all at the next future salon.

Along with the key question: suppose you want to be *correct*, rather than optimistic, pessimistic, or biased in any other way? What if you want to be objective and rational? What if you want to see the future as close as possible to the way it will actually be? And can an "extreme" viewpoint (good or bad) turn out to be correct?

The book to read, if you are the type of per son to read the "recommended" books, is Expert Political Judgement by Philip Tetlock. Mr. Tetlock started a research project in 1986 (which ran until 2003) where he recorded thousands of predictions of 284 experts -- and then actually checked to see who was right. And then he looked at their thinking styles, to see what actually works.

This is a past event.

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