Will our future be dystopian? Credit: DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP via Getty Images
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In Alex Garland’s recent sci-fi TV series Devs, Silicon Valley engineers have built a quantum computer that they think proves determinism. It allows them to know the position of all the particles in the universe at any given point, and from there, project backwards and forwards in time, seeing into the past and making pinpoint-accurate forecasts about the future.
Garland’s protagonist, Lily Chan, isn’t impressed. “They’re having a tech nerd’s wettest dream,” she says at one point. “The one that reduces everything to nothing — nothing but code”. To them, “everything is unpackable and packable; reverse-engineerable; predictable”.
It would be a spoiler to tell you how it all ends up, but Chan is hardly alone in criticising the sometimes-Messianic pronouncements of tech gurus. Indeed, her lines might as well have been written by the entrepreneur and business writer Margaret Heffernan, whose book Uncharted provides a robust critique of what she calls our “addiction to prediction”.
Our fervent desire to know and chart the future — and our exaggerated view of our ability to do so — forces us, she says, into a straitjacket whenever some authoritative-sounding source makes a prediction: the future’s laid out, we know what’ll happen — it’s been forecast. Only by kicking this habit, she argues, “do we stop being spectators and become creative participants in our own future”.
That’s something of a lofty goal, but as we’ll see, the consequences of misunderstanding predictions can be far more immediate. In pandemics, it can end up killing thousands of people.
Heffernan does get to pandemic disease in the latter part of her book, but before that, she provides some cautionary tales that are useful to readers way beyond her targeted “business book” audience. Take, for instance, the 2013 prediction by researchers at the Oxford Martin School that “by 2035, 35% of jobs will have been taken by machines”. As Heffernan notes, this was an impossibly specific quantity: exactly this number of years in the future, exactly this percentage of jobs will be done by robots. When you think about it, such specificity is absurd, but it didn’t half grab the media’s attention, playing on people’s quite reasonable fears about the coming age of automation. The resulting media discussion, Heffernan says, “projected inevitability onto what was no more than a hypothesis”.
There are subtler manifestations of the prediction addiction. In science, for example, researchers — and I include myself in this — often deploy the word “predict” in a way that doesn’t comport with its everyday usage. Variable X predicts variable Y, they say, even though both were measured at exactly the same time. What they mean is that, if you didn’t know anything about Y, you would have some information about it if you knew X. But this “prediction” can be very weak: usually just “a bit better than chance” rather than “with a strong degree of accuracy”. By the time this translates to the public, often via hyped press releases, it’s frequently been imbued with a great deal more certainty than is warranted by the data.
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SubscribeAn ok article, until you contradicted yourself, and started down the rather stupid path of “predicting” what would have happened (cost 1000’s of lives!!!) IF we had done things differently.
Exactly how did you reach that conclusion?? Did you use a model? A guess? An inappropriate comparison to a different country? The phrasing is such that it sounds like a given, rather than the complete uninformed guess that it is.
You do not seem to get your own argument that predictions are difficult and uncertain and should only be used with care. Or did you just want to criticise government policy and back solved for an article to put in front of the criticism so you look less biased?
I’d certainly agree that we need to treat predictions with caution and recognise them for what they are. Economic forecasts are notoriously inaccurate and yet, whenever the OBR comes out with a new one, it gives rise to a noisy political debate about the alleged economic mismanagement by the Government in which the prediction is regarded as guaranteed to be 100% accurate. Madness.
Predictive models are only as good as their assumptions . Unfortunately it seems the Prime minister and close advisors were perhaps unaware of this when panicked by the highly dubious , non peer reviewed Imperial College model. Prof Ferguson is an attention seeker with a dismal record. His foot and mouth predictions caused a needless and hugely expensive catastrophe based on faulty assumptions. This behaviour has been rewarded with continuing research funding rather than been called to account and so he has been allowed to continue indulging himself.
That weekend of political panic will have economic consequences that will reverberate for a generation.
And all from a dodgy prediction – but surely the Government process that allowed him to contribute , given his appalling record , is massively culpable.
True enough, vis-a-vis Professor Ferguson. But which experts should we use to select our experts? (We know the one not to use now, at least)
Writer doesn’t seem to realise this, but he’s actually dealing with religion. Because what else is religion but an attempt to insert some certainty into an uncertain future? The priest says if you pray to his god, your prayers will be answered. Or, if you don’t abide by the rules of the religion, you will be damned & go to hell. People look for reassurance. Why they read horoscopes in papers. So rather than a god, they put their faith in the high priests of computer models. There’s little difference. Still mumbo-jumbo
It isn’t the same at all. Computer model predictions are statements about the future based on how things went in the past which is difficult given the variables involved. Religious predictions about the future are based on the knowledge of a being who is in control of the future who has deigned to reveal his plans to his creatures. If one has good reasons for positing the existence of such a being and the veracity of his revelation then trusting him when he says such and such will happen is perfectly reasonable.
An interesting article and another book for my towering To-Be-Read pile! I’ve long suspected predictions tell us more about the state of mind and general disposition of the predictor than anything else. For example, when economists predict whether and how fast an economy may recover after the Coronavirus they are really telling us whether they are optimists or pessimists.