FUTURES- POSSIBLE, PROBABLE

FUTURES- POSSIBLE..PROBABLE
DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING?


“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.” — R D Laing If there’s one thing that separates humans from other creatures on Earth it’s foresight: the potential to proactively anticipate what might be, and act a ccordingly. Yet, caught up as we are in our daily chore of busying out an existence that’s more often than not fuelled by mechanised rites of passage and tunnel vision, most of us hardly have the time to think of anything but the present. In fact, such is the nature of the continuously predatory bustle of living that even reflecting on the past is sometimes an indulgence in overtime. In comparison, contemplating the future is a downright luxury. Yet, surprising as it seems, the future is what the present is all about and every need, plan, strategy and procedure is geared only for that one inescapable eventuality which will ultimately overtake us. That’s because contrary to Sidney Sheldon, tomorrow always comes and rarely does it catch us prepared. Which is a shame, for if it did, we’d be that much more informed, equipped and adapted to deal with it. Fortunately there is now a nascent but rapidly expanding branch of learning which can prepare us for that great and inviting unknown that always lies ahead and a lot of us can be guided to see the advantages of extrapolating from what is taking place today and pooling that data for a near-foreseeable tomorrow. For the truth is, the future is a venture which blind animal evolution never charted but which evolved human beings have to seriously believe in if they are to become denizens of another day down the line too. It’s called futurology, or futuristics, which since the early 1950s has evolved from a nearly random and haphazard forecast-based approach used mainly for strategic defence and fiscal planning to a full-fledged academic discipline with a focussed methodology. Today, there are several organisations all over the world that are dedicated to a systematic approach to studying the future and several reputable institutes and universities (including some in India) offer courses in futuristics at the postgraduate and doctoral levels. Futurology is a broad field of inquiry that explores and represents what the present could become from a multiple interdisciplinary perspective including inputs from economics, sociology, geography, history, engineering, mathematics, psychology, technology, tourism, physics, biology, astronomy and theology. Practitioners of the discipline who previously concentrated mostly on extrapolating from present trends to predict future scenarios are now beginning to examine whole systems instead, along with the uncertainties and seedings built into them. This helps to better visualise the possible, probable, preferable and wild-card futures — the so-called “four P’s and a W” model of futurology. A “possible future” of course is a non-starter for the simple reason that in a near infinite universe with near eternal time around anything logically consistent that can happen will evidently happen. Everybody knows that and astrologers and others of that ilk capitalise hugely on it. So do gamblers who wager of the possibility of winning. A “probable future” on the other hand makes better sense since this is where the study of whole systems leads to predictions that are more realistic and reliable. Alvin Toffler was perhaps one of the first to employ the methodology when he described the three types of societies based of waves that clearly carried the seeds of a subsequent wave. First there was the huntergatherer culture which made way for an agrarian society that then led to the industrial revolution and which, in turn, nurtured post-industrial nation states. Probable futures is also what drives economies and societies today by examining meta-megatrends that extend over multiple generations such as rate of population growth and climate change. Which is how we know global warming and ecosystem damage is a distinct prospect in the decades to come. Many business gurus and science fiction writers too fall in this category of futurism. For instance, the business futurist, Frank Feather who famously coined the prescient phrase “Thinking Globally, Acting Locally” way back in 1979 and Arthur C Clarke who correctly predicted that the whole planet would one day be interconnected via a global system of orbiting telecommunications satellites. Interestingly the TV series Star Trek has also been responsible for unintentionally spinning off a huge potential of probable futures which scientists are only now beginning to take seriously. One of them — matter transfer (as in “Beam me up Scotty”) — is a physics reality today, albeit at the atomic level at present. The most important paradigm shift in futurology, however, has been the move towards studying the “preferable future”. It’s different from a predicted future because a preferred future is a future we desire to achieve whereas a predicted future is one which experts predict. For example, it’s all very well to forecast that with the sophistication and rise in high resolution satellite surveillance, street level photomapping, intimate social networking sites and shared personal databases, individual privacy will soon be a thing of the past — but is that what we want? Or that the heat-sink effect is sure to melt all the Arctic ice one day and flood coastal cities all over the northern hemisphere. Is that a future we actually desire? Obviously not, and this is where futuristics is beginning to play a pivotal role using a powerful new tool called “backcasting”. It’s a process where futurologists start by defining a desirable future and then work backwards to identify policies and programmes that will connect the future to the present. The fundamental question backcasting asks is, “If we want to attain a certain goal, what actions must be taken to get there?” In other words, it’s a method in which the future desired conditions are envisioned and steps are then defined to attain those conditions, rather than taking steps that are merely a continuation of present methods extrapolated into the future. Because this, as we have seen in many cases, simply gets us nowhere in a hurry. Finally there’s the “wildcard”, the W after the four P’s. Wildcard events are defined as “low probability high impact events that, were they to occur, would severely impact the human condition.” They’re generally catastrophic one-off occurrences such as a total stock market collapse, global pandemic or an asteroid impact, yet often a series of small intensity wildcards can also have a cascading effect on the same system. True, scientists are aware of near-Earth asteroids which can crash into us but the chances of that happening in the near future is extremely remote. However, futurologists who factor wildcards in remind us that knowing an event is unlikely to happen doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a mechanism in place to deal with it if it does. After all who wants to go the way the dinosaurs did? In our long history we’ve invented so many things. From wheels to washing machines, agriculture to antiseptics, cooked food to compact disks, dugout boats to drive-in theatres, spears to space ships...and so much more stuff in between that are all in the past now. It’s about time we got around to inventing the future. It can only come back to us as a present.
MUKUL SHARMA TOICREST 12N1111