Imagine for a second that you lived 4000 years ago, how difficult do you think it would be to forecast with some degree of certainty what the world would look like in 20 years? A fair bet would be that it would look very much like it did at the time of the forecast. If however you imagine yourself back in our time, it’s fair to say that such a 20-year forecast would be largely inaccurate. I think we all agree that forecasting has become more difficult and I pose that it just keeps getting worse. Why is this so?
I believe there are three driving forces to this. Firstly, the earth is finite; it has a fixed size, when population increase in a finite space, the distance between people decrease, and each person can reach more people. The direct effect of this is that there are almost no isolated pockets of people in the world, as opposed to 4000 years ago when there were almost only isolated pockets of people. This means that ripple effects of choices reach longer.
Secondly, the numbers of choices we are presented with are increasing, something that is reflected accurately in the movie Trainspotting: “Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television (…)” and so on. While most of our newfound choices are trivial in nature, such as what brand of cereal you want for breakfast, also the number choices that have severe effects are increasing.
This leads us to the third force, technology, which is more of an enabler of the second force. As technology gets more sophisticated, and more accessible, more people have access to items that they can use to affect the world in the direction they please. With more people, more choices and larger ramification of each choice, the equation that would accurately predict the future becomes immensely complex.
To illustrate this we can look at the incident at the WTC in 2001, how do the three forces affect this event? Firstly, the fact that people live closer (globalization) caused friction long before the bombing, as we all know, many people in the Arabic world were growing more hostile to western interference, while the west was growing more hostile to Arabic hostility, though one may put forth hundreds of arguments of race, religion, oil and so on, there can be little doubt that globalization and the shortening of distance played a crucial role. Secondly, not only were there a number of people with motivation to do something, there was a significant number of people with the possibility. Advents in travel and technology made it possible to get to the US, and the vast number of targets available to the terrorists made it impossible for the Americans, even if they knew that an attack was imminent, to predict where. The sets of choices of how and where to strike was so vast that prediction was nearly impossible.
The WTC bombing is but one example, if you compare the financial crisis of 1929 and 2008 you will find that the ripples of the latter traveled much further, faster. However the effects were less significant because more people had thought about how this could be handled, more choices were available. Also more people were in a position of power to induce a financial crisis, experts are still at it about what caused the crisis, was it a bubble? Was it the sub-prime market? Was it regulation? Or was it corrupt bankers? The fact that more people can willingly or unwillingly cause crises of various sorts, also leads to the inevitable fact that the future becomes more uncertain, because it’s not only determined by measurable events, but also by random choices made by people not on anyone’s radar.
The point here is that there are so many options, that however unlikely one isolated event is, it is extremely likely that several extremely unlikely events will occur. It’s not very likely that a specific fortune 500 company goes bankrupt in the next 20 years for example, but it’s very likely that at least one of them does. When there are several thousands of large events like this that will without a doubt happen, we can be certain that the changes in the next 20 years will be profound (so gambling on status quo is the bet with the worst odds), but since we don’t know which immense and unlikely changes will occur, just that some will, we have no way to know in which direction the world will shift. So we are left with the certainty that things will change, and the certainty that we don’t know in which way the world will change.
This also raises another concern. If the forces I have mentioned have driven our path to uncertainty, then we can expect the future to become even more uncertain in the future as these trends continue. Technology continues to evolve, the population to increase, and more people are getting the ability to make greater choices. So what will happen to our ability to predict the future? And what consequences will this have?
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