Technology foresight has been stuck for the last 10-20 years; we need to be paying more attention to social-cultural futurism.

Foresight is not about making predictions. Rather, it's a tool for identifying dynamics of change, in part by exploring the implications of those changes. This is a point I've made often enough that even I'm sick of it -- but it remains an idea that not enough people understand. It's next to useless to say "X will happen;" it's much more valuable to say "here's why X could happen."

One of the trickier aspects of this formulation of foresight is the need to keep an eye on how the dynamics of change themselves are evolving. It's easy to get locked into a particular idiom of futurism, calling upon standard examples and well-known drivers as we work through what a turbulent decade or three might hold. It's comforting to be able to go back to the old standbys, confident that the audience can sing along.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the role technological change plays in futurism. The big picture visions of what the next 20-50 years could hold in terms of technologies haven't changed considerably since the beginning of the century, and (for the most part) since the early 1990s. Moreover, what we've seen in terms of real-world, actual technological change has been largely evolutionary, not revolutionary. Or, more to the point, the revolutions that have occurred have not been in the world of technologies.

Here's what I mean: if you were to grab a future-oriented text from the early part of the last decade, you'd find discussions of technological concepts that radical futurists and "hard science" science fiction writers were seeing as being on the horizon, developments like:

Cyberculture legend RU Sirius, editor at the Acceler8or webzine, interviewed Joel Garreau and myself about the Prevail project. (Short summary for those who missed the earlier post: Prevail is an Arizona State University-sponsored non-profit organization looking to build collaborative knowledge about transformative technologies and culture.) In a series of back-and-forth email among the three of us, we discussed everything from the logic of transhumanism to the power of the Occupy movement.

In one of his comments, Joel gives one of the best summaries of the Prevail perspective I've yet seen:

The heart of Prevail is: perhaps there are two curves of change, not one. If our technological challenges are heading up on a curve, but our responses are more or less flat (like we’re waiting for House Judiciary to solve our problems), the species is clearly toast. The gap just keeps on getting wider and wider.

But suppose we are seeing an increase almost as rapid in our unexpected, bottom-up, flock-like social adaptations. Then you’d be looking at high-speed human-controlled co-evolution.

There are reasons for guarded optimism about this.

In other words, we can't wait for someone else to give us the future; we have to make it ourselves.

The title of this post is one of my comments from the interview.

It comes down to humanism.

One bit of snark I’ve used before is that transhumanists focus too much on the “trans” and not enough on the “humanist.” As I said earlier, I’m more adamant in my anti-Singularitarianism than in my anti-Transhumanism, but in both cases it’s not because I reject the notion that our technologies are changing rapidly. It’s because I firmly believe that it’s not a one-way process. Technologies change us, but we change the technologies, too. Technology is not an external force emerging from the very fabric of the universe (and, as you know, there are some Singularitypes out there who seriously believe that Moore’s Law is woven into the laws of nature); our technologies (plural, lower-case T) are cultural constructs. They are artifacts of our minds, our norms and values, our societies.

Our tools do not make us who we are. We make tools because of who we are.

It was a good conversation. Thank you to RU for inviting me along, and thank you to Joel for tolerating my presence!

Not literally, of course. But if we think about the future as something that infects us, we gain a new perspective on our world.

Human civilization has a weak immune system when it comes to futures. We can sometimes recognize when something big is imminent, and act. We rely on clumsy, inefficient tools like finance, religion, even "look before you leap" to make us look forward and consider our choices. So more often than not, we're taken by surprise, shocked when something big happens "out of the blue." We haven't prepared for big changes. Our immune system needs to be strengthened. But how do we do something like that? (I suspect you know the answer.)

First, a digression: a biological immune system works by encountering a pathogen, then generating antibodies to fight that pathogen. The body now recognizes that pathogen, so if it's encountered again, the body is ready to fight it off. That's roughly how it all works. Now, some pathogens can be deadly, and getting infected the first time doesn't help the immune system if you're dead! But there's a trick. We figured out that infecting the body with a weakened form of a pathogen still triggers the body's immune response, generating antibodies. A vaccination makes the body sensitive to the appearance of a pathogen, and ready to fight--even if you never actually encounter that bug!

In my view, futurism ("strategic foresight," "scenario planning") is a vaccination for our civilization's immune system. It strengthens us. By introducing us to different possible futures, we become sensitive to those potential outcomes, and able to recognize their early signs. We can think about how we would respond to different futures, and argue about what would be desirable *before* it happens... if it happens. That "if" is important. Most of the forecast futures *won't* happen, and even the "real" future won't look exactly like our scenarios. It will have bits and pieces from multiple forecast futures, and some items that we didn't catch. We'll still be surprised by some things.

But it turns out that planning for a set of different possible futures is a good way to prepare, even if the real future is different. There's usually enough overlap, enough "economies of scope" allowing plans and solutions built for one issue to be effective for another. And even when reality takes us by surprise, the very act of thinking about, preparing for different futures gives us a better perspective. We're more attuned to how seemingly unrelated factors can combine, leading to novel outcomes. We're sensitive to the power of contingency. Diversity of ideas strengthens us; we're more flexible and adaptive. We can't let ourselves get trapped by thinking about just one future.

Sadly, many of our world's business, government, and cultural leaders see thinking about the future as silly, or unprofitable, or dangerous. Forecasts that violate dogma or ideology are ignored. Scenarios that demand big changes to head off disaster are rejected as "impossible." Our civilization's body is rejecting its own immune system. We're making ourselves vulnerable because we don't like what we see. But as Bruce Sterling said, "The future is a process, not a destination." We can change this. We have to act to build the future that we want.

On Monday, December 12, I'll be doing a session of Swedish Twitter University.

#STU06 - Jamais Cascio:
“The Foresight Immune System”

If accurate predictions are impossible — and they are — why should we think about the future? In 25 tweets we’ll explore why foresight work remains important and what role it should play in our thinking about the world. Hint: it does for civilization what a vaccination does for our bodies…

The concept is that I will prepare 25 tweets, each an individual thought (so not broken up over multiple entries), on my topic. There's an associated hashtag (in my case, it will be #STU06), and in between posts I'll be answering questions that come up from those following the "class."

It's actually a cool idea, one that takes advantage of the Twitter format in a way that isn't simply trying to reproduce another medium. It pushes the "instructor" to be pithy and concise, and to pare concepts down to their basics.

Previous Swedish Twitter University classes include Rachel Armstrong's "Beyond Sustainability," Natalio Kasnogor's "To Boldly Go: Computer Science's Quest to Make Living Matter Algorithms-Friendly," and Jonas Hannestad's "Nature As Technology: Strategies for Nano-Scale, DNA-Based Communication." Pretty heady stuff.

The class starts at 8pm GMT/12 noon PST (my time). Here's the key info:

How can I attend an event?
You just open http://twitter.com/SvTwuni in your browser to follow the presentation. Then go to the http://twitter.com homepage in another browser window, and perform a Twitter-search for the associated hashtag (for example #STU01). Arrange the browser windows next to each other for maximum overview of the event. Everything will be updated in more or less realtime.

Or you can put the @SvTwuni-flow in one column and the associated hashtag-flow in another one next to it, if you got a Twitter-client like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.

Do I need a Twitter-account to attend an event?

No, not if you just want to lurk and not engage in any discussions… But that’s NOT recommended!

The following is my essay for Joel Garreau's Prevail Project.

I have in front of me a late 1960s advertisement from the Burroughs Corporation. It shows a sketch of a guy — in a snappy suit and crisp haircut — sitting at what one must assume is a Burroughs business computer. A large genie-like figure billows from the machine, and the caption reads “MAN plus a Computer equals a GIANT!”

I love this image, despite the outdated sexism. It’s a healthy reminder that the notion of computers making humans something supremely powerful (and distinctly no longer human) isn’t just an idea dreamt up in the heady days of the 1990s, as Moore’s Law seemed to be really taking off. It’s been woven into the fabric of our relationship with “thinking machines” for decades. While there may have been no Mad Men-era Singularitarians fantasizing about being uploaded into a B6500 mainframe, it was clear even then that there was something about these devices that went beyond mere tool. They were extensions not of our bodies, but of our minds.

Of course, anyone sitting down at a 1960s Burroughs business machine right now expecting to become a figurative “giant” is in for a surprise. It may be something of a cliché at this point to note that a cheap mobile phone has far more computing power than a mainframe of a generation or two ago, but it’s true. Yet instead of making us all “giants,” our information technologies played something of a trick: they made us more human. All of the things that humanize us — love, sex, despair, creativity, sociality, storytelling, art, outrage, humor, and on and on — have been strengthened, given new power and new reach by the march of technology, not discarded.

That’s not the conventional wisdom. Western intellectual culture is in the midst of a civil war between two superficially distinct viewpoints: a claim that transformative information technologies are set to sweep away human civilization, eliminating our humanity even if they don’t simply destroy us, versus a claim that transformative information technologies are set to sweep away human civilization and replace it (and eventually us) with something better. We’re on the verge of disaster or the verge of transcendence, and in both cases, the only way to hang onto a shred of our humanity is to disavow what we have made.

But these two ideas ultimately tell the same story: by positing these changes as massive forces beyond our control, they tell us that we have no say in the future of the world, that we may not even have the right to a say in the future of the world. We have no agency; we are hapless victims of techno-destiny. We have no responsibility for outcomes, have no influence on the ethical choices embodied by these tools. The only choice we might be given is whether or not to slam on the brakes and put a halt to technological development — and there’s no guarantee that the brakes will work. There’s no possible future other than loss of control or stagnation.

Such perspectives aren’t just wrong, they’re dangerous. They’re right to see that our information technologies are increasingly powerful — but because our tools are so powerful, the last thing we should do is abdicate our responsibility to shape them. When we give up, we’re simply opening the door to those who would use these powerful tools to manipulate us, or worse. But when we embrace our responsibility, we embrace the Prevail scenario.

To Prevail is to accept that our technological tools are changing how our humanity expresses itself, but not changing who we are. It is to know that such changes are choices we make, not destinies we submit to. It is to recognize that our technologies are manifestations of our culture and our politics, and embed the unconscious biases, hopes, and fears we all carry — and that this is something to make transparent and self-evident, not kept hidden. We can make far better choices about our futures when we have a clearer view of our present.

To Prevail is to see something subtle and important that both critics and cheerleaders of technological evolution often miss: our technologies will, as they always have, make us who we are.

Human plus a Computer equals a Human.

Joel Garreau has one of the most sensitive radars for big changes of anyone that I know. I first met him back at GBN, and I quickly came to realize that I should pay very close attention to whatever he's thinking about or working on -- and what he's working on now is definitely worth the time to check out.

The "Prevail Project" (named for one of the scenarios in his book Radical Evolution) at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University is an attempt to draw together people thinking about -- and building -- a livable human future, one that uses (but is not dominated by) transformative technologies.

Joel's statement in the press release sums up his perspective:

"Prevailproject.org will be a place for everybody from my mother to technologists inventing the future to grapple with some of the most pressing questions of our time: How are the genetics, robotics, information and nano revolutions changing human nature, and how can we shape our own futures, toward our own ends, rather than being the pawns of these explosively powerful technologies?” said Joel Garreau, the Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, and director of The Prevail Project: Wise Governance for Challenging Futures.

“The Prevail Project is a collaborative effort, worldwide, to see if we can help accelerate this social response to match or exceed the pace of technological change,” Garreau said. “The fate of human nature hangs in the balance.”

I'll set aside my resistance to the traditional "social response to technological change" model to celebrate the placement of this project in the Law School, and not as part of the school of engineering or some technical discipline. It's far too common to see these issues dominated by technologists (and technology-fetishists) with little understanding of law and culture; it's vital to get a more sophisticated understanding of society into the conversation.

As the Prevail Project kicks off its public unveiling, it has invited a set of writers to offer up their thoughts on what it means to "prevail" in a transformative future. Bruce Sterling's essay went up yesterday; mine went up today.

Just a quick update: after much complaining from people who wanted to comment but didn't like the authentication methods I had enabled, I've turned "anonymous" (i.e., enter an email address that doesn't get published) commenting back on. I'll have to filter more spam that way, but I'll persevere.

"We are as gods and might as well get good at it." -- Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968.

Stewart Brand's observation has simultaneously enchanted, terrified, and driven me ever since I first heard it (probably some 20-25 years after he wrote it). It's both an admonition (we're not very good at being gods) and encouragement (...but we could be!); Brand saw that our capabilities as humans (when using the tools devised by human minds) equalled or exceeded most of the capabilities of the gods of myth, and even those abilities not yet in our toolkit would likely be right over the horizon. Brand also saw that our sense of ourselves, and our responsibility to the world, remained firmly rooted in simple humanity.

"We have more power than we think we do," he seemed to be saying, "and we can't use it wisely until we acknowledge that fact."

The statement can be critiqued from a number of perspectives, and has been. (My own push-back against it these days is that it has the equation exactly backwards. Gods are just people who can truly see the extent of their power.) But there's one observation about the "We are as gods..." line that I haven't seen elsewhere -- and it requires a little digression.

Matt Jones at BERG London asked me to participate in the "Tomorrow's World" event they were putting on for Internet Week Europe. "A night of drinks and ten minute talks" was the capsule description, and everyone who spoke had been asked to talk about the "near-future of..." some idea. Matt asked me to talk about the near-future of redesigning the planet.

I'm sure Matt expected that I'd do a quick geoengineering song-and-dance, and that was my original plan. But the more I thought about the topic, lying in bed at 4am cursing jet lag, the more I realized that I needed a different direction. And then I remembered the Brand line, and was struck by something I hadn't heard anyone else say.

"We are as gods --" okay, but which gods? In our generally monotheistic age, we tend to lump all "gods" and "godlike powers" into a bucket of Almighty Power. But that's not the way humans have thought of gods until relatively recently; for much of human civilization, gods were seen as individuals, with their own personalities, domains, and entries in an AD&D manual.

We are gods, but we're the gods of an earlier age. Powerful, yes, but petulant; wise yet warlike; arrogant and utterly capricious... and also able to create sublime beauty. The Greek gods were the ones that came to mind last week, but really nearly every mythic pantheon followed a similar pattern.

We are as gods, but we have gotten pretty good at it -- as long as we remember that this means we are as likely to be Loki as Athena.