We hear a lot of dire predictions these days: the economy is going to crash, leaving retirees penniless; artificial intelligence (AI) is going to leave 30 to 40 percent of the workforce unemployed; climate change is going to render the planet uninhabitable in a dozen years. What is one to do? If the predictions are correct and we don’t act immediately, what will happen? If the predictions are incorrect but we do act, are there any possible downsides? How can we know? And, what is the future? Maybe it is a place we go to, for example: further down the road there will be problems and it will be too late to address them. Maybe it’s a good place: in the future, there will be driverless cars, robot servants, and we will all live hundreds of years. Or maybe the future arrives like an enlightening guest: when the future gets here, we will understand how many things we are doing wrong today. We don’t really know what the future is, nor do we know what it has in store for us. Maybe we are just thinking about it in the wrong way.
When Dostoyevsky sat down to write Crime and punishment, did that book lie in his future or was he constructing the book and his future as well? When Ebenezer Scrooge journeyed into the future with the Ghost of Christmas Future, was he going to a place that exists or a place that might exist? If it might exist, what other places might exist? Could he find them if he looked? If he liked one of those better, could he choose that instead?
The author of this book offers a different way to think about the future, some of which sounds vaguely familiar and some of which sounds quite different. “The future is not something to be predicted, but to be made,” the author asserts, going on to point out that “a concept of the future that involves only prediction and reaction, rather than the development of goals and progress toward them, is incomplete.” This idea of the future as the outcome of goals, progress, and intentional efforts is not entirely new, yet it provides an important foundation for the author’s concept of the future. The future is unwritten, like Dostoyevsky’s book when he sat down to write. The author would go on to add, “Not just unwritten in the sense of an unwritten history, in the way we might lack documentation of something that has already happened, but uncomposed and unimagined, yet to be made.” Now it is getting interesting. Can the future be composed in way a document can be composed? Yes, that is where we are going. The author begins to develop a concept of the future that one might call the constructed (as opposed to determined) future, and the process of bringing it about is called “future-making.” In the author’s words:
I’m calling the act of imagining a particular future and consciously trying to contribute to it future-making. This term is meant to distinguish a potentially productive perspective on the future (let’s build a better future) from a less productive one (let’s predict what will happen, for instance, so we can react quickly by anticipating it).
Immediately the reader begins to think that if the future is not determined, and that it is not really out there already, then we are always involved in the process of future-making, as the future is, to a large extent, the result of the things we do today, intentionally or unintentionally, thoughtfully or thoughtlessly. This reveals one of the delightful things about this book. Statements are made, almost in passing, that cause readers to stop for a moment and question their understanding of the future.
The author goes on to construct a concept of future-making that falls a bit short of a theory, but which may very well lead to one eventually. And the insights often come from the most unlikely places. For example, discussing the kitchen of tomorrow, a favorite of world’s fairs and mid-20th-century trade shows, the author points out that our limited imaginations often allow only incremental thinking, and people whose worldviews are grounded in the past are more likely to see a future that reinforces the values of the past. Now, this may not be true all the time. For example, many radical ideas inspired from science fiction became reality. But to what extent does our current understanding of individual autonomy, automobile ownership, and the freedom of interstate highways affect our views on the future of driverless cars?
In a later chapter on computer technology, the author illustrates the cooperative nature of future-building. A lot of prior developments, such as hypertext and the mouse, not to mention computers and networks, eventually led to the World Wide Web. Take any one of these away and the web may have been very different, or not at all. So future-making is a thing we do even when we are not doing it intentionally. And almost always when we are doing it, we have no idea where it will eventually end up.
This book is not a Pollyanna clarion call to bring about a better world, for example, if we all just cooperate, we can prevent a horrible future. In fact it is neither utopian nor dystopian. Life is a lot more complicated than that, and it requires a more textured view of the future, which the author provides. There are many ways to look at the future: technological determinism, extrapolation of the past, utopian or dystopian outcomes of human efforts, extreme optimism (technology will solve all problems), extreme pessimism (we are going to destroy ourselves), and so on. But these are all reactive and fail to recognize that what may happen is not the same as what will happen.
How does the author propose overcoming the barriers to future-building, such as lack of imagination, inability to get past the values of the present, and serendipitous collaboration? In simple terms, the answer is that we need to write and read stories that present or explore the consequences of alternative futures--a process called “design fiction.” In the author’s words: “One could describe design as a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose,” while fiction is the result of a “systematic imagination.” Brought together, design fiction systematically explores a possible future through fictional constructs (not limited to written words). One could argue that we have instances of this today. But today’s science fiction tends to present one possible view of the future, primarily for entertainment and only secondarily for thoughtful reflection. And we tend to get only one possible world rather than alternatives. What if Jurassic park had worked out and the advances in biotechnology were used to improve the well being of people? What if those improvements led to drastic overpopulation? What if that overpopulation led to greater genetic diversity, which in turn produced future humans with a vastly improved quality of life? And so on.
This book would be of interest to anyone who thinks about the future and is getting nowhere with their current thinking. It would also be of interest to aspiring fiction writers, as mainstream fiction may very well turn in this direction. Finally, it would be of interest to nearly anyone who would like some interesting ideas to think about.
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