The Future
July 8, 2008
Short History of the Future
The Historicists
The Professional Prophets
The Amateur Prophets
The Historicists
Historicism: the belief that there exist timeless laws
that govern the development of human history (Popper,
`The Poverty of Historicism’)
Greek and Hindu myth
Vico
Hegel and Marx
Spengler and Toynbee
Mythology
• The world cycles
through four ages
• We are now living in
the worst age, or kali
yuga
Vico’s Cyclic History
• Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)
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• Saw history as the succession of
four ages: the divine, the heroic,
the human, and the ricorso.
Hegel (1770-1831)
History is the working-out
of a dialectical process,
which takes us from primitive
despotism, through
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democracy, to absolute
monarchy.
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Karl Marx (1818-1883)
• Replaced Hegel’s
dialectic with
dialectical
materialism:
society’s form is
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determined by
the means of
production used.
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
• Dialectical materialism takes society through a
fixed sequence of stages: savagery, barbarism,
feudalism, capitalism, socialism and
communism. Each stage, except the last, is
characterised by the dominance of a particular
class.
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
• Impressive success: the Communist
Manifesto (1848) predicted revolutions that
would occur fifty to a hundred years later.
• Less impressive: doctrine of the
immiseration of the proletariat.
Untergang des Abendlands
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Summer
Earliest urban/civil
societies; aristocrats vs.
monarch
Spring Autumn
Feudalism; Aristocrats vs.
Nobility vs. priesthood bourgeois
Winter
Materialism, non-symbolic
art, democracy
Untergang des Abendlands
Oswald Spengler, 1880-1936
All societies pass through fixed
stages, ending in culture,
civilization and decline.
Western society is just entering
the stage of decline.
Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of
History (1934-1961)
Civilizations grow as they
respond to challenges, decline
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``Civilizations die of suicide,
not murder.’’
Popper on Historicism
• Although history should be purely
descriptive, most historicists seem to take it
as a prescription for action:
``It’s good to move things in the direction
they’re bound to go.’’
Popper on Historicism
• The historicist project is doomed to fail,
since one major determinant of the form of
society is technology, and we can’t predict
future technology (if we could, it would be
today’s technology).
Popper on Historicism
• Historicists may deny that there are timeless
laws of human nature. But many examples
exist, including Lord Acton’s dictum:
``You cannot give a man power over
other men without tempting him to
misuse it --a temptation which roughly
increases with the amount of power
wielded, and which very few are
capable of resisting.”
The Professional Prophets
• 1. Herman Kahn and the Hudson Institute
• 2. Limits to Growth
• 3. The popular prophets:
Alvin Toffler, `Future Shock’
John Naisbitt, `Megatrends’
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Herman Kahn and the Hudson Institute
`Things to Come: thinking about the Seventies
and Eighties’ (1972)
``There will be nuclear-powered aircraft,
weighing thousands or tens of thousands of
tons.’’
Herman Kahn and the Hudson Institute
• ``The great globe itself is in a rapidly maturing
crisis -- attributable to the fact that the
environment in which technological progress must
occur has become both undersized and under-
organised…in the years between now and 1980,
the crisis will probably develop far beyond all
earlier patterns’’
• (from `Things to Come’, quoting von Neumann,
1955, Fortune)
Herman Kahn and the Hudson Institute
(From `The Next 200 Years’, 1976):
`By 2000, a quarter of mankind will live in post-industrial
society, in which the task of procuring the necessities of
life has become trivially easy. Virtually everyone will be
rich and devote their leisure to cultured pursuits.’’
``More than two-thirds of humanity will earn more than
$11,000/year’’
Herman Kahn and the Hudson Institute
(From `The Resourceful Earth’, 1984):
``Fish catches are resuming their long upward trend.’
``There is no sign of climate change.’’
``There is no evidence of species loss.’’
Limits to Growth (1972)
• A range of computer models, extrapolating
existing trends, showed global catastrophe
approaching within the next few decades
(similar results were obtained by the Ehrlichs.)
The Popular Prophets: Alvin Toffler
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The Popular Prophets: Alvin Toffler
``As we hurtle towards super-industrialism, a new ethos
emerges in which other goals … supplant those of
economic welfare’’
``One of the healthiest phenomena has been the sudden
proliferation of organisations dedicated to the study of the
future.’’
``To improve education… there should be a `council of the
future’ in every school and community.’’
``There should be whole new curricula, designed by
futurists…’’
(`Future Shock’, 1970)
Naisbitt -- Megatrends
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Naisbitt -- Megatrends
Trend 2: the Human Potential movement will
grow in pace with increased use of
computers
Trend 4: Companies will move from short-term
planning to long-term planning
Criticisms of the Professional Prophets:
1. You can’t extrapolate a chaotic process
2. The sum of a chaotic process and a linear
process is a chaotic process
3. The `closed world’ problem:
Criticism of the Professional Prophets
• 4. Evident self-interest:
– Repeated emphasis on the growing importance
of futurology
Who funds the Hudson Institute?
The Amateur Prophets
• Science fiction and movies of this and the
previous century:
1. In the future, everyone will dress alike.
(Metropolis, Star Trek,
`We’ by Zamiatin
`Brave New World’ by Aldous Huxley)
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The Amateur Prophets
2. Humanity will evolve into two sub-species:
an effete class of owners, and a degraded
class of workers.
(Metropolis, Brave New World,
The Time Machine…)
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The Amateur Prophets
3. Application of the most recent technology will
lead to a change in the moral character of
mankind.
``That airplanes, by linking the Earth, will bring
about lasting peace between these close-knit
nations.’’
British aviators Graham-White and Harry Harper,
1914
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The Amateur Prophets
3. Application of the most recent technology will
lead to a change in the moral character of
mankind.
``That the Web, by linking the Earth, will bring
about lasting peace between these close-knit
nations.’’
British aviators Graham-White and Harry Harper,
1914
The Amateur Prophets
3. Application of the most recent technology will
lead to a change in the moral character of
mankind.
Example: The Airplane, in `Things to Come’ and
Kipling’s `Easy as ABC’.
See also:
``Through technological improvements, the human
condition will improve, till it becomes as disgusting to kill
a man as we today consider it disgusting to eat one.’’
(Andrew Carnegie, 1900)
The Amateur Prophets
3a. That the most recent technology will produce a
revolutionary improvement in education.
``Motion pictures will revolutionise our educational
system, and in a few years will supplant largely if not
entirely, the use of textbooks’’
Thomas Edison, 1922
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The Amateur Prophets
3a. That the most recent technology will produce a
revolutionary improvement in education.
Computers will revolutionise our educational
system, and in a few years will supplant largely if not
entirely, the use of textbooks’’
Thomas Edison, 1922
Where is Technology Going?
1. Science leads technology: scientific advance
makes new things possible, and these are the
things that technology creates.
2. The needs of humanity direct technology:
engineers work on products and problems for
which demand exists. (This demand can be
expressed either through the marketplace or by the
elected representatives of the people.)
Where is Technology Going?
3. Managers direct technology: those who run
enterprises choose which technologies to develop,
then create a demand for their products.
(Example: the conviction of GM, Standard Oil and
Firestone, March 1949, for having criminally
conspired to destroy the electric trolley system in
Los Angeles and replace it by gasoline or diesel-
powered buses.)
Where is Technology Going?
4. Military goals lead technology, which in turn
leads to new military goals.
Example: any arms race.
Conclusions
1. We can’t know the future if we don’t
know the past.
2. Knowing the past will not allow us to
know the future.
3. …but a knowledge of the past will help
show us the range of possibilities