Probabilities matter. If society fails to appreciate probabilities, and insists on seeing everything in certainties, a bleak future awaits us all (probably).
Consider five predictions, and common responses to these predictions.
Prediction A: If the UK leaves the EU without a deal, the UK will experience a significant economic downturn.
Response A: We’ve heard that prediction before. Before the Brexit vote, it was predicted that a major economic downturn would happen straightaway if the result was “Leave”. That downturn failed to take place. So we can discard the more recent prediction. It’s just “Project Fear” again.
Prediction B (made in Feb 2020): We should anticipate a surge in infections and deaths from Covid-19, and take urgent action to prevent transmissions.
Response B: We’ve heard that prediction before. Bird flu was going to run havoc. SARS and MERS, likewise, were predicted to kill hundreds of thousands. These earlier predictions were wrong. So we can discard the more recent prediction. It’s just “Project Pandemic” again.
Prediction C: We should prepare for the advent of artificial superintelligence, the most disruptive development in all of human history.
Response C: We’ve heard that prediction before. AIs more intelligent than humans have often been predicted. No such AI has been developed. These earlier predictions were wrong. So there’s no need to prepare for ASI. It’s just “Project Hollywood Fantasy” again.
Prediction D: If we don’t take urgent action, the world faces a disaster from global warming.
Response D: We’ve heard that prediction before. Climate alarmists told us some time ago “you only have twelve years to save the planet”. Twelve years passed, and the planet is still here. So we can ignore what climate alarmists are telling us this time. It’s just “Project Raise Funding for Climate Science” again.
Prediction E (made in mid December 1903): One day, humans will fly through the skies in powered machines that are heavier than air.
Now, you might think that I write these words to challenge the scepticism of the people who made the various responses listed. It’s true that these responses do need to be challenged. In each case, the response involves an unwarranted projection from the past into the future.
But the main point on my mind is a bit different. What I want to highlight is the need to improve how we frame and present predictions.
In all the above cases – A, B, C, D, E – the response refers to previous predictions that sounded similar to the more recent ones.
Each of these earlier predictions should have been communicated as follows:
There’s a possible outcome we need to consider. For example, the possibility of an adverse economic downturn immediately after a “Leave” vote in the Brexit referendum.
That outcome is possible, though not inevitable. We can estimate a rough probability of it happening.
The probability of the outcome will change if various actions are taken. For example, swift action by the Bank of England, after a Leave vote, could postpone or alleviate an economic downturn. Eventually leaving the EU, especially without a deal in place, is likely to accelerate and intensify the downturn.
In other words, our discussions of the future need to embrace uncertainty, and need to emphasise how human action can alter that uncertainty.
What’s more, the mention of uncertainty must be forceful, rather than something that gets lost in small print.
So the message itself must be nuanced, but the fact that the message is nuanced must be underscored.
All this makes things more complicated. It disallows any raw simplicity in the messaging. Understandably, many activists and enthusiasts prefer simple messages.
However, if a message has raw simplicity, and is subsequently seen to be wrong, observers will be likely to draw the wrong conclusion.
That kind of wrong conclusion lies behind each of flawed responses A to E above.
Sadly, lots of people who are evidently highly intelligent fail to take proper account of probabilities in assessing predictions of the future. At the back of their minds, an argument like the following holds sway:
An outcome predicted by an apparent expert failed to materialise.
Therefore we should discard anything else that apparent expert says.
Quite likely the expert in question was aware of the uncertainties affecting their prediction. But they failed to emphasise these uncertainties strongly enough.
Transcending cognitive biases
As we know, we humans are prey to large numbers of cognitive biases. Even people with a good education, and who are masters of particular academic disciplines, regularly fall foul of these biases. They seem to be baked deep into our brains, and may even have conveyed some survival benefit, on average, in times long past. In the more complicated world we’re now living in, we need to help each other to recognise and resist the ill effects of these biases. Including the ill effects of the “probability neglect” bias which I’ve been writing about above.
Indeed, one of the most important lessons from the current chaotic situation arising from the Covid-19 pandemic is that society in general needs to raise its understanding of a number of principles related to mathematics:
The nature of exponential curves – and how linear thinking often comes to grief, in failing to appreciate exponentials
The nature of probabilities and uncertainties – and how binary thinking often comes to grief, in failing to appreciate probabilities.
This raising of understanding won’t be easy. But it’s a task we should all embrace.
Footnote 2: Some people who offer a rationally flawed response like the ones above are, sadly, well aware of the flawed nature of their response, but they offer it anyway. They do so since they believe the response may well influence public discussion, despite being flawed. They put a higher value on promoting their own cause, rather than on keeping the content of the debate as rational as possible. They don’t mind adding to the irrationality of public discussion. That’s a topic for a separate discussion, but it’s my view that we need to find both “carrots” and “sticks” to discourage people from deliberately promoting views they know to be irrational. And, yes, you guessed it, I’ll be touching on that topic too on Sunday evening.
In a time of travel restrictions and operating from home, we’re all on a learning curve. There’s much for us to find out about alternatives to meeting in our usual physical locations.
London Futurists have been meeting in various physical locations for twelve years. We’ve also held a number of online gatherings over that time, using tools such as Google Hangouts on Air. But now the balance needs to shift. Given the growing Covid-19 lockdown, all London Futurists physical meetings are cancelled for the time being. While the lockdown continues, the group’s activities will be 100% online.
Hopefully my observations can help others to improve their own online events. Hopefully, too, readers of this blog will offer answers or suggestions in response to questions I raise.
Context: our event
Our event last Saturday was recorded, and the footage subsequently edited – removing, for example, parts where speakers needed to be told their microphones were muted. Here’s a copy of the resulting video:
By prior arrangement, five panellists gave short introductory talks, each lasting around 5-10 minutes, to set the stage for group discussion. Between 50 and 60 audience participants were logged into the event throughout. Some of them spoke up during the event; a larger number participated in an online text chat discussion that proceeded in parallel (there’s a lightly edited copy of the text discussion here).
As you can see from the recording, the panellists and the other participants raised lots of important points during the discussion. I’ll get back to these shortly, in another blogpost. But first, some thoughts about the tools and the process that were used for this event.
The “Free” level is restricted to meetings of up to 40 minutes.
The “Pro” level – which costs UKP £11.99 per month – supports longer meetings (up to 24 hours), recording of events, and other elements of admin and user management. This is what I use at the moment.
I’ve not yet explored the more expensive versions.
Users participating in an event can can turn their cameras on or off, and can share their screen (in order, for example, to present slides). Participants can also choose at any time to see a view of the video feeds from all participants (up to 25 on each page), or a “presenter view” that focuses on the person who Zoom detects as the speaker.
Recording can take place locally, on the host’s computer (and, if enabled by the organiser, on participants’ computers). Recording can also take place on the Zoom cloud. In this case, what is recorded (by default) is the “presenter view”.
The video recording can subsequently be downloaded and edited (using any video editing software – what I use is Cyberlink PowerDirector).
Limitations and improvements
I switched some time ago from Google Hangouts-on-Air (HoA) to Zoom, when Google reorganised their related software offerings during 2019.
One feature of the HoA software that I miss in Zoom is the ability for the host to temporarily “blue box” a participant, so that their screen remains highlighted, regardless of which video feeds contain speech or other noises. Without this option, what happens – as you can see from the recording of Saturday’s event – is that the presentation view can jump to display the video from a participant that is not speaking at that moment. For five seconds or so, the display shows the participant staring blankly at the camera, generally without realising that the focus is now on them. What made Zoom shift the focus is that it detected some noise from that video feed -perhaps a cough, a laugh, a moan, a chair sliding across the floor, or some background discussion.
(Participants in the event needn’t worry, however, about their blank stares or other inadvertent activity being contained in the final video. While editing the footage, I removed all such occurrences, covering up the displays, while leaving the main audio stream in place.)
In any case, participants should mute their microphones when not speaking. That avoids unwanted noise reaching the event. However, it’s easy for people to neglect to do so. For that reason, Zoom provides the host with admin control over which mics are on or off at any time. But the host may well be distracted too… so the solution is probably for me to enrol one or two participants with admin powers for the event, and ask them to keep an eye on any mics being left unmuted at the wrong times.
Another issue is the variable quality of the microphones participants were using. If the participant turns their head while speaking – for example, to consult some notes – it can make it hard to hear what they’re saying. A better solution here is to use a head-mounted microphone.
A related problem is occasional local bandwidth issues when a participant is speaking. Some or all of what they say may be obscured, slurred, or missed altogether. The broadband in my own house is a case in point. As it happens, I have an order in the queue to switch my house to a different broadband provider. But this switch is presently being delayed.
Deciding who speaks
When a topic is thought-provoking, there are generally are lots of people with things to contribute to the discussion. Evidently, they can’t all talk at once. Selecting who speaks next – and deciding how long they can speak before they might need to be interrupted – is a key part of chairing successful meetings.
One guide to who should be invited to speak next, at any stage in a meeting, is the set of comments raised in the text chat window. However, in busy meetings, important points raised can become lost in the general flow of messages. Ideally, the meeting software will support a system of voting, so that other participants can indicate their choices of which questions are the most interesting. The questions that receive the most upvotes will become the next focus of the discussion.
London Futurists have used such software in the past, including Glisser and Slido, at our physical gatherings. For online events, ideally the question voting mechanism will be neatly integrated with the underlying platform.
I recently took part in one online event (organised by the Swiss futurist Gerd Leonhard) where the basic platform was Zoom and where there was a “Q&A” voting system for questions from the audience. However, I don’t see such a voting system in the Zoom interface that I use.
Added on 20th March
Apparently there’s a Webinar add-on for Zoom that provides better control of meetings, including the Q&A voting system. The additional cost of this add-on starts from UKP £320 per annum. I’ll be looking into this further. See this feature comparison page.
Thanks to Joe Kay for drawing this to my attention!
Summarising key points
The video recording of our meeting on Saturday lasts nearly 100 minutes. To my mind, the discussion remained interesting throughout. However, inevitably, many potential viewers will hesitate before committing 100 minutes of their time to watch the entirety of that recording. Even if they watch the playback at an accelerated speed, they would probably still prefer access to some kind of edited highlights.
Creating edited highlights of recordings of London Futurists events has long been a “wish list” item for me. I can appreciate that there’s a particular skill to identifying which parts should be selected for inclusion in any such summary. I’ll welcome suggestions on how to do this!
Learning together
More than ever, what will determine our success or failure in coming to terms with the growing Covid-19 crisis is the extent to which positive collaboration and a proactive technoprogressive mindset can pull ahead of humanity’s more destructive characteristics.
That “race” was depicted on the cover of the collection of the ebook of essays published by London Futurists in June 2014, “Anticipating 2025”. Can we take advantage of our growing interconnectivity to spread, not dangerous pathogens or destructive “fake news”, but good insights about building a better future?
That was a theme that emerged time and again during our online event last Saturday.
I’ll draw this blogpost towards a close by sharing some excepts from the opening chapter from Anticipating 2025.
Four overlapping trajectories
The time period up to 2025 can be considered as a race involving four overlapping trajectories: technology, crisis, collaboration, and mindset.
The first trajectory is the improvement of technology, with lots of very positive potential. The second, however, has lots of very negative potential: it is the growth in likelihood of societal crisis:
Stresses and strains in the environment, with increased climate chaos, and resulting disputes over responsibility and corrective action
Stresses and strains in the financial system, which share with the environment the characteristics of being highly complex, incompletely understood, weakly regulated, and subject to potential tipping points for fast-accelerating changes
Increasing alienation, from people who feel unable to share in the magnitude of the riches flaunted by the technologically fortunate; this factor is increased by the threats from technological unemployment and the fact that, whilst the mean household income continues to rise, the median household income is falling
Risks from what used to be called “weapons of mass destruction” – chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons, along with cyber-weapons that could paralyse our electronics infrastructure; there are plenty of “angry young men” (and even angry middle-aged men) who seem ready to plunge what they see as a corrupt world into an apocalyptic judgement.
What will determine the outcome of this race, between technological improvement and growing risk of crises? It may be a third trajectory: the extent to which people around the world are able to collaborate, rather than compete. Will our tendencies to empathise, and to build a richer social whole, triumph over our equally deep tendencies to identify more closely with “people like us” and to seek the well-being of our “in-group” ahead of that of other groups?
In principle, we probably already have sufficient knowledge, spread around the world, to solve all the crises facing us, in a smooth manner that does not require any significant sacrifices. However, that knowledge is, as I said, spread – it does not cohere in just a single place. If only we knew what we knew. Nor does that knowledge hold universal assent – far from it. It is mocked and distorted and undermined by people who have vested interests in alternative explanations – with the vested interests varying among economic, political, ideological, and sometimes sheer human cussedness. In the absence of improved practical methods for collaboration, our innate tendencies to short-term expedience and point-scoring may rule the day – especially when compounded by an economic system that emphasises competition and “keeping up with the Joneses”.
Collaborative technologies such as Wikipedia and open-source software point the way to what should be possible. But they are unlikely to be sufficient, by themselves, to heal the divisions that tend to fragment human endeavours. This is where the fourth, and final, trajectory becomes increasingly important – the transformation of the philosophies and value systems that guide our actions.
If users are resolutely suspicious of technologies that would disturb key familiar aspects of “life as we know it”, engineers will face an uphill battle to secure sufficient funding to bring these technologies to the market – even if society would eventually end up significantly improved as a result.
Politicians generally take actions that reflect the views of the electorate, as expressed through public media, opinion polls, and (occasionally) in the ballot box. However, the electorate is subject to all manners of cognitive bias, prejudice, and continuing reliance on rules of thumb which made sense in previous times but which have been rendered suspect by changing circumstances. These viewpoints include:
Honest people should put in forty hours of work in meaningful employment each week
People should be rewarded for their workplace toil by being able to retire around the age of 65
Except for relatively peripheral matters, “natural methods” are generally the best ones
Attempts to redesign human nature – or otherwise to “play God” – will likely cause disaster
It’s a pointless delusion to think that the course of personal decay and death can be averted.
In some cases, long-entrenched viewpoints can be overturned by a demonstration that a new technology produces admirable results – as in the case of IVF (in-vitro fertilisation). But in other cases, minds need to be changed even before a full demonstration can become possible.
It’s for this reason that I see the discipline of “culture engineering” as being equally important as “technology engineering”. The ‘culture’ here refers to cultures of humans, not cells. The ‘engineering’ means developing and applying a set of skills – skills to change the set of prevailing ideas concerning the desirability of particular technological enhancements. Both technology engineering and culture engineering are deeply hard skills; both need a great deal of attention.
A core part of “culture engineering” fits under the name “marketing”. Some technologists bristle at the concept of marketing. They particularly dislike the notion that marketing can help inferior technology to triumph over superior technology. But in this context, what do “inferior” and “superior” mean? These judgements are relative to how well technology is meeting the dominant desires of people in the marketplace.
Marketing means selecting, understanding, inspiring, and meeting key needs of what can be called “influence targets” – namely, a set of “tipping point” consumers, developers, and partners. Specifically, marketing includes:
Forming a roadmap of deliverables, that build, step-by-step, to delivering something of great benefit to the influence targets, but which also provide, each step of the way, something with sufficient value to maintain their active interest
Astutely highlighting the ways in which present (and forthcoming) products will, indeed, provide value to the influence targets
Avoiding any actions which, despite the other good things that are happening, alienate the influence targets; and in the event any such alienation emerges, taking swift and decisive action to address it.
Culture engineering involves politics as well as marketing. Politics means building alliances that can collectively apply power to bring about changes in regulations, standards, subsidies, grants, and taxation. Choosing the right partners, and carefully managing relationships with them, can make a big difference to the effectiveness of political campaigns. To many technologists, “politics” is as dirty a word as “marketing”. But once again, mastery of the relevant skillset can make a huge difference to the adoption of technologies.
The final component of culture engineering is philosophy – sets of arguments about fundamentals and values. For example, will human flourishing happen more fully under simpler lifestyles, or by more fully embracing the radical possibilities of technology? Should people look to age-old religious traditions to guide their behaviour, or instead seek a modern, rational, scientific basis for morality? And how should the freedoms of individuals to experiment with potentially dangerous new kinds of lifestyle be balanced against the needs of society as a whole?
“Philosophy” is (you guessed it) yet another dirty word, in the minds of many technologists. To these technologists, philosophical arguments are wastes of time. Yet again, I will disagree. Unless we become good at philosophy – just as we need to become good at both politics and marketing – we will fail to rescue the prevailing culture from its unhelpful mix of hostility and apathy towards the truly remarkable potential to use technology to positively transcend human nature. And unless that change in mindset happens, the prospects are uncertain for the development and adoption of the remarkable technologies of abundance mentioned earlier.
[End of extract from Anticipating 2025.]
How well have we done?
On the one hand, the contents of the 2014 London Futurists book “Anticipating 2025” are prescient. These chapters highlight many issues and opportunities that have grown in importance in the intervening six years.
I’m wondering where the Futurism is in this reaction.
Maybe the group is more aptly Reactionism.
I wanted to splutter out an answer: the group (London Futurists) has done a great deal of forward thinking over the years. We have looked at numerous trends and systems, and considered possible scenarios arising from extrapolations and overlaps. We have worked hard to clarify, for these scenarios, the extent to which they are credible and desirable, and ways in which the outcomes can be influenced.
But on reflection, a more sober thought emerged. Yes, we futurists have been trying to alert the rest of society to our collective lack of preparedness for major risks and major opportunities ahead. We have discussed the insufficient resilience of modern social systems – their fragility and lack of sustainability.
But have our messages been heard?
The answer is: not really. That’s why Covid-19 is causing such a dislocation.
It’s tempting to complain that the population as a whole should have been listening to futurists. However, we can also ask, how should wefuturists change the way we talk about our insights, so that people pay us more attention?
After all, there are many worse crises potentially just around the corner. Covid-19 is by no means the most dangerous new pathogen that could strike humanity. And there are many other types of risk to consider, including malware spreading out of control, the destruction of our electronics infrastructure by something similar to the 1859 Carrington Event, an acceleration of chaotic changes in weather and climate, and devastating wars triggered by weapons systems overseen by AI software whose inner logic no-one understands.
It’s not just a new mindset that humanity needs. It’s a better way to have discussions about fundamentals – discussions about what truly matters.
Footnote: with thanks
Special thanks are due to the people who boldly stepped forwards at short notice as panellists for last Saturday’s event:
and to everyone else who contributed to that discussion. I’m sorry there was no time to give sufficient attention to many of the key points raised. As I said at the end of the recording, this is a kind of cliffhanger.
Yesterday, I spent some time at the BETT show in London’s ExCeL centre. BETT describes itself as:
the world’s leading event for learning technology for education professionals… dedicated to showcasing the best in UK and international learning technology products, resources, and best practice… in times where modern learning environments are becoming more mobile and ‘learning anywhere’ is more of a possibility.
I liked the examples that I saw of increasing use of Google Apps in education, particularly on Chrome Books. These examples were described by teachers who had been involved in trials, at all levels of education. The teachers had plenty of heart-warming stories of human wonderment, of pupils helping each other, and of technology taking a clear second place to learning.
I was also impressed to hear some updates about the use of MOOCs – “Massive open online courses”. For example, I was encouraged about what I heard at BETT about the progress of the UK-based FutureLearn initiative.
FutureLearn is a massive open online course (MOOC) platform founded in December 2012 as a company majority owned by the UK’s Open University. It is the first UK-led massive open online course platform, and as of October 2013 had 26 University partners and – unlike similar platforms – includes three non-university partners: the British Museum, the British Council and the British Library.
Among other things, my interest in FutureLearn was to find out if similar technology might be used, at some stage, to help raise better awareness of general futurist topics, such as the Technological Singularity, Radical Life Extension, and Existential Risks – the kind of topics that feature in the Hangout On Air series that I run. I remain keen to develop what I’ve called “London Futurists Academy”. Could a MOOC help here?
I resolved that it was time for me to gain first-hand experience of one of these systems, rather than just relying on second-hand experience from other people.
I clicked on the FutureLearn site to see which courses might be suitable for me to join. I was soon avidly reading the details of their course Climate change: challenges and solutions:
This course aims to explain the science of climate change, the risks it poses and the solutions available to reduce those risks.
The course is aimed at the level of students entering university, and seeks to provide an inter-disciplinary introduction to what is a broad field. It engages a number of experts from the University of Exeter and a number of partner organisations.
The course will set contemporary human-caused climate change within the context of past nature climate variability. Then it will take a risk communication approach, balancing the ‘bad news’ about climate change impacts on natural and human systems with the ‘good news’ about potential solutions. These solutions can help avoid the most dangerous climate changes and increase the resilience of societies and ecosystems to those climate changes that cannot be avoided.
The course lasts eight weeks, and is described as requiring about three hours of time every week. Participants take part entirely from their own laptop. There is no fee to join. The course material is delivered via a combination of videos (with attractive graphics), online documents, and quizzes and tests. Participants are also encouraged to share some of their experiences, ideas, and suggestions via the FutureLearn online social network.
For me, the timing seemed almost ideal. The London Futurists meetup last Saturday had addressed the topic of climate change. There’s an audio recording of the event here (it lasts just over two hours). The speaker, Duncan Clark, was excellent. But discussion at the event (and subsequently continued online) confirmed that there remain lots of hard questions needing further analysis.
I plan to invite other speakers on climate change topics to forthcoming London Futurists events, but in the meantime, this FutureLearn course seems like an excellent opportunity for many people to collectively deepen their knowledge of the overall subject.
I say this after having worked my way through the material for the first week of the course. I can’t say I learnt anything surprising, but the material was useful background to many of the discussions that I keep getting involved in. It was well presented and engaging. I paid careful attention, knowing there would be an online multiple choice test at the end of the week’s set of material. A couple of the questions in the test needed me to think quite carefully before answering. After I answered the final question, I was pleased to see the following screen:
It’s fascinating to read online the comments from other participants in the course. It looks like over 1,700 people have completed the first week’s material. Some of the participants are aged in their 70s or 80s, and it’s their first experience with computer learning.
There hasn’t been much controversy in the first week’s topics. One part straightforwardly explained the reasons why the observed changes in global temperature over the last century cannot be attributed to changes in solar radiation, even though changes in solar radiation could be responsible for the “Little Ice Age” between 1550-1850. That part, like all the other material from the first week, seemed completely fair and objective to me. I look forward to the subsequent sections.
I said that the timing of the course was almost ideal. However, it started on the 13th of January, and FutureLearn only allow people to join the course for up to 14 days after the official start date.
That means if any readers of this blog wish to follow my example and enrol in this course too, you’ll have to do so by this Sunday, the 26th of January.
I do hope that other people join the course, so we can compare notes, as we explore pathways to improved collaborative learning.
dw2 