Bristol Festival of Ideas - How Should We Think About the Future?
Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2020 9:59 pm
Bristol Festival of Ideas has an awesome catalogue of events and this one seems even more prescient given the furore over 'superforecaster' Andrew Sabinsky. His grasp of science appears to be slim but does it mean the idea of forecasting is stupid or just that we shouldn't be employing arrogant privileged arsewipes to do the predicting?
I went to a panel chaired by Margaret Heffernan last year and she was excellent so have high hopes that this event will be too.We are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future. But the complexity of modern life won’t provide that; experts in forecasting are reluctant to look more than 400 days out. History doesn’t repeat itself and even genetics won’t tell you everything you want to know. Ineradicable uncertainty is now a fact of life. But thinking ahead is what we all do: planning careers, families, companies, countries. So how can we face the future if we don’t know what it holds?
Margaret Heffernan’s new book, Uncharted: How to Map the Future, argues that not knowing the future must not leave us passive. She looks at long-term projects developed over generations that could never have been planned the way that they have been run. Experiments, led by individuals and nations, discover new options, and radical exercises in forging new futures with wildly diverse participants allow everyone to create outcomes together that none could do alone. Existential crises reveal the vital social component in resilience. And preparedness – doing everything today that you might need for tomorrow – provides the antidote to passivity and prediction.
This session challenges us to resist the false promises of technology and efficiency and instead to mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in.