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A fascinating and highly accurate picture of the future from a panel of experts
Wednesday, 19 July 2006
Catchy title, eh? It's an example of a basic template for one of the most lucrative industries on the planet: fortune-telling. This is an industry that a 1997 estimate found was worth $200 billion a year in the United States alone.
Those are some big bucks.
But what does the fortune-telling industry consist of exactly? Most people would think of psychics, astrologers and tea-leaf readers. The educated and worldly laugh at anyone who believes in the predictions of such charlatans. But judging by the reading-material most people consume, the vast majority of us are in the habit of paying for prophesies.
Many supposedly reputable professions - such as financial analysis, political punditry, economics, futurology, and technology consultancy - are also heavily involved in the fortune-telling game. Pick up any newspaper or most magazines and you'll find that a large proportion of what's inside deals with what "will" happen, not what "has" happened.
"Local housing market to take a dive", "The hot technologies for next year", "Income tax predicted to increase", are just some examples of the headlines you're likely to see.
Of course, we all want to know what the future holds because the benefits of being able to do so are enormous.
Is marrying this person the right decision? Is this the right time to buy a house? What direction is my industry heading? What technologies should I be looking at? What should I invest my retirement money in? What will the future look like for me and my family?
These are all extremely important questions for most people. The answers could mean the difference between prosperity and ruin, between happiness and misery. Is it any wonder we want advice on what things will be like tomorrow?
Shrewd businessmen and those with a desire for power have long recognized this basic human need. Fortune-telling is one of the world's oldest professions. Witchdoctors and oracles were important people in historical times, just as stock analysts and technology consultants are today.
But are our modern fortune-tellers getting better results than those of three-thousand years ago?
While researching his book "Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?" Philip E. Tetlock, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, asked a huge number of experts and nonexperts to make forecasts about future events. He ended up with 82,361 such predictions.
The result he found? There is no such thing as an expert on the future. People who claimed to be specialists got no better results than those who didn't. Even computer programs that simply mapped out trends from the recent past were more accurate. One interesting finding was that the more famous the expert, the worse their results.
In his book, "The Fortune Sellers", William A Sherden, took a hard statistical look at the results of experts in a wide-range of fields - weather forecasting, economics, stock-pickers, demographers, technology forecasters, social scientists, and so on. He came to similar conclusions. No matter how sophisticated and scientific-sounding their methods - the experts were no better than the average Joe at guessing what the future would look like.
So why do we listen to them?
The simple answer is because they appear so credible. The have access to information and tools that we don't. On the question of which direction the local real-estate market is going, an analyst armed with a supercomputer and ten-thousand numbers is always going to sound more convincing than your sixty-year old aunt.
We also know for certain that at least some experts are able to make accurate predictions. Astronomers and physicists can tell you where Venus will appear in the sky next week. Chemists can predict the outcome of mixing two compounds together. But these are the exceptions. Most professions are terrible at prediction.
We get so seduced by the methods used to make the forecasts that we forget about the actual results.
Witchdoctors and oracles did the same thing in their time. They knew people believed in gods and evil spirits, so they devised elaborate ceremonies to make their forecasts seem more believable. Today's specialists use the same means wrapped in a different language. Instead of animal sacrifices, we get supercomputers. Instead of astrology charts, we get databases.
But the outcomes are likely to be the same - a random guess that's as good as anybody else's.
Of course speculating about the future can be great fun. Who doesn't enjoy watching sci-fi movies set fifty years hence? Or imagining teleporting through space while speaking on a universal communicator?
For an equally enjoyable, but less popular thrill, spend an afternoon in a library reading magazines, newspapers and books from a decade or more ago. Look for predictions of the sort of lives we're supposed to be leading today - what sort of cars we'll be driving, the political scene, and the types of work we'll be doing. They're almost always laughably inaccurate.
Enjoy the fun side of speculation, but don't take it too seriously. In almost every field, nobody really knows what the future holds. Accept this fact, and enjoy the thrill of making decisions where the outcome can be guessed at but is ultimately unknown.
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