Futurology

Those of you born in or before the 80s may just remember a cartoon called the Jetsons. I say remember - I couldn't really tell you anything about it, other than a slight twinge of pre-pubescent tumescence when Mrs. Jetson was on screen. It was, in essence, a lazy rehash of the Flintstones, a programme with no discernible plot progression or well-defined characters. The interest came from the situation in which the characters were based. The 'charm' of the Jetsons, such as it was, was how it portrayed an imaginary future, replete with jetcars, pills for meals (if memory serves) and robots. It's amusing that Mrs. Jetson is in essence the archetypal 50s housewife, staying at home and doing the cooking and watching over the household, given the thousands of years that would have had to elapsed for jetcars etc. to have arisen. But then who could've predicted women would start having careers? I think we can all agree it was ludicrous enough giving them the vote, but the notion that they might go to work! Bewidering....

Anyway, I bring this up as it's always hilarious to look back at the directions we all imagined the future would take in the past. Lord Kelvin's prediction in 1897 that 'radio has no future' is a real favourite of mine. I suppose we should all be thankful he was wrong, due to the technology's later development as radar, the key to victory in the Battle of Britain. Amusingly he also predicted two years earlier that heavier-than-air flying machines were an impossibility, so had he been an accurate predictor we'd not have even have needed radar. Sir Clive Sinclair's infatuation with the idea that his C5 personal automobiles were the mode of transport of the future cost him much of his business and ultimately paved the way for the domination of IBM and Microsoft as the world leaders in the computer industry. The greatest quote in this regard has to go to Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899. Mr. Duell, perhaps hoping for an easy life, remarked that 'Everything that can be invented has been invented.'

It's not to say we don't get things wrong in the modern world too, even short term predictions prove elusive. During my lifetime, the millenium bug must of course rate as the clearest example of how utterly wrong a species can be. Recent fears over bird flu (which was surely a nonesense from the start) and swine flu (which I caught, and was nasty, in fairness) show that even when the best and brightest are at work, any prediction is fraught with difficulty.

We may, however, be getting better. Statistically, meteorologists, for example, are gaining steady accuracy as time goes by. But what's really interesting is the growing encroachment of ideas taken from mathematics and physics and extrapolated into the field of social sciences. In essence, these theories postulate that there are often times when we, as societal groups, act en masse, as if a group of atoms within a substance. Of course, this is not too hard to believe when one considers that we are not as free-willed as we'd like to believe we are. There so many written and unwritten rules that direct and dictate our conduct, and the acts of those around us impact massively on the choices we made. This is just as well, as without such limitations, faced with endless choices, life would be very difficult, nigh on impossible even.

Physicists often see similar things. In iron, for example, each atom is like a compass that can orientate itself in a magnetic field. Individually, each atom is 'free' to choose its own orientation; but because of the magnetic forces between them, all the atoms will align themselves in the same plane/orientation. Brazilian physicists have used a model like this to explain why the voting statistics of the 1998 Brazilian elections do not sit easily with a notion of rampant free will. It seems that the influence of individuals within the group, all tyring to convert others to their political points of view, cause subgroups and communities to 'line up' and vote in blocs, like lumps of iron - further weight to the Chruchillian view that democracy is the worst from of government (except all the others we've tried).

It may also help explain how market traders and economists act, with waves of mass buying and selling, bull markets full of confidence suddenly flipping to bear markets of disaster as a herd mentality takes over due to interactions between agents.

Of course, it is a long strecth to say this will ever be an exact science - indeed, if one could accurately predict the future, it would suggest that our traditional understandings of time are wildly erroneous (since time must, by nature, move from the known to the unknown). If these models do prove more accurate, they may give us an insight into how we can shape societies, and hopefully for the better. As ever, though, I'm not sure we will ever arrive at a decision en masse as to how that society should work and what it should be.

In any event, I hope we won't end up looking as silly as Mr. Duell does now. I'd wager that the era of the bizarre prediction won't have ended just yet though. I, for one, am not too upset by that.