Crystal ball
What does the future hold? At a conference this week scientists will try to answer that question. Jamie Morton looks at our rich history of predictions and five things that will change our lives.
Scientists predict the future at a conference starting tomorrow.
The Japanese tourist clinging to the Mt Cook ice face is in serious trouble.
A storm is moving in, he’s missing a crucial board meeting back in Osaka and his Kiwi guide, 3m above him, doesn’t speak Japanese.
Luckily, the cutting- edge technology of “Network New Zealand” can answer his problems.
Using a 75 mm-wide, satelliteconnected, language-translating display phone wrapped around his wrist, he discusses the next move with the guide.
Just as an LCD screen shows the next hour’s forecast for the South Island, his display phone beeps again: his boardroom colleagues need him to make an emergency call on some budget figures.
He casts his vote, just as the ice breaks away below, dropping him into a 300m crevasse. The network can’t save his life — but his bracelet’s navigation chip pin-points the location of his body to within a metre for
later recovery.
That scenario, imagining the faroff, high-tech world of 2010, featured in a report from 1981, when Smash
Palace was playing in theatres and anti-tour protesters were storming rugby stadiums.
The 80-page discussion paper, adorned with a retro-title font, represented the last time our country had a real, nationally focused effort at looking ahead.
It was authored by the Commission for the Future, a state-funded think-tank that had a colourful but short-lived existence between the late 1970s and early 1980s.
It suffered the classic fate of a messenger bearing bad news when some of its conclusions and recommendations didn’t align with Muldoon’s Government of the day, and was shut down.
This was despite some of the uncanny developments it correctly predicted, among them ultra-fast broadband internet networks, Full-HD flatscreen TVs and strange “pocket telephones” with video screens.
Technology would massively disrupt photographic film and print media, the commission reckoned in the 1970s, and computing advances would transform the manufacturing, transport, communications, finance and insurance industries. And “Network New Zealand”? It ’s called the internet.
Over three days this week, some of the brightest minds in the space will descend on Christchurch for Australasia’s first exponential technology summit, hosted by Silicon Valley’s Singularity University.
“We used to think of future studies as being 20, 30, 50 years out,” says event organiser and speaker Kaila Colbin.
“But we’re looking at massive, widespread technical and societal changes on a time-span of 10 years or less.”
History is packed full of thinkers who are decades, sometimes centuries, ahead of their time.
Many of the biggest inventions and developments of the 20th century were accurately predicted by science fiction writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, among them Jules Verne and HG Wells.
A later generation — led by the likes of Arthur C Clarke, whose 2001: A Space
Odyssey portended the dark powers of artificial intelligence — sensed the immense influence of the coming digital world, and its potential to accelerate the pace of change.
Today, we can watch YouTube Ted Talks by visionaries such as Ray Kurzweil who, along with his predecessor Verner Ving, predicted a technological “singularity”, where artificial intelligence becomes as truly intelligent as humans.
This could be a reality by the middle of the century, they say, and, given advances in computing capacity and machine learning, we may well be on track to achieve it.
It will mean self- drivings cars that ferry us along motorways as we sneak in a quick pre-work snooze; DNAtailored healthcare that can tell us what faulty genes we should snip out; and a workplace where no job is safe.
Yet many scientists argue that today, our landscape of forward-thinking remains flat and featureless and we can point to little in the way of systematic courses, programmes or centres.
We have hundreds of scientists and policy analysts scattered through New Zealand’s research institutions and government departments, studying everything from climate change to public health to make projections for the future. But futurists are a scarcer breed. Their concern is solely trying to pick most accurately what is likely to happen in the future — the pace and nature of technological chance, and the risks and opportunities that this poses.
They try to give us a handle on risk and uncertainty and flag wildcards incidents that may change everything.
The Wellington-based McGuinness Institute, which saved the commission’s reports for posterity, is one rare player.
Others efforts have come and gone. The “Futurewatch” programme that sprouted by the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification in 2001 survived just four years.
“We seem to be leaving conversations about new genetic or medical technologies, artificial intelligence, and nanotechology to the rest of the world, and this worries me,” Auckland University physicist and innovation commentator Professor Shaun Hendy says.
“New Zealanders might be faced with the loss of kiwi from our wilderness in a few decades. Would we be prepared to release genetically modified organisms to keep wild kiwi alive on the mainland?”
Our country feeds millions of people and affords us a high standard of living, but our golden gooses of meat and milk are set to be disrupted, driven by the desire for more nutritious, convenient and palatable foods that are less resource-intensive to produce.
Labs in the US and Europe are already working on synthetic meat and milk. What does the intersection of technology and food mean for us as producers?
“Good futures work is more about asking the right questions rather than providing answers to what the future will be like,” says Robert Hickson, one of the country’s few dedicated futures thinkers.
“Success is often about how you respond to change, so futures helps you see what may be coming, and give you time to think about the best courses of actions to take, even in the face of uncertainty.”
How useful futures thinking is in today’s tech-charged, fast-changing world depends upon what we look at — and over what timeframe.
And many of tomorrow’s problems don’t necessarily require tomorrow’s technology to tackle today.
We can look to the long-established laws of physics to work out the varying rates of degrees by which the planet will warm this century.
We can use existing data to calculate what impact an ageing population and soaring rates of obesity will have on 2050’s healthcare system.
Still, Hickson expects technological evolution — although along with big social, political, economic and environmental changes — is calling for an increasing demand now for futures thinking.
Our “old” way of thinking about issues, and we respond to them, was overdue a shake-up.
“Futures should be a critical part of any policy work, since both are ultimately interested in looking ahead.”
There was already some training under way in Wellington to expose policy analysts to basic futures methodologies. McGuinness Institute founder and director Wendy McGuinness pointed elsewhere to efforts by the Prime Minister’s chief science advisor, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, and the Royal Society of New Zealand.
“Obviously there are think tanks like ourselves doing this work too, however, we could be more integrated nationally which should help us test assumptions and not undertake repetitive work.”
There have been calls for a new Science Commission with a mandate for translating research into policy, and similar moves.
Science and Innovation Minister Steven Joyce said although it was tough to say how much work was enough, he acknowledged more could be done, particularly in advanced areas of ICT.
McGuinness sees New Zealand’s size and location as a strength that allows for agility in testing innovative solutions to potential problems.
Even though it could appear the
big changes came only out of labs in China, Korea and California, ideas could emerge anywhere, and big companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, General Electric are spending billions acquiring start-ups.
If we could combine innovation with a culture aimed at fixing the causes of problems, and not just their symptoms, there was no reason we couldn’t foot it with the big players.
“We take great pride in Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor, the All Blacks and rowers, and companies like Xero doing well internationally,” Hickson says.
“Attitude plus skill is what can make us more successful.”