Today, the idea future is deeply woven into the practical fabric of our lives. “It’s almost as though we live there,” Joshua Rothman writes. “And all sorts of people—technologists, writers, artists, politicians, investors, and businesspeople—now work to shape our notions about what’s to come.”
How’s that going? Two facts stand out. First, since no one actually knows the future, guessing, speculating, or simply making things up remains the state of the art for almost everyone involved in describing it. (Prediction markets, the biggest recent innovation in forecasting, are based on the recognition that experts are often wrong.) And second, our views of the future tend to be dark, and seem to be getting darker. Young people, in particular, increasingly report that they’ve “lost the future” as something to look forward to; they feel trapped in a world careening out of control. A survey conducted by Pew Research found that only 14 per cent of Americans would transport themselves to the future, if given the choice; nearly half say that they’d prefer to live in the past. Looking ahead, we see mostly malevolent inevitabilities—climate change, oligarchy, autocracy, A.I. overlords, and the like. The open future has closed up on us; we’re back in the end times, where we started.
But for most of history, people didn’t try predicting the future. Rothman writes about how, maybe, that was wise: www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/d...