ell, 2001 sure didn't turn out like we thought it would. We always figured there'd be space wheels and moon bases, flying cars and intelligent computers. Instead, we have the point-and-click of Internet shopping, the ongoing revolution of the human genome project and also the unwelcome intrusion of war, in a world grown fat on the fruits of peace. And while all of this has taken us by surprise, it's really no mystery at all that the steady, semi-random accretion of current events should include a lot of surprises. As theorist Alvin Toffler noted in 1971, our primary experience of the future is one of shock, rather than recognition or welcome.
Two years ago, I wrote a column about prognostication ("You, Too, Can Predict the Future Using Math"), and today I stand by every word of it. There are things you can know with relative certainty: that the sun will rise and set, that the seasons will change, that the calendar will continue to peel back, one day at a time. Moreover, by studying today's demographic data, you can even forecast the makeup and age distribution of tomorrow's local or global or interplanetary population.
Even weather—the classic chaotic system, highly resistant to direct prediction—generally yields to statistical analysis. If my Farmer's Almanac tells me that March is Denver's snowiest month, and November its driest, then that does probably tell me something about what 2002 will look like. Also 2003, 2005 and even 2020. I can even use almanac data to predict the chance of rain or snow on a particular date, with reasonable accuracy.
Still, there's a lot more to the future than just the weather. The intertwining serpents of economics and technology have a huge effect on our lives, both directly and through their influence on politics. To some extent, these forces are predictable as well: over time, prices and salaries and stock markets tend to grow exponentially. This isn't simply a function of inflation: we genuinely get richer over time, as more and more energy and brainpower are harvested to extract useful information and material from the world around us. The steadily dropping price of gold is one example: there is simply more of it around than there used to be, and not even a nuclear war will mix it all back into the Earth's crust again.
The future never fails to deal wild cards
Technological innovation is something we'd all like to know about in advance. Unfortunately, this is even harder to predict, since it's a complex function of wealth, population, politics, culture and luck. Still, a large, wealthy, open-minded country can be expected to push the state of the art in a variety of fields, and it's not too difficult to predict which countries these will be, at least over the span of a few decades. We may not know what the innovations will be, but we can probably guess where most of them will occur, and whom they will enrich.
These techniques lead to a science-fictional process I call "shallow extrapolation," where the trends and fads of the present day are simply rolled on and on until they assume gargantuan proportions. The Overpopulation Future. The Ran-Out-of-Energy Future. The Future Run by Japanese Corporations. The best of these are the stories which extrapolate many trends at once, keeping track of politics, fashion, health, housing and all the hundreds of other factors which make up our daily lives.
But this ignores the main lesson of 2001, and indeed of all human history—as any game designer can tell you, there are wildcards, in the deck. Natural disasters strike without warning, devastating local populations and economies, straining infrastructure and erasing the works of civilization. Economies can become unstable and crash. Scientific breakthroughs can toss decades or centuries of learning out the window, and spawn entire industries overnight. New diseases and crop pests can dramatically alter the habits of even a stubborn culture. And these events are not rare—any typical decade contains several.
And of course there is the human element as well: the intrusion of free will in an otherwise deterministic world. Some human behavior can be modeled in simple cause-and-effect ways, and some of it is cyclic or generational or constant (such as the need for food and water). Even these are hard to piece together accurately, although economists and futurists spend their whole lives in the attempt, with some modest successes to their credit. Isaac Asimov's Foundation series was dedicated to this idea.
The thankless job of science fiction
But even the best economists (especially the best economists) will tell you that humans are not deterministic. Philosophers can argue until the end of time about whether free will exists, whether we're complex machines or quantum randomizers or genuine spiritual entities who can shape events through force of will. Either way, in practical terms history is littered with people who single-handedly changed the world, and with it the entire course of the future, for better or worse. In practical terms, human beings are the wildest cards of all.
For this reason, the job of science fiction is not to predict "the future," but to sift through the infinity of possible futures and to bring back lessons which can help us here in the present day. One corollary of this notion is that probable futures have more to teach us than improbable ones do. Maybe we'll all learn to fly next week, or to live in perfect peace, but I wouldn't make plans around it.
And this is an important point, because the shallow-extrapolation futures are not probable. They contain no surprises, no hiccups, no lightning bolts from the clear blue sky. This is exactly why novels like John Brunner's 1968 Stand on Zanzibar and William Gibson's 1984 Neuromancer are classics of uncanny foresight, even though they get most of the specifics wrong. Through it all, these authors understood that the new century would be a tumultuous time, of ethnic tension and population growth, of war and mass murder and petty crime, of big countries beset by small ones, and vice versa. Hell, most times are like that. Then there is the additional layering of bewilderment, future shock, techno-wonder and the beacon of individual achievement, which has never gone out of style and never will.
The times ahead will be exactly like this: a kaleidoscopic jumble of slaps in the face and pennies from heaven, populated by ordinary people struggling to make sense of it all, and to shape a new (and hopefully better) future for themselves and their children to inhabit. There's nothing science-fictional about this: We are all time travelers, and it's the very mystery of our destination that makes the journey worthwhile.
Wil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, science fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots, and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short fiction has graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Science Fiction Age and other major publications, and his novel-length works include Aggressor Six, the New York Times notable Bloom, and The Collapsium.
