[HN Gopher] Could, should, might, shouldn't - A taxonomy of futu...
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Could, should, might, shouldn't - A taxonomy of futurists
Author : doener
Score : 51 points
Date : 2021-07-27 08:26 UTC (2 days ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Nick Foster's matrix might be revealed in a mix of principles:
|
| Technology is the study of _means_ , as John Stuart Mill put it.
| (Mill contrasts this with science, the study of _causes_.) A
| technology is a verb, a process to obtain a result. We often see
| the manifestations (tools, mechanisms, products), but those
| merely support and guide the process.
|
| - Any intervention has both _intended_ and _unintended_ effects.
|
| - Effects may be _manifest_ or _latent_ , similar to Robert K.
| Merton's notion of manifest and latent functions.
|
| - Effects, whether manifest or latent, may be short-term or long-
| term.
|
| - The overall process may be readily communicated (learned, sold,
| advocated, adopted), or difficult.
|
| - Implementations and interactions may be simple or complex.
|
| That's five dimensions rather than two, though there's a strong
| correlation between most of the last five might be collapsed to a
| simple/complex or easy/difficult axis. And of course, the
| distributions aren't binary but continuous, though they're
| probably not strictly normally distributed.
|
| Optimists deal with the intended, manifest, short-term, and
| readily grasped.
|
| Pessimists deal with the unintended, latent, long-term, and that
| grasped only with difficulty.
|
| In discussing latent and manifest functions, Merton makes the
| observation that:
|
| _Discovery of latent functions represents significant increments
| in sociological knowledge .... It is precisely the latent
| functions of a practice or belief which are not common knowledge,
| for these are unintended and generally unrecognized social and
| psychological consequences._
|
| Robert K. Merton, "Manifest and Latent Functions", in Wesley
| Longhofer, Daniel Winchester (eds) _Social Theory Re-Wired_ ,
| Routledge (2016). https://www.worldcat.org/title/social-theory-
| re-wired-new-co...
|
| There are other elements to this, including positivity bias and
| the power of denial over unpleasant truths. These seem fairly
| evident in the futurist trade.
|
| I read Alvin Toffler's _Future Shock_ for the first time last
| year, on its 50th anniversary. My overall impression was that the
| book actually holds up quite well, though its best points are
| generally those looking at the long-term complications of
| technology. Individual technology advocates are most likely to be
| wrong, almost always because they were grossly overoptimistic
| (again, with a few exceptions). Many of the social predictions
| seem quaint, but that 's almost always because they did in fact
| come true, and we're living in the world that's resulted from
| this, such that the view from the other side seems naive. The
| psychological elements, the ongoing psychological strain of
| dealing with continuous change, seems highly apropos.
| vonnik wrote:
| AI tends to accentuate many of the types that Foster describes,
| and the trends in Merton's rubric above.
|
| AI millenarians (Musk, EA, MIRI) combine certainty that
| superintelligence will come about with concern that it will be
| bad. They are in Foster's "shouldn't" class.
|
| AI boosters, which are most of the people working on AI in big
| tech and startups, are in the "could" bucket. They still see
| the rainbows, short term and long term.
|
| AI pragmatists (Hinton, LeCun, Ng) minimize what AI can do,
| focus on near term gains, and on the difficulties in achieving
| them. These people are also mostly in big tech and startups,
| but usually closer to the code and the data. They are the
| "shoulds" and sometimes the "mights".
|
| But there are a couple other dimensions to AI that I'm not sure
| I have the right words for.
|
| There's a certain kind of person who is more of an adventurer.
| They just want to be close to the action, almost regardless of
| the outcome. They are building AI, sometimes very powerful AI,
| but the ultimate consequences of that work are less important
| than the fact that they, as individuals, are at the fulcrum of
| this historical moment.
|
| And there is a large faith-based element to AI, which I suspect
| applies to other futurist topics to a lesser extent. And that
| faith-based framework creates tribal arguments about
| unfalsifiable claims, like the advent of superintelligence.
| Instead of "should" or "should", they fit into the "will"
| class, and they provoke skepticism that is just as strong and
| irrational. Pragmatists sometimes tip over into this group.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| > Optimists deal with the intended, manifest, short-term, and
| readily grasped. Pessimists deal with the unintended, latent,
| long-term, and that grasped only with difficulty.
|
| Man, this is DEEPLY untrue if taken as a rule. Some of the most
| naive, shallow, and short-term thinking I've seen has been by
| pessimists and technology skeptics.
|
| Malthusian predictions are the most glaring and there's a 200
| year long history of its wrongness, spanning over the most
| explosive expansion of both population AND wealth/wellbeing in
| human history.
|
| And I know many of us on HN are sick and tired of tech
| bulls**ters and are understandably jaded about many aspects of
| tech progress, but Malthusian ideas have, when some have really
| taken them to heart, led to some pretty rotten results, such as
| the British letting the Irish starve. But we still have plenty
| of similar zero/negative-sum thinking today on both the left
| and the right (although it seems the vanguard Left today is
| Degrowthist, there was a time when it was the Left that was
| most optimistic for the glorious future and accused "Limits to
| Growth" types as using Malthusian ideas to reinforce the status
| quo).
|
| The reality is that humanity has massive potential, but also
| massive agency for good AND ill. To surrender to zero sum,
| degrowth/Malthusian/neoLuddite thinking has huge consequences
| because it leaves us without the tools we'll need to address
| the problems of today and the future. Malthusians can't only
| see the short term use of resources by people, not how people
| working together can actually create greater abundance long
| term. They look at the amount of land, the number of mouths and
| number of births to extrapolate poverty and starvation but they
| don't look deeper, to the Industrial Revolution that was
| happening under Malthus' own nose, how those people working
| together increase yields and develop better medical technology
| to resolve the problems that in the short term seemed
| insurmountable. Progress has negative consequences, but the
| status quo is absolutely murderous long-term.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I do not see any proof that the Malthusian predictions were
| wrong, on the contrary.
|
| There has been indeed as you say "an explosive expansion of
| wealth".
|
| While so much wealth would have been enough so that a much
| smaller population could have lived much better, the increase
| of wealth has been used so that a larger population lives
| about as well as before.
|
| While modern technology provides a number of devices that
| allow me to spend much less time with chores than my
| ancestors, e.g. microwave oven, refrigerator, automatic
| washing machine, computer, mobile phone, there are a lot of
| things that I cannot hope to ever be able to buy, even if I
| am supposed to be a well paid professional, which my
| grandparents were able to buy from their salaries, e.g. large
| houses and land.
|
| Moreover I am not even able to buy food of a quality
| comparable to that of my grandparents. While food is very
| cheap now, food of a quality similar to what they had can no
| longer be found anywhere that I am aware of.
|
| I have never seen any evidence supporting this dream of
| "people working together who can actually create greater
| abundance long term".
|
| People working together or single will continue to discover
| more efficient ways to make everything that we need, but no
| matter what they do, they cannot create an extra piece of
| land for me to have a house, or an extra forest like those in
| which I was happy to wander as a child, but which now do not
| exist any more, having been replaced by cultures or buildings
| or just wasteland.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| In _A Farewell to Alms_ , UC Davis professor of economics
| Gregory Clark makes the cogent point that both the richest
| _and poorest_ people who have ever lived, are alive today.
|
| Modern technology makes possible great wealth. It also
| makes absolutely crushing poverty ... survivable. Though
| not especially enjoyable.
|
| https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691141282/a
| -...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'd suggest that the apparent shallowness of technology
| skeptics comes from two principle factors:
|
| - The most readily-dismissed skeptics are those whose
| critiques are readily grasped ... and wrong. Effectively this
| is a strawman dismissal, as the strong criticisms are _not_
| addressed substantively. (Your own criticism fails to detail
| what specific elements of Malthusian though, either original
| or current, you disagree with.)
|
| - Those who are prone to dismiss skeptics are themselves
| frequently falling victim to the biases I've mentioned.
|
| The principle omission from Malthus's calculus was that
| humans would spend the next 200+ years consuming the great
| prize of stored fossil fuels in the Earth, a nonrenewable
| resource which would eventually overwhelm its environmental
| sinks as well, at rates of up to 5 million times those of
| formation.[1] Increases in net human productivity track very
| closely to per-capita energy usage.[2]
|
| Note that in Adam Smith's own arguments over how nations grew
| their wealth, he _also_ missed the role the Industrial
| Revolution and fossil-fuel powered machinery would play. That
| 's a significant omission, because Smith was a Scott, living
| and working in Glasgow at the same time as James Watt,
| inventor of the steam engine, and more than that, _arranged
| for Watt 's appointment to the University of Glasgow and had
| intimate discussions with Watt about his work._ The net
| result of this is _one brief mention_ within _Wealth of
| Nations_ , concerning the event by which an improvement was
| made to the engine (a boy wanting to play with his friends).
| Even Smith's contemporaneous biographer, Dugald Stewart,
| fails to mention Watt at all.[4]
|
| The significance of the Industrial Revolution was _not_
| evident even to those smack in the middle of it. Nor was it
| especially beneficial to the bulk of the population until the
| rise of the labour movement in Britain. The Irish Potato
| Famine (1845--1852, 1 million deaths, a 20--25% fall in
| Ireland 's population _from which it has not yet recovered_
| )[5], for what it's worth, happened directly in the middle of
| the first Industrial Revolution.
|
| The core of the "limits to growth" view is just that: that
| growth has _limits_. That unconstrained, those limits _will_
| out. Just where those limits lie, or what mechanisms might
| further delay their realisation for another few decades, isn
| 't always clear. But pointing out the moral reprehensibility
| of one means of imposing them doesn't mean others won't
| eventually manifest. War, disease, and famine are the usual
| suspects. It's interesting to note that ideological rejection
| of _Limits to Growth_ was led by _both_ the left _and_ the
| right.[6] Singing "la-la-la" and closing ones eyes is merely
| wishful thinking and the fallacy of argument from
| consequence.[7]
|
| The underlying motivation I find most compelling in the
| Limits discussion is of coming up with _better_ understanding
| of what growth is, what causes it, what the specific
| mechanisms of technology are, and were limits might be found.
| My realisation in studying the question for well over a
| decade is that these questions _aren 't_ well-answered by the
| proponents of unlimited growth, that their reasoning often
| appears motivated (whether consciously or not), and that
| there's a widespread agreement among economists that growth
| --- the topic of Smith's foundational book --- is _NOT_ well-
| understood.[8]
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. See Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003)
| https://www-
| legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_C... (PDF)
|
| 2. Vaclav Smil's _Energy and Civilization_ (2018) and _Energy
| in World History_ (1994) both illustrate this in depth.
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-
| his... https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-
| history/oclc/... Robert J. Gordon's _The Rise and Fall of
| American Growth " (2017) does _not* take this view, but
| nonetheless notes that industrial output per worker rose in
| lockstep with direct energy _supplied_ per worker, measured
| in either kilowatts or horsepower.
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/rise-and-fall-of-american-
| gro... Steve Keen argues that the Cobb-Douglas production
| function, in which output is a function of capital and
| labour, is vastly more powerful as an explanation (with a far
| smaller residual) when an _energy_ term is added. See "A
| Note on the Role of Energy in Production" (2019) https://www.
| sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...
| "Incorporating Energy Into Production Functions" https://www.
| forbes.com/sites/stevekeen/2016/08/19/incorporat...
|
| 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt
|
| 4. Life of Adam Smith
| https://delong.typepad.com/files/stewart.pdf
|
| 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
|
| 6. See Mauricio Schoijet, "Limits to Growth and the Rise of
| Catastrophism" (1999) for a catalogue of responses.
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/3985399
|
| 7. https://yandoo.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/argument-from-
| conseq...
|
| 8. See for example Paul Krugman and Tony Atkinson in
| conversation, beginning at 38m53s:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l6E3mUNW70&t=38m53s and
| discussed here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments
| /1wf57z/econ_pa...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| NB, for other books looking at history through the lens of
| history:
|
| https://joindiaspora.com/posts/ee8c190017d501391a81002590d8
| e...
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _Pessimists deal with the unintended, latent, long-term, and
| that grasped only with difficulty._
|
| It's a sign of extreme optimism to think that unintented,
| latent, long term and difficult to grasp implications can be
| predicted at all when the subject is as complex as "everything
| human beings value."
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I made no claim that unintended / long term / latent /
| difficult-to-grasp concerns _can_ be accurately predicted.
| _Difficulty of demonstration_ does _not_ mean "less likely
| to occcur".
|
| However the more common issue is that they're simply entirely
| ignored or dismissed, often with quips similar to the one
| you've used here.
|
| Typically by those who are unwaveringly optimistic about the
| intended, manifest, short-term, and easily-grasped aspects of
| phenomena or interventions.
| mistermann wrote:
| > However the more common issue is that they're simply
| entirely ignored or dismissed, often with quips similar to
| the one you've used here.
|
| Members of each group do this to each other, although
| perhaps not identically.
| whatshisface wrote:
| We're presently operating at a level of abstraction that
| makes it impossible to accept or dismiss anything.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Several items are concretised in this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27998576
|
| I've addressed specific dismissals and their proponents
| numerous times on my subreddit, search "cornucopians":
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=cornucopian
| s&r...
|
| One of the most cogent arguments for limits I've found is
| in William Ophuls, _Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity_
| , most especially the first three chapters. The book is
| available on the Internet Archive:
|
| https://archive.org/details/ecologypoliticso0000ophu/page
| /n7...
|
| As well as many libraries: https://www.worldcat.org/searc
| h?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=au%3Ao...
|
| Other examples of dismissed consequences can be found in
| the works of Naomi Oreskes, notably _Merchants of Doubt_
| , on the negative long-term latent and complex
| consequences of asbestos, lead, CFCs, cigarette smoke,
| and fossil fuels. There are also the consequences of
| pesticides (both environmental contamination and
| increased resistance), antibiotics (resistance), various
| medications (thalidomide comes to mind), advertising,
| shipping (invasive species), just off the top of my head.
|
| Kyle Harper's _The Fate of Rome_ argues compellingly that
| civilisations co-evolve with their plagues, which raises
| some interesting implications.
|
| I've been suggesting in conversations elsewhere that
| we're living in an era of consequences.
| blueyes wrote:
| Merton's ideas seem really useful, thanks for linking to them.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| He's a huge name in sociology.
|
| I'd just sort of stumbled across a reference, then kept
| finding good stuff in his work.
|
| His son, Robert _C._ Merton, is a Nobel laureate economist,
| FWIW.
|
| (Cue the old economics-sociology rivalry.)
| ozataman wrote:
| I think what you want here is a radar chart, not a 2-2 matrix. I
| suspect most people embody these different types to varying
| degrees over time, topics and circumstances.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Another useful distinction might be between people who make
| predictions, prescriptions, imaginings, warnings, etc., about
| things they are already expert in (a scientist making narrow
| claims about their specific domain, a SF writer unpacking the
| social ramifications of some technology in their story), and a
| self-described futurist, who has made it their job to talk about
| the future in a broader way.
|
| That is, people who you would describe as futurists _post hoc_ ,
| and people who have it on their business cards. I am highly
| skeptical of the latter!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I don't find the distinction is quite so clear. There seem to
| be two forces coming to bear.
|
| One is _specific expertise_ in some domain. Here, there 's a
| challenge in that _generalists_ must _of necessity_ have
| _lesser specific expertise_ than, well, _experts_. This a
| general problem (so to speak) of synoptic or syncretic works.
| (One such has a wonderful disclaimer in its preface, I 'll see
| if I can dig that up.)
|
| The other is _self-interest in a specific application area_.
| This is where _knowledge_ becomes secodary to _bias_ , and
| there are numerous cases of people with deep expertise in
| specific fields proving poor counsel for considered and
| complete judgement of them. Edward Midgely (inventor of two of
| the greatest scourges of the 20th century, leaded petrol and
| chloroflourocarbon refrigerants) is perhaps the exemplar of
| this tendency, though he has ample company.
|
| As I mentioned earlier in thread, Alvin Toffler, author of
| _Future Shock_ (1970), does _pretty well_ in giving _both_ the
| optimistic and pessimistic side of technologies. In my
| estimation, the book 's strengths largely come from critics,
| its weaknesses largely from specific domain experts. Toffler
| himself (and his often under-credited wife) are _not_ domain
| experts themselves.
|
| There's a generalist-class which often climbs on the
| cheerleading wagon, though, and that is those who advocate for
| numerous technologies, though they might better be seen as
| _specialists in advocacy, public relations, and propaganda_.
| Beware those whose principle interest is in making others look
| good. (Or bad.)
|
| There are also experts who have voiced strong cautions over
| specific technologies. They're often sidelined for doing so (a
| general hazard of whistleblowing), though some have seen
| success. One such case is Paul Baran, a co-inventer of packet-
| based switched networks, the technology on which the Internet
| was based. Baran wrote numerous articles whilst at RAND
| cautioning against risks of computing _in the 1960s_ , many of
| which read as highly relevant and prescient even today. Those
| are now freely available to the public at my specific request:
|
| https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/baran_paul.html
|
| I've compiled a listing of other early cautions concerning
| privacy and surveillance around computer technology:
|
| https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105074933053020193
| karaterobot wrote:
| It's definitely a fuzzy distinction. Candidly, I'm skeptical
| about generalized methods that make claims about the future
| _and_ pretend to do so rigorously.
|
| The image that comes to mind when someone says "futurology"
| is those 19th century drawings of people riding flying
| bicycles to work: breathless excitement, comic in hindsight.
|
| To the extent that someone claims they can forecast something
| with so much uncertainty, the hair on my neck starts to stand
| up.
|
| And maybe I'm condemning a straw man, but it seems like this
| is your _generalist-class_ , and most of the other groups who
| would not be as likely to self-identify as a futurist per se.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I found the quote I was looking for, it's in Arthur S.
| Iberal, _Toward a General Science of Viable Systems_
| (1972), and he 's quoting Arnold Toynbee, _A Study of
| History_ (1962). The passage concerns looking backwards
| rather than forwards, though the sentiment is similar:
|
| _There is a strong tendency to depreciate works ... which
| are created by single mids, and the depreciation becomes
| the more emphatic the nearer such works approximate to
| being 'Universal Histories'. For example, Mr. H. G.
| Wells',_ The Outline of History _was received with
| unmistakable hostility by a number of historical
| specialists. They criticized severely the errors which they
| discovered at the points where the writer, in his long
| journey through time and space, happened to traverse their
| tiny allotments. They seemed nnot to realize that, in re-
| living the entire life of Mankind as a single imaginative
| experience; Mr. Wells was achieving something which they
| themselves would hardly have dared to attempt -- something,
| perhaps, of which they had never conceived the possibility.
| In fact, the purpose and value of Mr. Wells ' book seem to
| have been better appreciated by the general public than by
| the professional historians of the day._
|
| As to specificity of predictions, the example I like to use
| is of distinguishing between _chronological predictions_ ,
| that a specific even will happen on a specific schedule,
| and _trigger or relational predictions_ , that one event or
| set of relationships predicates another.
|
| If a few minutes after 9 a.m. on the morning of 10
| September 2001, you'd been standing on the corner of
| Liberty and West streets in lower Manhattan, looking north,
| and somebody were to ask you how much longer the two towers
| across the way would stand, your guess might have been
| decades to a century or more. If someone asked you the same
| question 24 hours later, your estimate might have been
| revised downwards considerably.
|
| Geology is a study which is remarkably _imprecise_ in
| predicting when specific large-magnitude events will occur
| (earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, etc.), though it has
| developed a very strong facility for suggesting _where_
| such indcidents are likely (and more pointedly, where not).
| The temporal uncertainty is a given due to the domain,
| characteristics, and timeline. The locational certainty is
| due largely to the predictability of what dynamics and
| structures give rise to events. (Yes, there are still
| surprises in both dimensions, though these tend to accrue
| additional knowledge.)
|
| All of the social and behavioural sciences have the
| handicap that _the studies themselves exist within the
| system they are studying_. Psychology, economics,
| sociology, political science, etc., operate within domains
| in which they are themselves among the variables and causal
| agents. Physical and biological sciences, for the most
| part, do not. This is seems to me a principle further
| confounding factor for the behavioural sciences, though it
| 's not an insurmountable one. Even within those domains,
| activities and actions exist within constraint parameters,
| and eventually those constraints (one might call them ...
| limits) interpose.
|
| Peter Turchin is among those who's been doing interesting
| work in computational history, with some success.
| blazespin wrote:
| This is an awesome start, but needs formalizing! She/He's really
| onto something here. Someone skilled here needs to pick this up.
| mistermann wrote:
| Big time, the world has (might have?) a severe lack of
| metacognition, diversity of thinking styles and capabilities
| (perceived upper bound), self-awareness, curiousity, etc.
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