We're not going to try to predict the future. At least not today. Today, I want to talk about the people who think the future for a living.
A category I belong to myself.
There is a whole class of them, scattered across disciplines, each with a respectable name today: prospectivists, forecasters, futurists, intelligence analysts, strategy consultants.
Modern-day Delphis, if you will.
And underneath all the sophistication of our instruments, there is still another kind of future-reader. Very much alive, and, believe me or not, very much used in high circles of power.
Psychics. Mediums. Fortune tellers.
I'm not interested in debating esotericism. Nor am I claiming that this is universal. But I have known enough powerful men (and I insist on men because that was the part that initially surprised me) to have watched them pass around the phone number of fortune tellers they trusted.
These were executives, investors, political figures. People surrounded by analysts, lawyers, advisers, intelligence, proprietary data and information systems that cost more than most companies.
Yet, somewhere outside the official architecture of decision, someone read the cards using a Lenormand deck, and told them what came next.
This is an old phenomenon.
Rome folded auspices into its political and military life. European courts kept astrologers. After Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, Nancy Reagan's reliance on astrologer Joan Quigley became consequential enough that former White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan later wrote about astrology influencing the presidential schedule.
You can call all of this superstition and move on. But you would miss the point of this brief:
Why does someone with access to extraordinary amounts of information still want to be told what will happen?
I think the answer is deceptively simple: information does not solve the problem, and it never did. You still have to act on something that has not happened yet. And you will have to live with the consequences of getting it wrong.
That's also called: making decisions under uncertainty.
Modern foresight has not solved that problem. Nor should we expect it to. What it has done is make uncertainty more explicit, structured and, in some forms of forecasting, measurable.
That is progress. But... someone still has to decide.
That is what interests me and will guide the reflection that follows:
What happens when our representations of the future enter decisions in the present? How does something that does not exist yet move money, people and institutions today?
To answer that, we need to follow the future through three different moments.
First, while it is still only something we are trying to know. Then, when a representation of it becomes credible enough to make people act. And finally, when those actions begin building the very future they were supposed to anticipate.
That is where I think the future becomes a problem of power.
We never had access to the future
The history of thinking about the future is, in part, a history of sophisticated ways of dealing with one stubborn fact: we cannot know it.
We learned to describe our ignorance of the future more precisely.