[ExI] What's Wrong With Academic Futurists?

[Anders Sandberg]

Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> , 27/1/2014 6:41 PM:
On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 10:39 AM, Robin D Hanson <rhanson at gmu.edu> wrote:

I've given talks to military futurist groups before, FYI.

If the military has an accurate view of the future, they sure don't seem to be sharing that information with the rest of government. Sad that.

Governments typically don't have a good way of sharing information with themselves. Some of it is just normal administrative inefficiency and malfunctions. But some of it is by design: you do not want the military to tell the law-makers what policies to set. And to some extent having accurate futures (or rather,being believed to be accurate) is setting policy. 
In practice, I have the distinct impression from my dealings with the military futures world that they are pretty open with most of their analysis. Forecasting trouble spots is generically useful, and they like to tell anybody in government who wants to listen about their findings. In practice of course plenty of people who ought to listen have other priorities. Also, I have not seen any hints of methodology over there that looks much better than good futures study methods elsewhere: saying smart stuff about the future is *hard*. 

(I like to mention UK Foresight, which does some really good broad looks at different topics, http://www.bis.gov.uk/foresight/publications/reports - but while they do a great job most politicians do not have the time to read them, and most civil servants only do it if the report is apparently about their domain.)

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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