[ExI] What's Wrong With Academic Futurists?

[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 5:43 PM,   Robin D Hanson <rhanson at gmu.edu> wrote:

> On Jan 24, 2014, at 1:03 PM, Keith Henson wrote:

>> I find it hard to take futurists seriously who are not on the bleeding
>> edge of technology, but even those can be blind to the obvious.
>
> To the contrary, I find it hard to take seriously futurists who seem to spend
> all their time focused on the latest tech press releases.

Sorry, my error.  I meant _working_ on the bleeding edge, not just
reading about it.

So I take Eric Drexler seriously on his projections of radical
abundance.  I take Ralph Merkle seriously on such topics.  Though with
the caveat that we get to the nanotech era without major resource
disruptions, particularly with respect to energy.

> At most that helps you
> see short term fluctuations. Futurists interested in the long term should focus
> on long term trends and not so much short term fluctuations.

Far as I know, none of the futurists projected the rise of cell phones
or smart phones before it happened, though the SF writers did better.
Far as I know, none of them predicted the financial meltdown of 2008.

snip to reply to Natasha

> These are the kind of issues I wanted to get people to talk about. If we want accurate estimates of the future, why wouldn't people who want to get paid by large organizations be a good source? Why would people who use stat, math, and formula be unreliable estimators, relative to people who are visionary and innovator/entrepreneurs?  Does data on past predictions support this choice?

If you have not read it, I suggest "The Black Swan."  To quote the
Wikipedia article,

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:

1  The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and
rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in
history, science, finance, and technology

2  The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare
events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small
probabilities)

3  The psychological biases that make people individually and
collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of
the rare event in historical affairs

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I work on power satellites, particularly the aspect of how to
construct them at a cost where they make economic sense.  I cannot
predict that they will happen.  But the consequence of not solving the
energy problem some way (such as LENR, StratoSolar or nanotech PV
paint) are a collapse in the world population.  That could happen
anyway as anyone who read "Spillover" knows.  Heck, it's worse than
that, as was just reported here this week, a _plant_ virus crossed
into an animal (bees) that has as long a genetic separation from
plants as we do.  Bad enough we should get viruses from chimps or
bats, but soybeans?

How do you model a future that may or may not see a huge population
drop from crop failures or disease or both? How about wars waged with
propulsion lasers?

I have thought about the future for a long time and have no confidence
in people's ability to predict it.  Best they can do is project the
consequences of certain things, but even there . . . .

Keith