Stories of the future - science fiction, foresight and the future

Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.
- Confucious

In Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail (detailed review here), he raised to my attention this stellar quote from Paul Graham on the efficiencies of following market trends in business. This lesson from Google I think can be applied to any industry and any business. It’s easy to move with currents than try to swim against them:

“The Web naturally has a certain grain, and Google is aligned with it. That’s why their success seems so effortless. They’re sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels. Google doesn’t try to force things to happen their way. They try to figure out what’s going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does. “(p70)

The world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significance as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language….We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.

Benjamin Whorf (1940), cited in ‘Attention and Human Performance’ by Steven W. Keele 1973 [p142]

I’ve just completed a unit on Sustainability as part of my masters in Foresight. We had a fantastic lecture from Frank Fisher, who is a published writer and is involved at Swinburne’s National Centre for Sustainability. Frank’s a keen cycler. I am a keen cycler. The following quote from his writing was one that shifted my thinking on what it means to be passed by a car on a hill.

Imagine a cyclist with enough insight to recognise that her apparently slow progress from one urban location to another is actually some three or four times faster than the speedy DODOs (driver only driver owned car) whizzing past her. To do this she would have to be aware of the time drivers spend earning the right to access (i.e. purchase) their cars and that that time must be factored into the calculation of their speed. In most cases therefore, DODOs in an urban context are the wrong messages!”

Frank Fisher. ‘Imag(in)ing Sustainability: metaphorical change for sustainability’, JVAEE, 30, 1. 2007.

The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible.

A story is a complete dramatic action - and in good stories, the characters are shown through the action and the action is controlled through the characters, and the result of this is meaning that derives from the whole presented experience. I myself prefer to say that a story is a dramatic event that involves a person because he is a person, and a particular person - that is, because he shares in the general human condition and in some specific human situation. A story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality. I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me, and when she returned them, she said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do,” and I thought to myself that that was right; when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there - showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.

Flannery O’Connor, quoted from ‘Writing Short Stories’
In ‘The Art of The Short Story’ by Wendy Martin

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

~ Albert Einstein

H.G. Wells produced many novels and works of non-fiction about the future. The foregoing transcript was aired by the BBC on 19 November, 1932 at the end of a radio program about communications.

It seems an odd thing to me that though we have thousands and thousands of professors and hundreds of thousands of students of history working upon the records of the past, there is not a single person anywhere who makes a whole-time job of estimating the future consequences of new inventions and new devices. There is not a single Professor of Foresight in the world. But why shouldn’t there be? All these new things, these new inventions and new powers, come crowding along; every one is fraught with consequences, and yet it is only after something has hit us hard that we set about dealing with it.

Tonight we are confronted with two facts, one bad and one good; the first, which has only been hinted at, that acts of war have become hideously immediate and far reaching; and the second that the whole round world can be brought together into one brotherhood, into one communion, one close-knit freely communicating citizenship, far more easily today, than was possible with even such a little country as England a century ago.

View the full trnascript - http://www.swin.edu.au/agse/courses/foresight/attachments/wanted - Professors of Foresight (wells).pdf

Thanks to the folks at Swinburne University for making this available.

We spend so much time thinking about the present, that the future escapes us. This isn’t something that occurs just with individuals. It happens at all levels of society. Governments, organisations, and people. For uni not so long ago I was researching this topic and came across this quote in ‘Competing for the future’, by Prahalad and Hamel. There’s a lot in this quote that the our organisations could learn from.

Recently one of us spent a day with the top officers of a well known U.S. company. The question put to these managers was simple: What are the forces already at work in this industry that have the potential to profoundly transform industry structure?

A heated discussion followed, and a dozen discontinuities were identified. One of the potential drivers was picked at random, and the top team was asked, “Could you sustain a debate for a full day, among yourselves, about the implications of this trend to your company and the industry? Do you understand how fast this trend is emerging in different markets around the world, the specific technologies that are propelling it, the technology choices competitors are making, which companies are in the lead, who has the most to gain and the most to lose, the investment strategies of your competitors via-a-vis this trend, and the variety of ways in which this trend may influence customers demands and needs?

The top team agreed that it simply didn’t know enough about this critical driving force to answer these questions, and certainly couldn’t keep a detailed, intelligent debate going for a full day. A few people suggested that these questions weren’t really fair.

They were then asked, “Could you sustain a debate for eight hours on the issue of how you allocate corporate overheads, set sales targets, and manage transfer prices?” Now this was a fair question. “On this we could keep going for eight days, no sweat,” replied a senior executive.

Suddenly the point hit them: This group of managers was not in control of their company’s destiny. They had surrendered control of that destiny to competitors who were willing to devote the time and intellectual energy necessary to understand and influence the forces shaping the future of the industry.

Hamel, G & Prahalad, C K 1996, Competing for the future, Harvard Business School Press, Boston

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. - Isaac Asimov