Foresight is not about making predictions. Rather, it's a tool for identifying dynamics of change, in part by exploring the implications of those changes. This is a point I've made often enough that even I'm sick of it -- but it remains an idea that not enough people understand. It's next to useless to say "X will happen;" it's much more valuable to say "here's why X could happen."

One of the trickier aspects of this formulation of foresight is the need to keep an eye on how the dynamics of change themselves are evolving. It's easy to get locked into a particular idiom of futurism, calling upon standard examples and well-known drivers as we work through what a turbulent decade or three might hold. It's comforting to be able to go back to the old standbys, confident that the audience can sing along.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the role technological change plays in futurism. The big picture visions of what the next 20-50 years could hold in terms of technologies haven't changed considerably since the beginning of the century, and (for the most part) since the early 1990s. Moreover, what we've seen in terms of real-world, actual technological change has been largely evolutionary, not revolutionary. Or, more to the point, the revolutions that have occurred have not been in the world of technologies.

Here's what I mean: if you were to grab a future-oriented text from the early part of the last decade, you'd find discussions of technological concepts that radical futurists and "hard science" science fiction writers were seeing as being on the horizon, developments like:

Molecular nanotechnology



Artificial intelligence and robots galore



3D printers



Augmented reality



Ultra-high speed mobile networks



Synthetic biology



Life extension



Space colonies I could go on, but you get the picture. All of those technologies appeared in the "hard science" science fiction game series Transhuman Space, which I worked on in 2001 to 2003. Most could easily be found in various "what the future will look like" articles and books from the late 1990s. Since then, some of those concepts have turned into reality, while others remain on the horizon. But pin down a futurist today and ask what technologies they expect to see over the next few decades, and you'll get a remarkably similar list -- often an identical one. As a telling example, the list above could serve as a rough guide to the current curriculum of the Singularity University, minus the investment advice. There hasn't been a ground-breaking new vision of technological futures in at least 10 years, probably closer to 15; nearly all of the technological scenarios talked about at present derive in an incremental, evolutionary way from the scenarios of more than a decade ago. The closest thing to an emerging paradigm of technological futures concerns the role of sensors and mobile cameras in terms of privacy, surveillance, and power. It's still fairly evolutionary (again, I could cite examples from Transhuman Space), but more importantly, it's much more about the social uses of technologies than about the technologies themselves. For me, that's an interesting signal. In many ways, we can argue that the major drivers of The Future, over the past decade and very likely to continue for some time, are primarily socio-cultural. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons futurists often are uncomfortable with this line of foresight thinking, and most do it rather poorly. But while those of us in the futures world have been talking about nanotechnology, fast mobile networks, bioengineering and such over the past decade, very few of us even came close to imagining back in the late 1990s/early 2000s that by the early 2010s we'd see:

The effective collapse of American hegemony.



The inability/unwillingness of world leaders to respond to global warming.



The death spiral of the European Union.



Accelerating economic inequality.



Major changes to global demographics, especially population forecasts.



The unregulated expansion of financial instruments based on little more than betting on other financial instruments.



That the Koreas would remain divided.



That there hasn't been a major biological, radiological, or nuclear terror event.



The speed of urbanization, especially in the developing world.

