Teaching the Future of Technology in the History Classroom: A Case Study

Asking Questions

Historical inquiry begins with questions. I reminded the students that the origins of the word history—the Greek historia—meant “inquiry,” and an historian was an inquirer, one who asks and answered questions. In a similar way, the study of the future is a kind of inquiry and so begins with asking the right questions. I wanted the students to look beyond the obvious and facile question of “What is the future of artificial intelligence?” or “What is the future of gene editing?” Often when we say we want to know the future of some subject, what we usually mean is that we want to know the state of some system at point X in the future. One way to think about the study of history is to say that it is an examination of how various systems—political, social, economic—“behaved” in the past. To study the history of the Roman Empire, for example, or the dislocation and mass movement of people after World War II offers ideas about how an analogous system might behave in the future. We read from Donella Meadow’s Thinking in Systems (Meadows 2008) as an introduction to thinking about the past, and the future, in terms of the behavior of systems.

I had students read the global history of technology as a way to understand how technological systems behaved in the past. Specifically, we read Daniel Headrick’s (2009) Technology: A World History, and I had the students look especially for patterns in the past that might suggest patterns in the future. To be clear, I was not asking the students to seek out regularities and periodicities in the past. That is, in examining the history of technology, students were not seeking—for they would not find—teleological patterns in the past, cycles or regularities that they could then project forward. Rather, they were seeking “metapatterns” (Volk 1995), analogies from the past. “History does not repeat itself,” I said reminded the students of the quote attributed to Mark Twain, “but it sometimes rhymes.” I asked students to consider such rhymes in the global history of technology. “History never repeats itself exactly,” argue Bertrand Roehner and Tony Syme. “Even for simple episodes, an event A and an event B are never identical but only similar. To describe this form of similarity we use the word ‘paronymic,’ a technical term taken from the field of linguistics. Two words are paranymic if their spellings differ only by one or two letters . . . the meaning of the words is of no matter,” only their form (Bertrand and Syme 2002, 19). I was having students locate paronymic patterns the history of technology to formulate questions about possible future patronymic forms.

These patterns provided the basis of our first set of questions, our inquiry into the future of technology. One such metapattern is the way that technology has continuously altered humanity’s relationship to nature. Through the domestication of plants and animals “humans found ways to manipulate the natural world to their advantage” (Headrick 2009, 15).

Horses had been known throughout Eurasia and North Africa for thousands of years. In the grasslands of Russia and central Asia, nomads used them for cattle herding, raiding, and warfare. In settled agricultural regions, horses were costly luxuries, long used to carry messengers and for ceremonial occasions. It took several technical advances to make them useful in other areas. (Headrick 2009, 59, emphasis added)

The stirrup, the horse collar and the horseshoe were all technologies that made animals “useful.” So, one question my students asked was “In what ways will animals and other life forms be rendered ‘useful’ in the future?” I wanted them to especially consider those animals that we do not think of today for their use value. Another question would be will there be a reexamination of the “usefulness” of the natural world and if so, what values would replace usefulness?

Another such pattern of the changing relationship between humanity and the natural world was the Columbian Exchange. “Among the most important . . . effects of the opening of the world [via European seafaring exploration] was a dramatic acceleration in the transfer of plants, animals, and microorganisms from place to place” (Headrick 2009, 81). We then asked “How might technology affect a similar sort of redesign of the biosphere in the future?” With what potential effects? What might a twenty-first century Columbian Exchange look like?

German chemists first synthesized organic and inorganic chemicals in the nineteenth century, a refashioning of natural materials, a pattern that initially dates back to the time when fire was first used to bake clay, thus changing its chemical properties. The nuclear age was, of course, another such paronymic pattern of humans refashioning natural materials. How will we redesign natural materials in the future? Headrick concluded the book with a question derived from the larger metapattern.

Technology is no longer a means of survival in the face of a hostile nature but a joyride at the expense of nature. How long the joyride can continue is a question that can be answered only by the next generation. (Headrick 2009, 148)

I informed the students that we would not leave this question to future generations, but would instead be asking and answering this question in our History and Future seminar. Whatever technology the student was examining, I asked them to consider how it might change humanity’s relationship to nature.

There is also a recurring paronymic pattern of technological “delays” or resistance to technology. The ancient civilizations of the Americas understood the wheel, “Yet even when the people of early civilizations understood the principle of the wheel, they made little use of it” (Headrick 2009, 31). (The reason was they lacked large enough domesticated animals to pull wheeled vehicles.) Writing was a technology that, in its early forms, was used by only a few specialists. “In battle, [the crossbow] hurled a heavy arrow that could penetrate a suit of armor and was so powerful that in 1139 Pope Innocent II is said to have banned its use against Christians” (Headrick 2009, 60). Other technologies have been banned:

In the Middle East, where paper had been used for centuries, printing was delayed for religious reasons . . . on the grounds that the Qur’an, containing the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, was originally written by hand. Not until 1706 did the Turks allow local Christians to operate a printing press, and not until the 1720s was the ban on printing in Turkish relaxed. (Headrick 2009, 85–87)

For centuries, the Japanese resisted for influences by closing off their society, a policy rescinded during the Meiji Restoration. China, however, continued to resist the West. “The experience of China [in the early twentieth century] shows how politics can delay technological change and economic development” (Headrick 2009, 128). There are recurring instances of paronymic events where the development or widespread adaptation of a technology is blocked or stymied, whether by cultural, political or legal resistance. Given this metapattern, I asked the students to consider what forms of resistance to technology might emerge in the future? For students considering the future of gene editing and other forms of bio-engineering, for example, they asked what would resistance to these technologies look like? Who would lead such resistance? How would this resistance be manifest?

Students uncovered several other such metapatterns, each yielding questions we could use in our inquiry into the future of technology:

Two students in particular were interested in the future of weaponry and military technologies. “In warfare, revolutionary innovations in weaponry are never permanent, for they stimulate the development of counterweapons. Chariots, which appeared when bronze was the predominant metal, were first challenged, and then made obsolete, by a combination of iron and cavalry” (Headrick 2009, 39). This historical metapattern led them to ask the question “What counterweapons might be developed to drones or super-strong body armor?” In short, seeking out metapatterns in the history of technology yielded a number of thoughtful, complex questions that would guide the students inquiry into the future of technology.

Evidence

The questions we generated helped guide the students’ search for evidence, what to be looking out for. At this stage in the research process, historians are usually traveling to archives to locate primary sources that can help answer our questions. Of course, there are no such “archives of the future,” curated institutions for storing primary sources about the future. Evidence of the future does exist, of course: I evoked William Gibson who has said “The future has arrived—it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” Students would therefore seek out those “pockets of the future.” Especially with regard to the future of technology, we can look to tools and applications that are currently being developed at university and industry laboratories, those technologies that are more than theoretical but not yet commercialized. I set the students to locate these prototypes of the future.

Students read from Adam Gordon’s Future Savvy (Gordon 2008), especially the chapters on drivers and blockers, as a way to think about their search for evidence of the future. As I was asking students to consider the future state a technology system might exhibit, I described these drivers and blockers as establishing the “dimensions of the system” under consideration, the conditions that define the system. Furthermore, drivers and blockers will interact with each other, and so part of their exploration of future evidence included determining these complex interactions.

I debated whether or not I should provide the students with these sources of information or have them locate sources on their own. When teaching a typical historical research seminar, I would certainly identify a collection of documents for students to examine, although I would expect them to explore those collections without my aid. I decided I would do something similar with a futures research seminar. I decided to “seed” their inquiries by suggesting a dozen or so sources of “future evidence.” MIT Technology Review and Wired were at the top of the list, especially since these publications report on the cutting edge of many technologies. As our survey of the history of technology demonstrated, the future configurations of technological systems will be determined by more than technology alone. The larger social, cultural, economic and geopolitical context will have an important influence in the way technology will develop. Therefore, I also had students consult publications such as The Economist (which reports on technology, but also on wider global trends), Foreign Policy (for geopolitical conditions), Dezeen (for the future of design), reports and white papers from the Pew Research Center (on public attitudes and beliefs), and Nature (for trends in science).

Unless they are specifically instructed how, I have found that students are not adept researchers, and I confess this was an assumption I carried into this research seminar. In my experience, students simply look up a topic in a Google search and locate the sources that appear at the top of the search. I wanted to use the occasion of this class to teach more thoughtful and rigorous research skills. In seeding their research with a dozen publications, my expectations were that they would look beyond these to locate other sources of information, especially those tailored to their particular research questions. I was especially keen to instruct the students in how to search for reliable sources about the future of technology. A report in Technology Review, for example, describes actual developments in the laboratory, not merely theoretical possibilities. Bertrand de Jouvenel once described such conditions as “futuribles.” “A future state of affairs enters into the class of ‘futuribles’ only if its mode of production from the present state of affairs is plausible and imaginable” (de Jouvenel 2012, 18). So, for instance, a general-intelligence artificial intelligence becomes “futurible” once Alpha Go defeated the best human go player. This is easy enough to identify with technology: again, we need only look at what is being prototyped for indications of such plausible and imaginable futures. But “futuribles” also applies to the future social and cultural context of technology. For example, the class debated the future of implants or other such direct interfaces between technology and the human body. Would people voluntarily alter their bodies in such a manner, even if it were theoretically possible? One could look at evidence today of the way in which young people, especially young women, are undergoing elective liposuction (even though they are not obese) as a way to shape their bodies. Young South Koreas are having plastic surgery to sculpt their faces into a more desirable shape. These cases are evidence of how people already manipulate their bodies: we could infer that there will be at least some who might similarly introduce technologies into their bodies. A future state of affairs cannot be simply imagined or theoretical: there must be evidence of it “futuribility” for it to be included in the scenarios.

This meant I asked students to be careful to distinguish between reports of technological development and self-promoting marketing. I urged the students to be cautious when locating information sources. Students should always ask of every report they are reading: Who is writing this article? What kinds of qualifications do they have for commenting on this subject? What is the rhetorical purpose of the article? To inform? To sell? To impact stock prices? One student, for example, was researching on the future of Bitcoin and, while he certainly found many credible sources that described the features of the cryptocurrency, he located many others that were created by Bitcoin promoters, announcing that “Bitcoin will solve the world’s problems!” and “Everyone needs to get in on the Bitcoin action!” For purposes of writing scenarios of the future of technology, I urged students to avoid these latter kinds of information sources.

Like all historical inquiry, the identification of evidence can sometimes yield new questions, or can even alter the original questions being asked. In some instances, contact with the evidence sometimes means that students need to ask another set of questions and that perhaps they have not been asking the right question. I instructed the students to be open and aware of these possibilities. Indeed, some students began with a particular research focus, and then, during the course of their research, refined or otherwise changed their original focus as they located evidence. One student, for example, was interested in the future of traumatic brain injuries and the role technology might play in combating these. But upon encountering the evidence his research turned more to the question of technology implants and human-technology interfaces. All historical inquiry involves a complex interplay between the questions that define the inquiry, the evidence uncovered to answer those questions, and the possibility of new questions arising from the research. Researching the future of technology is no different.

Interpret and Draw Inferences from Evidence

Historians understand that the evidence and primary sources we work with are incomplete and imperfect. Unlike the social scientist, historians rarely create their own data but must rely on what has been preserved—sometimes by sheer luck—in archives. We understand that the information we have about the period in question is rarely complete and does not offer “the whole picture.” Nevertheless, historians have developed methods to read and analyze these fragments of the past. We draw inferences from that evidence, seeing in the data more than what is explicitly stated in the evidence. Similarly, evidence of the future is by definition incomplete and imperfect. In the same manner, we must draw inferences from that incomplete data when making a judgment about the future. Because they had taken other history classes before taking the research seminar, the students were already familiar with the interpretation of primary sources, and were able to apply this skill to the evaluation and interpretation of evidence of the future.

To aid in their interpretations of this future evidence, I had the students compose futures wheels. In drawing out first order effects and then second order effects, students found they had a tool to organize their imaginative thoughts, a way to organize the inferences they were drawing from the evidence. As a way to introduce the futures wheel concept, and to give them some practice in inferring from nonexistent events, we spent one class period working on counterfactuals. In one instance, we consider a counterfactual where college football was banned by Congress in 1905. There were over a dozen student deaths that year from football-related injuries, and only the intersession of President Roosevelt kept this ban from happening. What if Congress had gone through and banned college football? Various scenarios emerged. One scenario explored a work where athletics is divorced from the college experience, and universities do not get in the business of big-time college athletics. Another scenario had football replaced with another sport—baseball, perhaps—as the new focus of the public’s attention. Fifty thousand–seat baseball stadiums now tower over universities, and the “problems of college sports” relates to what happens on the diamond, not the gridiron. There were two other scenarios that students developed from this one counterfactual. I organized these counterfactuals in the form of a futures wheel; that is, our inferences were organized as first order effects, second order effects, and so on. After this exercise, students felt more confident in drawing inferences from the “what ifs?” presented by the evidence of the future. They understood how to discipline their imaginations: that they could not draw just any inference from the evidence, but inferences nevertheless grounded in what is plausible. Creating counterfactual historical narratives is a very effective way to teach students how to make inferences about the future.

Armed with tools to draw inferences from future evidence, students then wrote a brief summary of the content of the research articles they located. Then they wrote a longer “implications assessment” of that content. This was an assessment of the meaning of the information presented in the article. “What effects might this technology have?” was the kind of questions students asked of this evidence. In effect, students were drawing inferences from this evidence of the future in a manner similar to any historian.

Here is an example of this student work. This particular student was interested in the future of technologies related to climate change. The student wrote out a proper citation of the article:

Temple, James. “The Growing Case for Geoengineering.” MIT Technology Review. April 18, 2017. Accessed October 16, 2017. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604081/the-growing-case-for-geoengineering/

Then the student wrote a brief summary of the main points of the article:

Published in MIT Technology Review in April, this article focuses on geoengineering and examines several groups of scientists with ambitious ideas and experiments for combating climate change. It first examines cloud seeding experiments being developed at the University of Nevada, involving drones releasing dust-like materials into the air in order to create larger ice crystals and thinner cirrus clouds, allowing more heat to escape from the atmosphere. It also mentions how increasingly grim climate projections have motivated scientists to begin looking at geoengineering as a necessary risk to take, and one that must be immediately researched extensively to discover potential problems and negative side effects. The article then mentions the continuing development of a solar radiation management experiment in Arizona, and presents a number of challenges to the future implementation of worldwide geoengineering.

Then the student wrote a longer implications assessment, a written form of the futures wheel they developed for each (some students included their futures wheels in this implications assessment):

This article has several important implications for future scenarios regarding environmental cleanup technology. First is the increasingly prevalent idea that geoengineering may become a necessary method of environmental cleanup, as global temperatures rise faster than current emission restrictions can control them and Earth’s climate becomes more unstable and dangerous to humanity. This would likely lead to a shift in environmental research priorities, as scientists will hope to analyze adverse side effects of this method in time for it to be effectively implemented. On the other side, if the climate situation becomes dire, governments may decide going ahead with untested geoengineering methods is a necessary risk, which could result in additional damaging side effects. The article also mentions the setbacks geoengineering, and environmental cleanup overall, may suffer from the current political environment in the US, as the Trump administration has been slashing climate change research funding. As in several of my other articles, drones would play in a big role in implementing geoengineering technology, a possible trend that may appear in environmental cleanup. Lastly, the future of geoengineering may also have many ethical and political implications and challenges. The articles asks who will have the right to make the decision on altering the global climate in potentially dangerous and unpredictable ways that may affect separate parts of the world differently. It also brings up an interesting question as to whether this technology could be used to attack a country’s enemies.

Students had to research a minimum of twenty-one articles, each summarized and analyzed in the manner above. I informed the students that, in so writing out these implications assessments, they were already well on their way to composing their scenarios.

Write Representations

After they have asked their questions, after they have located, analyzed, and drawn inferences from evidence, historians compose a written narrative. I reminded the students that the “past” does not equal “history,” by which I mean the domain of all that has happened before the present is vast, but our written representations of that domain are imperfect simulacra and only capturing a small portion. Repeating the dictum “The map is not the territory,” I reminded the students that any history we compose is not the past. Similarly, “the future”—that domain of potential events—does not equal our representations of the future. The philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit views histories—written representations of the domain of the past—as “proposals,” in that they substitute for that which is absent, in this case the past (Ankersmit 2001). Calling our representations a proposal implies a kind of provisional status, something to be debated or edited, and certainly not something in one-to-one correspondence to the past.

Written narratives in the form of scenarios are a similar product of an historical inquiry into the future, and are another kind of “proposal.” Futurists do not make predictions, I counseled the students. Rather, they prefer to see the future as a number of potential states of a system, with each state of the system described by a scenario. Like a counterfactual thought experiment, futurists think in terms of multiple plausible scenarios, not a single prediction. To that end, I had the students compose three scenarios.

Scenarios should read as if they are narratives written from the time in question. In that regard, they read like “histories from the future.” So, if the scenario is set in the year 2045, for example, I instructed them to write these as if they are describing the world in that year, and to describe the process by which that world came to be. Again, the students were accustomed to writing traditional histories, but this act of imagination was a stretch for many.

It was important that the students see representative models of scenarios, to learn about their structural and rhetorical form. They read a RAND white paper that had four scenarios on mobility in China in 2030 (Ecola et al. 2015), and scenarios from the Institute for the Future on four scenarios of the future of food (Kreit et al. 2011). In addition to learning about the compositional mechanics of writing a scenario, I wanted the students to see that scenarios come in fours, typically (although I was having them compose three). I wanted them to avoid thinking of the scenarios in terms of dualities like “good” and “bad” or “utopian” versus “dystopian.”

Given this instruction, the students said that they were at a loss about how to begin to write the scenarios, specifically how to structure them. As an exercise, I had the students identify two drivers from their particular research question. I had them identify two conditions each for both drivers, and to arrange these in a coordinate diagram. The resulting four quadrants would yield a simple framework for beginning the scenario. I was at pains to point out that they would need to expand on the simple structure created by these quadrants.

Results

Whatever their initial misgivings about composing histories of the future, the students performed well. Two students considered the future of military hardware, one looking specifically at the renuclearization of the geopolitical environment, another looking at personal armor. That student included a scenario where soldiers are provided with exoskeletal enhancements that create a “21st Century Knight.” He then considered how such a “knight” might alter the tactical situation in a number of geostrategic regions. One student considered the future of athletic prosthetics, including a scenario where a professional league is formed for such “enhanced” athletes.

Another student was interested in the future of genetic engineering, and in particular how techniques such as gene editing and DNA regeneration might be employed on animals. In one scenario, she considered the implications of the revival of a mastodon. In her scenario, zoos serve as the location of these resurrections, as they are already equipped with the infrastructure and expertise to carry out such endeavors. She also considered another scenario where genetic modification technologies are consumerized, and in this scenario people design their own pets to meet their own specifications (an allergic owner might engineer a dog or cat without fur, for example).

Another student considered scenarios around Hyperloop, including a scenario where the United States fails to develop the technology, and falls further behind the rest of the world, with a host of detrimental economic implications. Indeed, one of the issues we discussed when developing scenarios was to not focus solely on conditions in the United States. That is, the United States may not be the sole driver of future change; such change might come from other countries, such as China. This idea came up in discussions of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) and genetic engineering. In one scenario, religious and cultural objections to crossing the human germline serves as a blocker on the implementation of this technology, ethical considerations of “playing God” outweighing other considerations. But it is possible that no such ethical qualms will be raised in other countries, and so there is a scenario where it is China, say, that crosses the germline.

One ambitious student developed a set of scenarios regarding the colonization of Mars. An engineering major with a history minor, he ran a number of computer simulations and identified three scenarios: one he titled “Antarctica,” suggesting that in one hundred years there will be less than a hundred humans on Mars, largely in a scientific capacity, not unlike the way Antarctica is populated today. A second scenario was titled “Neo-North America,” where there are sufficiently large enough human populations (on the order of tens of thousands) that these groups organize around their home countries, not unlike the history of the colonization of North America into New Spains and New Englands. The third scenario considered a full blown distinctive civilization of millions. What was noteworthy about his approach was the way in which he explored historical patterns as a way to draw analogies about the future. He looked, for example, at the historic lag time between the discovery of the new land, when colonization began, and the time in which a new civilization “took off.” Based on these patterns, he considered a similar pattern unfolding in the future. His was an intriguing scientific history of the future.

Four of the students made formal public presentations to a futurists group I organize in Columbus. After presenting their scenarios, one audience member noted that the students had done well at placing the technology they were considering in a wider social, economic and political context. Such “contextual thinking” is a central feature of the historical method, and one of the chief benefits of historians studying the future.

The future is a domain worth exploring, and the history classroom is a natural locus for such investigations.