Abstract
This is an exceptionally rich issue of the World Futures Review, containing essays by or about some of the founders of futures studies as well as contributions by two scholars relatively new to the field, namely Hugues de Jouvenel, Bruce Tonn, Dorian Stiefel, Patrick van der Duin, and Maureen Rhemann.
The article by Hugues de Jouvenel, “Futuribles: Origins, Philosophy, and Practices—Anticipation for Action,” discusses the origins, underlying rationale, and subsequent sixty years of futures work by Futuribles, the premier Francophone futures organization, if not the world premier in any language. The founder, Bertrand de Jouvenel, was an intellectual giant of the postwar (World War II) era. His four books on politics—On Power (1948), Sovereignty (1957), The Nature of Politics (1962), and The Pure Theory of Politics (1963)—were absolutely required reading when I was a young student of political science (they appeared a year or two earlier in their original French editions). But de Jouvenel’s book The Art of Conjecture (1967) is one of the four or five foundational sources of modern futures studies. The Art of Conjecture is still required reading for my graduate classes since it deals with almost all of the issues that remain current and problematic about the field to this day, including the fact that the field is about the “art” of “conjecture” and not about the “prediction” of the “future.” Hugues, Bertrand’s son, discusses that volume, and the various terms, in French and English, for the futures field, contrasting la prospective, favored by Gaston Berger and many French futurists, with futuribles that the elder de Jouvenel coined to capture the notion of possible futures that can be envisioned and created rather than an inevitable future that can to some extent only be forecasted and accepted.
In 1960, de Jouvenel founded Futuribles International in Paris as a kind of think tank that convened hundreds of seminars, roundtables, and conferences in France and elsewhere, and published scores of books, journals, and newsletters on all varieties of futures topics. I still read the newsletter, futuribles with its subtitle, L’anticipation au service de l’action which well expresses its philosophy, then and now. As Hugues de Jouvenel explains in the essay here, futuribles is based on three observations that remain essential in explaining the philosophy implicit in the process. First, the future is a field of freedom, power, and will. It is a territory to explore, hence the usefulness of monitoring, or scanning, and anticipating, especially in exploratory foresight. It is a territory for action, hence the usefulness of normative foresight, which refers to investigating not possible futures but rather desirable futures and the strategies that could be adopted to achieve them.
I believe those are three pillars of all good futures work everywhere.
Bruce Tonn has also been a productive futurists for many years—exceptional also because he does not shrink from considering futures 1,000 years hence in many contexts. “Anticipating the Unanticipated-Unintended Consequences of Scientific and Technological Purposive Actions,” cowritten with Dorian Stiefel (a relative newcomer to the field), considers a set of issues that have also long been at the heart of futures studies, especially for those who see new technologies as being major agents of social and environmental change (as I do). While generations of futurists have talked and written about facets of these issues, Tonn and Stiefel do something that I don’t believe has been done before, certainly not in the detail they do. They have created a framework for identifying unintended consequences, especially unanticipated-unintended consequences, and prioritized the actions that are necessary to mitigate or adapt to those consequences. They explore the consequences in four scenarios: evolution over time, market-saturation, interventions in tightly coupled systems, and existential risk of human extinction.
Especially concerning the latter, they ask if humans had known how dire the unanticipated-unintended consequences of their technologies would be, would they have developed them anyway. They might not have. The Greeks are well known for having invented and played with scores of technologies that they did not further develop, leaving it to others to reinvent and develop more than a thousand years later. Moreover, for tens of thousands of years, right up to the present time, groups of humans all over the world lived happy, peaceful, bountiful, and meaningful lives in hunting and gathering societies until other “advanced” societies with their advanced technologies destroyed them.
Creative destruction, indeed!
Patrick van der Duin, “Toward ‘Responsible Foresight’ Developing Futures That Enable Matching Future Technologies with Societal Demands,” is a splendid follow-on to Tonn and Steifel’s piece since it is focused largely on the same concerns that animated them—“that innovation processes have to take into account ethical, social, and cultural considerations and changes. A better and more just society will not be created if we only give priority to technology and commerce”—and he comes up with a solution similar to that of Tonn and Stiefel—“To make sure that responsible innovation has a positive and effective impact, it is important to develop ‘responsible foresight,’ that is, a combination of ‘responsible futures’ and a responsible foresight process.”
Indeed, van der Duin uses terms that are strikingly similar to those of Tonn and Stiefel: Responsible foresight should focus not only on exploring so-called “anticipated-unintended consequences” but also (or especially) explore so-called “unanticipated-unintended consequences.” The first category can be dealt with by using responsible foresight to make both governments and their policies more robust and/or resilient. The second category puts an additional push on the exploratory nature of foresight producing “responsible futures.” It almost means that foresight practitioners and policy makers must go into the world of “unknown unknowns.” Nevertheless, if that is what it takes for “responsible foresight” to have a lasting impact on technology development, then that should be the road ahead for foresight practitioners and policy makers.
And yet in many ways, we saw above that this is also what motivated Bertrand de Jouvenel in the earliest days of futures studies, including his “solution.” As Hughes de Jouvenel put it, “Forecasts underlying public decisions should be public. In other words, what is needed is a ‘foresight forum’ during which advanced (read future-oriented) opinions are aired on what may arise and what may be done.”
While I was preparing this editorial, I happened to read a Washington Post story about Alex Stamos, former chief security officer of Facebook, who lamented that there aren’t processes to thoughtfully think through [technological/social] trade-offs. You end up with these for-profit, very powerful organizations that are not democratically accountable, making decisions that are in their best and often short-term interest . . . without there being a much more open and democratic discussion of what these issues are.
Stamos intends to create “the Stanford Internet Observatory, [that] will help unite ‘sometimes warring factions’ of academia, tech companies and Washington policymakers to work together to help solve ‘the negative impacts technology can have on society.” (Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Facebook’s Former Security Chief Warns of Tech’s ‘Negative Impacts’—and Has a Plan to Help Solve Them.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/16/facebooks-former-security-chief-warns-techs-negative-impacts-has-plan-help-solve-them/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0b3c949e369c&wpisrc=nl_tech&wpmm=1)
Once upon a time, from 1972 to 1995, the U.S. Congress had an Office of Technology Assessment that reported to it about the possible impact of new technologies when they were in their earliest development. In spite of being a formidable futurist himself, Newt Gingrich killed that Office when he became Speaker of the House in 1994—because it was one of the few federal bureaucracies he could kill quickly and unilaterally (since it was a part of Congress, and not of the Administrative Branch), which he pledged he would do.
Is the time finally ripe for democratic, participatory, open, honest, informed technology assessment before more new technologies with all the unknown unknowns of Pandora’s box are unleashed upon the world? Or is it too late?
Maureen Rhemann, “Deepening Futures with Neuroscience” also deals with an issue both old and new to futures—how and why humans are able to think about what they call “the past,” “the present,” and “the future” since, while they have experienced (or learned about) past and present events, they also imagine, plan for, or try to prevent events that have not happened yet. What Rhemann does new is to compare and contrast recent developments in neuroscience/brain science with certain theories and methods of futures studies to put earlier speculations on a sounder scientific basis for acceptance, expansion, or revision.
In some ways, Rhemann’s contribution is an addition to a series of articles that appeared in two recent issues of World Futures Review on “Time and Futures Studies” (Vol. 9, No. 1, March 2017 and Vol. 9, No. 4, December 2017). She specifically refers to my introductions to both issues, the first summarizing historical and cross-cultural notions of time while the second reviewed conclusions about time and memory in current neuroscience. I have very recently come across a statement about time that seems to give an interesting twist to my contention that time exists only (or mainly) as an artifact of biology—that because we are born, mature, age, and die, we speak of “the passage of time.” But time does not pass. Rather, we live in an eternal present, with the past being stories about events that are said to have happened before we were born (or became conscious) while the future refers to whatever may happen, if anything, after we die (or lose consciousness). According to Kate Bolick, Alethea Black says that “Time doesn’t flow like a river. Time already exists—it is we who flow through it” (Kate Bolick, “Growing Pains,” New York Times Book Review, October 14, 2018, p. 22). This also adds another way to grasp the idea that time and space are the same thing—namely, “spacetime.”
Rhemann’s article discusses powerful new theories and technologies that themselves cry out for democratic, participatory, open, and fair institutions and processes of “responsible foresight” and “foresight forums” since neuroscience seems to be telling us that almost all theories, institutions, laws, and mores based on old notions of rationality, free will, and foresight are wrong, or at least marginal compared with why, when, and how humans actually reach decisions and act.
A note to readers: If you liked the discussion by Rhemann, I recommend you also consult the work of Jake Dunagan who has been concerned with neuroscience, futures, and governance for some time (Jake Dunagan. 2004, November. “Neuro-Futures: The Brain, Politics, and Power.” Journal of Futures Studies 9 (2): 1–18; 2010, December “Politics for the Neurocentric Age.” Journal of Futures Studies 15 (2); 2015, July “Intellectual Property for the Neurocentric Age: Towards a Neuropolitics of IP.” Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property Law 3: 302-326; and 2015 “Who Owns the Extended Mind?: The Neuropolitics of Intellectual Property Law.” In The Sage Handbook of Intellectual Property, edited by Matthew David and Deborah Halbert, 689–708).