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Predicting the Future

Some of the most exciting and highest paying positions now belong to "futurists," or people who can predict the future. The governments of the world, businesses who want to stay on top, and intelligent readers from all walks of life are demanding access to the future.

What does a futurist do?

Is he a prophet, a guru, a crystal ball gazer? Does a futurist predict exact dates, locations, and detailed events? No, none of these. What we will cover in this course is technical, scientific prediction within certain ranges, not exact dates.

Learning to Observe

But, how can any person know the future? We can see much of the future just by observing the past and present. I'm convinced that every person knows pieces of the future. Few of us recognize these bits and pieces as the future unfolding. But, if we could seize upon these pieces, and put them together with the pieces from other "observors," we could complete enough of the jigsaw puzzle to see a significant portion of the future.

Evaluation

Once we have opened the eyes of the students in this course, teaching them to observe, then we would get lots of potential pieces of the future. Unfortunately, for beginning observors, many of these potential pieces would just be junk. We would also need to be able to separate the wheat from the chafe. (Sorry, not connected yet)

Trending

The future often predicts itself. Like a thief who wants to be caught, the future often drops hints before manifesting itself (see Trending) (Sorry, not connected yet).

Emergency Response Group

But, some future events will surprise even the most effective futurist. In these cases, we can only design a response group (Sorry, not connected yet) that can react quickly to the unexpected, minimizing damage.

Probability and Consequences

A futurist must address both the probability and consequence of future events. For some future events, the consequence is so small as to be of no interest. For instance, nobody cares about earthquakes so small that the only way to detect them is to be looking at a glass of water for the circular ripples. And, the probability of a tidal wave in Kansas is so small, that we wouldn't even bother to predict it. Typically, the larger the consequence, the smaller the probability, and the smaller the consequence, the large the probability. It's a nice simple rule, and we're glad it works that way.

Now, The Details

This has been an overview of the Futurist course. Now, for the details:

Once you have completed the Futurist course above, we also recommend you take the Creative Problem Solving course, because the more creative you are, the further your future horizon will extend.

Observation can be as simple as just looking without prejudice (this is not as easy as it sounds). Or, observation may include keeping lots of data of past events, sorted by degree of consequence. For instance, from a detailed record of the past, we learn that a 10-foot tidal wave has hit a certain beach every 100 years, and a 30-foot wave every 300 years. We might hazard a guess that a 500-foot wave would happen once in the next 500 years (I'm keeping the numbers simple, of course, since this is just an illustration).

The probability of future events is the time frame within which the event is expected to happen. For instance, a seismologist (a predictor of earthquakes) may forecast that a severe earthquake will strike a certain city in California within the next 30 years. He will probably not give the exact date (and if he did, you probably shouldn't believe him... yet). That prediction ("one quake within the next 30 years") is the probability of the event.

Consequences of future events. If a seismologist predicts that an earthquake of Richter Scale 8 will hit soon, the size of the event, or the effect, is called "consequence." Thus, loosely speaking, the probability tells us "when" and the consequence tells us "what happens."

For events where the consequence is very small, the probability is very large. What is the probability you will catch your toe on a rug next week ("trip" without falling)? You will probably do this at least once. But, the consequence is so small, we really don't care about the probability, even though it is relatively large.

The consequence of a tidal wave in Kansas is huge. Fortunately, the probablity is so small we can dispense with building dikes in Kansas.