Futuríveis
quinta-feira, junho 30, 2005
New Labour invests a lot in cloudy crystal balls - a professor of forecasting explains why.
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It also highlights how forecasting has come into fashion at the same time as its claims rarely appear legitimate. How can we account for this?
The answer is that the fad for holding forth about the future has itself arrived because of increased uncertainty about what is in store. As a sense of risk and foreboding has spread through the West, so new Cassandras are hauled in to make prophecies. At the same time, the febrile atmosphere that establishes a demand for multiplying prophecies holds the prophets themselves to be somewhat suspect. Like Cassandra herself, they can be right about the future - but that doesn't mean that they will be believed.
Ironically, the obsession with the future has emerged at a time when mankind faces a profound loss of historical thinking. Generations are growing up for whom history means the music and clothes of the 1970s or the 1980s. There is also a loss of any sense of human agency - of mankind's ability to build the future. Alan Kay, the inventor of the computer interface that eventually emerged on the screens of Apple machines, famously remarked that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. In today's culture, however, most people imagine that the future is already out there, and will simply happen to them.
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Today's forecasters are suffused by fatalism. But in joining environmentalists and invoking the Precautionary Principle, they like to claim the mantle of agency, portraying themselves as activists out Saving the Future from the inertia of corporations.
Many of today's forecasts are recipes, in fact, for never taking a risk, and indeed for never leaving home again. In 2005, therefore, exposing forecasters' pretensions must the starting point for comprehensive assessments of the future - and for the genuine activism that should accompany such assessments.
...
sp!ked-IT | Article | All eyes on the future
It also highlights how forecasting has come into fashion at the same time as its claims rarely appear legitimate. How can we account for this?
The answer is that the fad for holding forth about the future has itself arrived because of increased uncertainty about what is in store. As a sense of risk and foreboding has spread through the West, so new Cassandras are hauled in to make prophecies. At the same time, the febrile atmosphere that establishes a demand for multiplying prophecies holds the prophets themselves to be somewhat suspect. Like Cassandra herself, they can be right about the future - but that doesn't mean that they will be believed.
Ironically, the obsession with the future has emerged at a time when mankind faces a profound loss of historical thinking. Generations are growing up for whom history means the music and clothes of the 1970s or the 1980s. There is also a loss of any sense of human agency - of mankind's ability to build the future. Alan Kay, the inventor of the computer interface that eventually emerged on the screens of Apple machines, famously remarked that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. In today's culture, however, most people imagine that the future is already out there, and will simply happen to them.
...
Today's forecasters are suffused by fatalism. But in joining environmentalists and invoking the Precautionary Principle, they like to claim the mantle of agency, portraying themselves as activists out Saving the Future from the inertia of corporations.
Many of today's forecasts are recipes, in fact, for never taking a risk, and indeed for never leaving home again. In 2005, therefore, exposing forecasters' pretensions must the starting point for comprehensive assessments of the future - and for the genuine activism that should accompany such assessments.
...
sp!ked-IT | Article | All eyes on the future
posted by CMT, 11:32 da tarde
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