The man of the future
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Column: Interview
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Delft futures researcher Dr. Patrick van der Duin
The man of the future
Delft futures researcher Dr. Patrick van der Duin subscribes to the unusual point of view that futures research should become a basic business skill and that it should be part of the educational curriculum, preferably replacing history. Together with TNO colleague Hans Stavleu he has written ‘De toekomst in een notendop’ (The future in a nutshell), which reads like a crash course in futures research. “The future is not necessarily dark and unknown. It is not something that just happens to us.”
By: Maarten Keulemans
Imagine the world thirty years from now. You’re walking along a street. What would you see around you?
“The trend is for technological changes to be increasingly less obvious. So if you were to ask what you would notice about the view on the street, the answer would be, not very much. The changes would all be there, but they would be hidden under the bonnet and in the surroundings. ICT will be an invisible technology. There will still be shops, but their function will have changed. They will be more like social meeting places, a place where people will be doing things rather than exchanging goods over a counter.”
In your book you write that the essence of futures research is not so much the extrapolation of trends into the future as it is pinpointing things that will be different in the future. Which of these developments will really surprise us?
“I'm fascinated by social empowerment, the phenomenon which has finally happened thanks to the dissemination of information. The average Joe knowing what the world is about. Politicians are being bombarded with e-mail messages, civil servants are being chastised by citizens who are better informed than they are, and GPs are complaining about smart patients. The change has been a long time in the making, but the next few years will really see it take off. Call it a kind of reverse chain effect. We still hark back to a culture in which the tribal elders were always right. We’re on the verge of a transformation, from travel agents becoming superfluous to solicitors coming under pressure. The interesting thing is that changes like these used to happen only very gradually. Nowadays we have more of a staccato effect. So another occurrence we will be seeing more often is that things can happen pretty quickly.”
You prefer not to be called a futurologist.
“Futurologist is a rather old-fashioned word dating back to the 1950's and 60's; a person predicting what technology will be like in the long term. A good futurologist can be great fun, a source of inspiration. I'm a bit more down-to-earth. I try to look at the wider picture, and in the shorter term, 10 to 15 years, rather than stating that we will have a colony on the moon 50 years from now. I get quite a few invitations to give talks. People want me to tell them about the future, look into my crystal ball and reveal what I see. I tend to steer away from occasions like that.”
Your book reads like a cookery book on how to prepare a future scenario. Why write a book like this using plain language?
“We want to democratise and demystify futures research. Everyone thinks about the future, but when it comes down to it most people will say that the future can’t be predicted anyway. That is a bit facile. We can do a lot more than that. We can explore, make scenarios, extrapolate, fantasise. The future is not necessarily dark and unknown. Of course you can’t shape the whole future; things never go exactly the way you want them to. On the other hand, the future is not something that just happens to us. It is not something we have no control over whatsoever. The future does offer several degrees of freedom.”
And so you propose to “make the future part of the curriculum in schools, organisations, and society in general”. Isn’t that overdoing it a bit?
“No. In our opinion futures research should not just be the domain of a handful of experts. Students will eventually be taking up responsible positions. They are the ones who have to make sure the organisations they work for will still be there in the future. They will have to be able to think ahead. We get taught all kinds of things about innovation, management, you name it. But strategic thinking about the future is something we don’t learn. We have history in our curriculum, but not the future.”
It’s easy to reproach this by saying that futures research is not a science. After all, you cannot validate your claims.
“True, the future does not exist. The future isn’t something you can drop on your foot. Even so, there is no reason why that should hinder research. Science is also a process that has to satisfy certain requirements. It should be transparent, independent, verifiable. On those grounds alone, futures research is a true science. I can use scientific methods to investigate how people consider the future, using questionnaires, surveys, and scenario studies. If a meteorologist says that tomorrow it will rain, that assertion is impossible to validate immediately. It doesn’t follow that meteorology is not a science.”
Even so, you write: “Many fellow scientists still consider futures researchers to be mavericks or even renegades”.
“There is something shady about the subject. The guru, the man who will tell us what the future has in store for us. Another problem is that many businesses tend to go for short-term planning only, and see long-term planning as an impractical waste of time. Speculations and scenarios are all very well, but we have different things to worry about today. Futures research is the first to fall by the wayside.”
Perhaps this is partly because the differences between the prognoses can be somewhat bizarre. Futurologist Ian Pearson of British Telecom expects us to become immortal by 2050 because we will be able to upload our minds to a computer. On the other hand, British astronomer Sir Martin Rees, in his book ‘Our Final Hour’, gives the human species a fifty percent chance of surviving the present century. One would say that only one of them can be right.
“Look, the point is that a discussion about whether in 50 years’ time we will be immortal or swept off the face of the earth serves no purpose. It is not a discussion at all. This is where transparency comes in. Fine, so we have these great statements. Now let’s do some backtracking and ask how come? On which facts do Rees and Pearson base their ideas? Under what circumstances exactly did they volunteer their statements?”
(After some deep thought): “I don’t go along with Pearson. I think that people tend to be more wary of technology than he thinks. And whether the world as we know it will still be here in 50 years, well that’s a tough one. But, I am a bit more optimistic.”
Whatever the case, some predictions for the future made in the past have turned out to be way off course.
“That’s right. Most predictions are disappointing because they fall short of the mark. However, the point is that such predictions will trigger certain developments. People set out to achieve something, but then they end up with something else. It takes vision to go places. Better to have the wrong vision than to have no vision at all.”
So how can we assess predictions for the future?
“In our book we mention a couple of reasons why predictions fall short. Sometimes they turn out wrong because futures researchers say that some things will happen just because they are made possible by technology. But then the people may have other ideas. There is also the effect of the spirit of the times. Predictions will sometimes reveal more about the period during which they were made than about the period they deal with. A prediction may also reflect a certain interest. Therefore the first thing you should ask yourself when reading a prediction is, who is predicting? Market research agencies are prone to this kind of error. They will go out and ask a manufacturer what will happen. Of course, this may give rise to an overly optimistic view. This is one of the messages our book tries to convey. Futures research should become much more transparent. Predictions are fine, but remember to show how you arrived at them. Many market research agencies fail to provide insight into these matters.”
Would you care to give an example?
“WAP (Wireless Application Protocol, internet for mobile telephones — ed.) is one of the things that went wrong. I have done research on the prognoses for WAP from the 1990's. They were very positive. But after the UMTS auctions, you could see the predictions being toned done. Now this wasn’t because UMTS was regarded as competition, but mainly because the sellers realised that the market wasn’t going to be as big as they thought.
Together with a colleague from Delft, Dr Roland Ortt, I'm setting up a research project entitled ‘Modern Prophets’, in which we will be looking at the way market research agencies make their predictions. We hope this will become a research project in the tradition of ‘The Fortune Sellers’ by William Sherdon, ‘Megamistakes’ by Steven Schnaars, or ‘Megaprojects and Risk’ by Bent Flyvbjerg. We are seeing the development of a great tradition in this type of critical evaluation literature.”
A fairly popular prediction in futurology is that of the ‘technological singularity’, as described by artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil, mathematician Vernor Vinge, and more recently, by Nobel Prize winner Gerard ’t Hooft. According to this view, our computers will soon be self-aware, as a result of which mankind will no longer be the only intelligent species on the planet, nor the smartest. This would then result in a situation that is basically inconceivable to humans, technological singularity.
“I'm not very well versed in this field, but the concept reminds me of something I heard not so long ago, which is that the Greeks played with dice, but knew nothing about statistics. They didn’t know when to bet money, they had no idea what the odds were. We may be seeing the same thing again. We are playing a game, but we don’t really know the rules. We know what nanotechnology is and what the Internet does, but what it’s all really about, what the ultimate effects will be, is extremely difficult to perceive. There might well be something in store for use that would force us to pull the plug right now. It would be totally bizarre, and we would have to learn how not to use some knowledge, simply because we cannot see its effects in the long run. One way to deal with this kind of thing might be something akin to an environmental impact study, so you would only be allowed to do this or that if you can prove its effect in other areas.”
Are you saying that you are in favour of effect studies?
“Umm, well yes, in a way I am. It is a bit like the situation with nuclear warheads. Once you have them, you can use them. Terrorists can steal them, and countries like North Korea can stir up trouble. These are side-effects that most hard-working nuclear physicists don’t like to think about too much. Doing so is considered slightly sissy-like, pious almost. It has to be done, though. On the other hand you should always remain receptive to the good things. There is no need to be technophobic about it. Otherwise you might as well go back to being a cave-dweller. Sometimes the discussion tends to go that way.”
You are already working on your next book, a pamphlet against history. In your current book you also rage against what you describe as ‘the history virus’. What is your problem?
“I get annoyed by the fact that we’re occupied with history all the time. It really is amazing: history week this, history museums that, compulsory history in schools, and history programmes on television. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but what annoys me is that it is being made into an instrument. History propagates, history repeats itself. I maintain that history teaches us very little. Ours is an incredibly dynamic era, and things are changing, whether you like it or not. This makes history an increasingly less useful guide to the future. I am amazed at the ease with which concepts from the past are applied to future. I’ve noticed that we’re always looking back. And meanwhile... Look, new diseases call for new medication.”
More information:
- Dr Patrick van der Duin, p.a.vanderduin@tudelft.nl, 015-278 1146.
- Patrick van der Duin and Hans Stavleu: 'De toekomst in een notendop' (Bert Bakker, 2006)
