Our Limited Ability To Predict The Future

Take a look at the picture below.

It shows the Easter Parade in New York in 1900. The rapid increase in horses and carriages created significant concerns about handling horse manure.

Projections indicated this would become an almost unmanageable problem within a few years. New York Times 1898:

"By 1930, the horse droppings will rise to Manhattan's third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions looms."

13 years later, this is how the same streets looked

The projection had not accounted for an unknown factor—the Car.

A quick look at predictions from the last decades reminds us that it is challenging, if not impossible, to predict the future.

It's very tempting to predict. And many engage in it—all the time.

Predictions about the planet's future

Last year, I enjoyed attending the fantastic master's course "Green Growth and Competitiveness" with Per Espen Stoknes. In one session, the central theme was scenarios.

We worked with both "forecast" and "backcast."

In the former, you start from the present and predict what will happen up to a given time. Often, these are extrapolations based on available data today.

In the latter, the starting point is a specific time in the future, and the scenario involves "working backward" to describe what led us there.

It occurs to me that most scenarios about the planet's next 30 years either revolve around doomsday or a form of Utopia.

I wonder if the doomsday scenarios place overly significant emphasis on extrapolations based on current knowledge. Jørgen Randers' scenario of a 2.8-degree increase in temperature by 2080 is an example of a "safe" projection.

Considering what history has taught us, isn't it likely that something fundamentally new will happen during the next 20-40 years that we cannot foresee today?

Sustainability as a secular salvation story?

But it's not necessarily better to base oneself on overly optimistic scenarios that don't account for human timeless imperfection—or original sin, as it was understood a generation or three ago.

A proliferation of sustainability scenarios shows a bright shining future in 30, 40, or 50 years.

Not only will we solve the climate challenges, but new international cooperation and a global sense of shared destiny among people will lead to a social redistribution of resources during the same period.

An example of an overly optimistic backcast is, in my opinion, Vision 2050 from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development: "Nine billion people live well, within the limits of the planet."

I believe in scenarios that balance cautious optimism and hope with realistic sobriety.

Perhaps we should heed the advice of Søren Kierkegaard: Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.

Examples of predictions that didn't quite hit the mark...

Anyway, here are some examples of how wrong things can go when we don't resist the temptation to confidently predict something that, by definition, we have no control over.

"Rail travel at high speeds is impossible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of oxygen deprivation."

(Dionysius Lardner, 1830, Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London)

"Heavier than air flying machines are quite simply an impossibility."

(Lord Kelvin, President of the British Royal Society, mathematician, and physicist, in 1895)

"One can disregard the possibility of coal, oil, or sulfur on the continental shelf along the Norwegian coast. It can be assumed that the continental shelf... consists of the same rock formations as on land in a corresponding area."

(Consensus among Norwegian geologists at the Norwegian Geological Survey, 1958. Norway has, since the 60s, been one of the largest producers of oil and gas)

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

(Bill Gates, Microsoft, 1981)

"I don't think the internet will become a market. Therefore, we have no immediate plans for online sales and bookings."

(Sales Director at SAS, 1996)

"A destabilizing contraction in nationwide house prices does not seem the most probable outcome... nominal house prices in the aggregate have rarely fallen and certainly not by very much."

(Alan Greenspan, FED, 2005)

"The oil industry has as much confidence in its future as it did before the 2010 boom: Costs have been reduced... and the industry believes it will no longer be as sensitive to fluctuations in oil prices."

(Hovem, CEO, DNV-GL O&G, 2019)

"That was the pandemic."

(Infection control expert Preben Aavitsland, June 2021)

And, last but not least, the evergreen Norwegian classic - Internet is a flop!