Discovering the Future

By Paul Crabtree
THE FUTURIST May-June 2008

For good reason, H.G. Wells is often considered to be the “father” of futurism. In the September-October 2007 edition of THE FUTURIST, I discussed some of the amazingly accurate predictions of Wells in his nonfiction book Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought, published in 1901. In that seminal volume, Wells attempted to analyze and describe the probable sequence of developments over the course of the twentieth century in a number of pivotal areas, such as transportation, cities, societal relations, government, education, and warfare. He achieved an overall predictive success rate of 60%–80%. Many of these predictions were specific and detailed enough to preclude guesswork and luck as explanations for his success. Though he had a few misses, mostly in terms of predicting social and demographic changes, his accomplishment must nonetheless be judged as an amazing achievement and one that begs for further investigation into how he managed it. His 1902 address to the Royal Society of England provides some startling clues. Among the tools in the Victorian futurist’s arsenal:

• Clockwork universe assumption.
One pillar of Wells’s argument in his speech to the Royal Society, “The Discovery of the Future,” is the nineteenth- century concept that all future events are predetermined by past events. If we knew all that happened in the past, strict cause and effect principles would allow us to predict the future, like a fall of dominoes.

Quantum physics and chaos theory would later invalidate this theory of an absolutely knowable correspondence between past and future events, but in 1901, Wells’s postulate that the past and the future were determined was an orthodox scientific view.

• Inductive thinking.
Wells argues that inductive thinking allows one to build up an understanding of the broad outlines of future history in the same way that archaeologists slowly build up an understanding of the history of previously unknown societies of the past—i.e., by “the comparison and criticism of suggestive facts.” Instead of looking at an array of archaeological facts and relationships and inferring what the past must have been like, Wells suggests using existing or researched information to infer a future state of affairs. Aside from really unknowable large-scale events—an asteroid impact being one of his examples—Wells proposes that such inferences can be reasonably accurate.

• Law of large numbers.
Forecasting the future can make use of statistical probability. While discrete human actions and very detailed events may not be individually predictable because we do not know all about the present or past, on a large scale involving many people and events, a broad trend becomes more apparent and historical aberrations tend to even out. As Wells scholar Patrick Parrinder says of Wells’s use of this idea, “We are concerned with

something like the ‘actuarial principle’ used by insurance companies in determining their premiums. Though individual outcomes are wholly unpredictable, certain sorts of average outcomes in human affairs can be predicted with fair accuracy.”

In arguing for the law of large numbers and broad historical forces, Wells is careful to add that he doesn’t believe in the “Great Man” theory of history. He believes that even individuals in authority react to events more than drive them. Humanity, Wells believes, can influence the details of history but rarely if ever alter major historical trends.

• Science as a predictive discipline.
Scientific procedures, principles, and results provide a basis for prediction, says Wells, pointing out that scientific knowledge is inherently predictive. He argues that science is not science unless it al lows one to successfully predict phenomena— the course and timing of planetary movements, the diagnostic course of disease, the result of chemical combinations, etc. In “Discovery of the Future,” he advocates a general expansion, codification, and joining together of predictions from the various scientific disciplines.

• Future-oriented mind-set.
Wells rejects a logical divide between the past, present, and future as a mistaken product of our personal experience. For Wells, a futurist mind-set means having a mind that “thinks constantly and by preference of things to come, and of present things mainly in relation to the results which must arise from them.” The opposite way of thinking, says Wells, uses the past (rather than calculated future results) as a guide to future action. This mind-set tends to assume that conditions in the past will apply to the future rather than anticipating changes. Change cannot be ignored, cautions Wells, citing both the grand timescale of evolution and the pace of human change in his own time.

• Change drivers.
Not mentioned in his “Discovery of the Future” presentation, but arguably a key assumption in addition to the predictive methodological components enumerated above, is the proposition that scientific and technical progress is both inexorable and a principal driver of changes in the human condition. This, of course, is the central theme of Wells’s Anticipations. Curiously enough, the driving role of science and technology in human affairs is not covered in the “Discovery” talk. Instead, Wells invokes a more encompassing agent of change in the form of a universal, almost teleological need to change and evolve:

We look back through countless millions of years and see the will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape.… We watch it draw nearer and more akin to us ... its being beats through our brains and arteries ... thunders in our battleships, roars through our cities....

• Disciplined web of implications.
Later in life, Wells tended to be less optimistic than he was in 1902 about the possibility of making successful predictions. Evidently Wells’s work on the screenplay and 1936 film Things to Come had humbled him somewhat. In a subsequent radio broadcast entitled “Fiction about the Future” he details the difficulty he had imparting a realistic feel to the scenes showing the distant future on the motion picture screen. He says the difficulties of depicting the small details of everyday life—hairstyles, clothing, and furniture—defeated the best efforts of his research and imagination. Despite his belief that the film had not been convincing enough, the successful predictions about the future included in Things to Come as well as the book it was based on represent a tour-de-force somewhat comparable to the predictions made in Anticipations.

An approach that Wells used in writing successful future-oriented fiction, which he discussed in the

“Fiction about the Future,” broadcast no doubt applies to his predictions in general. This is to create a web of detailed, plausible implications “by rigorous adherence to the hypothesis” and by excluding “extra fantasy outside the cardinal assumption.”

Wells’s Predictive Building Blocks As a System
At first glance, the elements outlined above look more like discrete considerations than parts of an ordered whole:

• Clockwork universe assumption.
• Inductive thinking.
• Law of large numbers.
• Science as a predictive discipline.
• Future-oriented mind-set.
• Change drivers.
• Disciplined web of implications.

When these principles are expressed in an active voice, relationships can be seen among them. Assume prediction is possible (clockwork universe); gather data and relationships and see what you learn (inductive thinking); identify central tendencies (law of large numbers); rely on logic, math, and science (science as a predictive discipline); identify areas to be evaluated for change impacts (future-oriented mind-set; identify key trends and forces (change drivers); and pursue central tendency causal impacts as far as possible while assuming other things unchanged (disciplined web of implications).

These actions can be reordered and H.G. Wells’s fiction writing expertise no doubt provided him with an ability to create scenarios. Together with the forecasting steps diagrammed above, Wells’s predictive process can be seen to be highly systematic, not merely inspired guesswork. It has, in fact, similarities with the development and use of a modern iterative computer-based forecasting model. But it isn’t mechanical. Rather, in its inventiveness and its reasonability, it speaks to the very best of humanity. ❑

About the Author
Paul Crabtree retired from the U.S. federal government after serving in a number of analytical and managerial positions. He now devotes much of his time to research and writing on technological innovation, forecasting, and related issues.