from future import star
We borrow from the future.
How we do it matters.
Futures Are Abundant
I’m amused with narratives about the future.
Narratives about the future are extremely cheap to make. (As plentiful as the back end production of a bull…)
For instance:
- “In the future, we won’t have flat farms anymore. They’ll all be vertical. Everywhere. And they’ll be in space.”
- “In the future, we won’t even need to have farms, we’ll just print all the food we need. Using 3D printers. Everywhere. In space.”
- “In the future, we won’t even need to have farms, because the human body won’t even need food. We’ll all be powered by quantum batteries. Everywhere. In space.”
Business cases are narratives about the future.
As are pitch decks.
In space.
The Future is Mortgaged
A mortgage is a kind of futurescape.
It isn’t a popular one.
The English translation of mortgage is dead pledge. The pledge is to make a stream of payments. The pledge dies when the debt is paid. It’s an instrument that binds the future to the present and secures it.
The lender is giving up consumption today for the prospect of getting more consumption later. The borrower is getting consumption today for the promise of giving up consumption later. That act of swapping causes the future to be a pool of potential that we can materialize today.
There are a few distinct estimates here. Does the person making the pledge intend to abide by it? Is the individual capable of making an accurate estimate of their ability to abide by the pledge? Is the individual likely to update their intent to abide by the pledge at a later date because they’re experiencing regret?
The estimate of the likelihood to fulfill the pledge is called credit worthiness, and is rendered tradeable in North America by the credit score.
There is not, to my knowledge, a standardized credit score for Endgame Narratives.
Endgame Narratives
When constructing Futurescapes, some jump to the endgame.
Consider the dialogue:
“In the future, we will put one million AI data centers in space, around the sun.”
“What about the middle game, the unit economics of the first 100? Who’s paying? For what? Why?”
“Doesn’t matter, sentient sun.”
Endgame narratives may be a kind of DDOS attack against the listener. Maybe there’s an intent to overwhelm and shut down the part of the brain responsible for critical thinking. Maybe the anticipated response from the listener, “wow, that’s ah-may-zing!” is associated with an input string. Some strings generate the stroking reaction more often than others.
Maybe endgame narratives are favoured by people who do vision, but not the details. Maybe they don’t perceive a middlegame. Maybe middlegames are deployed by the naysayers and doubters as justifications to not do something. Or maybe an endgame narrative is a preserving method of saying I don’t know. (Even though saying “I don’t know but what I can say is…” is a signal of authenticity)
Maybe it is effective on some portion of the population. And it’s difficult for me to discern whether or not it’s the same kind of the same social dynamics that happen at a WWE event. That, in order to fit in, one has to pretend to suspend disbelief. Maybe it’s polite to appear to suspend disbelief. Maybe both the speaker and listener are both actively aware that both have chosen to suspend disbelief. I’m not sure if there’s an intent to deceive, self-deceive, both, or neither.
And it’s easy to be wrong about most things.
It’s generally, when pulling from the distribution of all futurescapes, easier to be wrong than right.
The Credibility of The Incredible
Consider the general problem of needing to be somewhere else.
In the early 1800’s, your solutions might have included walking, running, horsing, boating, and taking the train.
Then in 1885 we got the first safety bicycle. It used a gear and a chain to transmit force from the legs to the rear wheel. Which meant that, unlike the Penny-farthing, you were closer to the ground. And you got more bang for your muscle buck.
A major source of dissatisfaction, a gap, a problem, is caused by the weight of the bicycle itself. Every kilogram in excess of your own bodyweight is an extra kilogram that you need to propel.
If you spent time making strong material lighter, you’d have one core enabling technology for something else.
If you spent time making use of the new diesel engine, and making it lighter, you’d have another core enabling technology for something else.
Combine lighter material with higher energy density, and you’d have the enabling conditions for solving the problem of being somewhere else, faster, by travelling in the air. You’d almost have enough technology for powered flight. Wilbur and Orville Wright put it together. Two credible guys putting it together and achieving the incredible.
Imagining lighter than air flight is easy. Anybody could look at a bird and say that one day, humans too, will join them. Indeed, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier figured that out in the 1780’s. The endgame was easy to talk about.
It was the middlegame that enabled it.
And middlegames are tricky.
The Credibility of The Incredulous
Everybody who said that lighter than air flight was impossible is dead. And they were wrong. Dead wrong.
Most who said that it wouldn’t happen in their lifetimes were right. Dead right.
Unless you know which enabling technologies can come together to enable the incredible, it’s relatively easy to take an incredulous stance. And, in general, it takes quite a bit of effort to sort through all of the recent developments in technology to understand what is newly possible, which gaps can be crossed, and which can’t be. It certainly isn’t convenient to make connections amongst disparate technologies.
Hype drives the overpromises and this is one contributing factor for manias. It’s natural that in the competition for scarce attention, people differentiate by making escalatory claims about the future. Happily, these narratives drive the investment to fund the breakthroughs, and then serve to discredit. General aviation experienced a bubble in the 1920’s. The bubble was useful as far as driving the technology forward. Western governments, knowing the military use was obvious from their Great War experiences, stepped in to support the sector post-bubble. The sector recovered, evolved, and became what it is today.
Why It Matters
I assume that, in general, most inventors, dreamer, and make-believers, are good people that may be accurately portraying their commitment to a future. This strange assumption is traceable to a stance that loosely translates to “people are generally good”. Reasonable people can disagree about evidence in support of the assumption. I’ll assume that most people are good.
Good people can still misestimate potential. And that’s a two-tailed argument. They can underestimate and overestimate.
Advancements in media technology are making it significantly easier to distribute futurescape narratives to particularly susceptible people, and to render people more susceptible to such narratives. Even if there wasn’t an conscious campaign to deliberately mortgage the future on the part of some, there is likely an emergent effect of overstoking the hypers. Manias become ever more manic. It may be an emergent property of the system: dreamers dreaming reinforcing delusionals deluding causing bubbles to bubble.
It’s unlikely that there’ll be any policy that emerges to tamp it down.
So what could you do?
Just as we use a credit score to assess the credit worthiness of a mortgage applicant, you can use a credit score to assess the credit worthiness of a futurescape proponent.
When I hear a textbook perfect futurescape, when the speaker uses just enough valence to convey commitment to the mission and to the bit, I look at the standard candles in the room and assess. Are they just absolutely captivated? I pause. I take in the show. And then I ask myself what’s the real problem they’re addressing. What’s the gap? Is there a metric? Are the accurately portraying the state of the art? Is it likely they can form a team to connect the dots? I assess the credibility.
Estimation matters. Middlegames matter.
The future, and how we talk about it, matters.