Is future all?

My son has a strange pastime; strange for a nine-year-old, that is. He draws models of cars he would like to see in the future. He hardly ever draws cars that do exist - it's always ‘future cars' with him. Sometimes he's so immersed in it that he forgets his toys, his homework, and if we were to allow it, his dinner. I often wonder what it is about the future that fascinates him so much. Come to think of it though, aren't we all obsessed with the future? I find myself - the supposedly sensible adult that I am - scanning the horoscope column despite myself, though I tell myself that it's just for laughs.

Why are we so interested in the future, often to the detriment of the present? Things have got to such a stage that there's even a new group of people who are referred to as ‘futurists'; and a branch of study called futurism. The logic is that things are changing so fast that all your best-laid plans can go off the rails unless you know exactly what's coming. Corporations are apparently ready to invest quite a bit to learn which way the wind is going to blow. And the worries? Everything from global warming and its impact on their business, to nuclear nightmares, to ever-changing technology that makes just about everything that exists today obsolete tomorrow.

"We spend inordinate amounts of time being concerned about the future, and by doing this, we are by definition absent from the present," says Etsko Schuitema, social anthropologist and managing member of Schuitema Associates in South Africa, in an e-mail interview. "In order to give attention to this illusory movie of the future that we play in our heads, we have to remove attention from things that are actually going on in the moment that we are in." ‘Illusory movie' seems an apt way to put it.

While stability has always been difficult to attain in this world, it's also true that life on earth has never been as uncertain as it is today. Maybe that accounts for this sudden obsession with the future - fear of the unknown.

Schuitema's explanation combines fact and philosophy. "We are more obsessed now than ever before for two reasons: Modern culture is founded in a deeply held materialism ... and [man] cannot trust the good auspices of being. [He] cannot trust something that is blind and random. This means that when modern man looks into the future, he cannot trust that the future is being shaped by something that is benignly disposed to him. So he worries."

"The second reason for our concern with the future is that we have access to the technological wherewithal to create an illusion of being able to control life or the universe. It only takes rising sea levels, a tsunami or two, or an earthquake to disabuse us of this essential arrogance." When man tries to interpret his basic responsibilities towards this planet as a license to overperform, it results in disaster. Interestingly, technology again comes to the rescue. We have the technology that tells us what's going to happen, and when. So, does it all amount to a simple case of ‘have tech, will predict'? Are we into the ‘future' just because we can, or does is it relate to something deeper within our psyche?

According to Schuitema, man's desire to know the future is inextricably linked to his desire to control it. "I think people have always struggled with the desire to control outcomes, hence the need to be able to predict. In fact, the desire to predict and the desire to control outcomes have to be very closely related characteristics. I view this need to control as the essence of our dark side as a species, and it has always been there. I suspect that earlier generations were better equipped to contain this dark side because they lived in a world where they had to rely on the good auspices of being because they had less effective means to produce predictable outcomes." In essence, all those practices we call superstitions and look down upon now were the result of our attempts at predicting and controlling the future.

We have now almost come to terms with the fact that the future is not going to be a bigger, better version of the past. But that has not taken away from our desperation to know what it will be. Is it because of the fear that our destiny is shaped by forces, people and ideas over which we have little control? Or perhaps it's because we anticipate, and have no way of knowing whether it will be good or bad. Every generation, without fail, has wondered if its successors were going into a less benign world than the one it lived in, just as we do now. It follows naturally that we would want to know what our children's chances of making it are going to be.

Technology is the tool futurists use to predict the future. Internet, social networks and telecommunication were all predicted by technologists, as well as science fiction writers. Is it because all we are interested in is the business side of life? Perhaps reducing the future to a set of consumer choices gives us a feeling of control; if we can buy the future, then we can change it, whereas predicting events we may not be able to affect makes us anxious.

"I do not think that the technologies that you mention are principally business technologies," says Schuitema. "They are communication technologies. However, this does have a profound implication on the economic world as we know it. The internet is busy doing away with hierarchy. Hierarchy in the 20th century essentially aspired to be technocratic and knowledge-based. How do you maintain hierarchy when everybody is equally knowledgeable because everyone has instant access to an internet search engine?"

Then how does this preoccupation with the future translate to corporations? Interestingly, more and more corporations seem to be looking into the crystal ball, according to William Cockayne, director of the Stanford Center for Critical Foresight in the US. Every year, Stanford's mechanical engineering students who are game for working on real-time projects are farmed out to corporate sponsors like BMW, Boeing and Samsung. The pay-off for the companies is when the students come up with a next-generation product.

What Cockayne has noticed is that as the years go by, companies have started pressing for concepts that look further into the future. Students, at one point, used to design cars that the company might produce six years down the line which is about one product cycle for a car company. Instead, they are now being asked to design a concept that is two or three product cycles away. Last year, eight out of 10 companies asked for such long-view projects.

Enter futurists. They may not call themselves by the name, but an expert in any field is in the future business because he claims to have some prognostic insight into the implications of the current situation and predicts what should be done to produce a more beneficial outcome. Researchers are futurists in the sense that they have to predict the future as they are the architects that shape it. Take for example scientists who have learnt to reverse skin cells back to their primitive state, and then pushed them to grow into heart-muscle cells. The prediction here is that in three or four years, they'll start growing heart muscle back in patients. So? This will lead to regeneration of other organs, they claim. And thence, immortality! A state of being that most of us aspire for, which lies at the bottom of our fascination for tomorrow.

High-profile futurist, inventor, and keynote speaker, Ray Kurzweil, who has become a best-selling author with visionary books like The Singularity is Near, does not suggest immortality, but does think that in another 15 years or so, we're looking at a lot more lifespan than previously expected. Kurzweil's vision of the future involves both human-level artificial intelligence and stunning medical breakthroughs by 2020 - by which time, Kurzweil predicts, research will lengthen our lives by more than a year for every year we live. By Kurzweil's reasoning, a glorious future is almost inevitable.

Adding to the list of futurists are science fiction writers. While technology is concerned with producing predictable outcomes and therefore with predicting the future, science fiction writers and their work usually focuses on social and ethical dilemmas stemming from the rise of technology. But while experts like researchers and science fiction writers are respected, career futurists still hold a dubious position.

"I think futurists are respected too," says Schuitema. "There is a South African writer called Clem Sunter who has built a fantastic career on giving strategic advice based on scenarios. These scenarios are nothing other than predictions, but because they are based on an extrapolation of the forces operative in the present they seem to be very credible."

Futurists are fond of pointing out that even Benjamin Franklin was obsessed with the future. Perhaps because that puts them in good company. Wasn't it Franklin who said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail? Wasn't that advice so we would keep an eye out for tomorrow?

Which again brings us back to the question we started out with - whether the future is something that's forced upon us, or if it is something we can create. Is it going to control us, or can we exert control? "You only ever control what you contribute to the situation that you're in, so when you make that your focus you are in control," says Schuitema. "By definition, any outcome is the result of a blending of a vast set of variables, many of which are out of your control. So, while you are trying to control the future, you are out of control."

Much like all the inventions that would never come to be, which is probably for the best. Nothing is more attractive than the next big thing in our imagination; often, nothing is sadder than the next big thing to become reality. Remember the transportation device that was supposed to revolutionise society and change lives across the globe? It was not a flying car or a teleporter; it was the Segway, a two-wheeled battery-operated transporting machine that Time magazine deemed to put on its cover as a symbol of the future.

What then is the ultimate aim of predicting the future? To be prepared for any eventuality? Or to shape the future to our benefit? With his infinite pragmatism, Schuitema would rather not depend on any futurist. "I'd rather listen to the predictions of my wife, who has an uncanny intuition about things. I think she's psychic!" he says.

Perhaps with good reason. People who make sweeping statements about the future can many times see their words coming back to haunt them. Such was the fate of millennium-bug alarmists when January 1, 2000, dawned. Me? I am content to let my son draw his ‘future cars'. As long as he finishes his dinner on time.