Co-authored with Tracey Follows
A good example saves 1000 words:
“In the future, most people will have a mobile phone”
How many futurists would include that in their talk as a demonstration of their remarkable insight? Actually, looking at a lot of other stuff currently passed off as futurology, I rather suspect quite a few.
If I were to put a reasonable freshness stamp on the above ‘insight’, I’d place it around 1990-1993. Insights typically stay reasonably fresh for a few years, but much later than that, they can reasonably be classed as futures archaeology, i.e. digging up and passing off predictions or insights that are already ages old. Other insights from the early 1990s (such as in my own talks) were warning people about how social media would likely lead to online tribalism, how we’d make good use of augmented and virtual reality for business and social applications or for virtual tourism, or listing the potential dangers of machines that could one day become smarter than humans. Any futurist still putting early 1990s insights into their talks or papers in 2023 should be reasonably accused of futures archaeology. Obviously, things might sometimes still justify inclusion for the sake of completeness, but if you’re a futurist, you should also be able to list a stack of things that are still way off and not already commonly known. Futures talks should be about the future, not about the present. Commenting on happenings and trends already obvious today is fine, but it isn’t futurology. As for talks at futures conferences, to other futurists, there is no excuse at all for talking about stuff every futurist already knew about years before the event.
The examples I listed are 30 years past the dates they could reasonably be considered fresh and insightful, but I still see them in futures commentary. Going back 25 years, Kurzweil and I both independently lectured about the coming convergence of AI and biotech, both of us noting the potential for smart bacteria for example. 25 years ago, it was futurology. If you’re lecturing now about how AI and biotech might converge, unless you’re actually introducing specific future implementations, you’re at least 20 years late to the party. You’re a futures archaeologist. The idea was newish 25 years ago, but although the actual technology is still in the future for most part, it is really only specific implementations and their implications that are still potentially new ideas in futurology.
As for global warming, or ‘climate change’ if you’re gaslighting, the meta-religious nature of the debate was fresh insight in the late 90s, but observing it today is futures archaeology. I haven’t seen a single valid comment on global warming in recent futures articles that wasn’t already out there 15-20 years ago. My 2006 paper ‘Carbon’ was as up to date and still as accurate as anything I’ve seen from many so-called ‘futurists’ recently. Global warming may be important, but it isn’t futurology, and hasn’t been for a long time. People have actually already heard about it, and are sick to death of hearing about it. Telling your audience that they need to prepare for climate change, or there may be a tipping point – geez, it’s just embarrassing. You’re wasting their time and insulting their intelligence! Anything LGBT is almost certainly at least 10 years out of date now. It had all been said by then.
More recent archaeology finds in my archives that I often still see:
20 years old – people will one day co-work with AI and people will focus on human skills, call it the care economy.
15 years old: using VR and AI for therapy or social skill development.
I could cite many more examples, but if you’ve read any recent futures output or worse still, been to a ‘futures conference’, then you can almost certainly think of your own. Whatever you’re topic, it is still possible to come up with new insights. If you can’t do that, either find another topic where you can, or find another job. Please stop casting futurology into disrepute by passing off yesterday’s insight as today’s. If you have nothing fresh and insightful to say about the future, digging up old insights that proper futurists dropped from their talks decades ago will not make you sound insightful or interesting, it will just prove you’re a rubbish futurist. Why should anyone waste their time listening to you?
Author bios:
Tracey Follows: https://www.traceyfollows.com/biography/
I Pearson: https://about.me/ipearson