The Future Is Now… And It Grants PhDs

What are your expectations and hopes for 2017? Thinking about the future can be intimidating and scary at some times. Did you know that trying to predict the future is a real science?

Tell me, what will the weather be like tomorrow? Do you think your next experiment will go well? How will food supply chain systems influence South American elections 20 years from now? The future can be both tangible and remarkably remote. Trying to predict it may at times seem hopeless, yet at other times, may be as simple as sticking your head out the window and deciding to take an umbrella to work. 

Future Studies: The Academic Discipline of Today?

Source: Vintageprintable1, via Flickr 

To many, a “professional futurist” may conjure the image of someone in a tin foil hat reading a lot of science fiction, and in fact, the discipline does have its roots in literature. For many, the birth of futurism came with Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the 20^th Century (written 1733), which tried to predict geopolitical trends, but had little to say about development of science or technology [1]. H.G. Wells took another (and doubtlessly flashier) approach by imagining a world in which aliens, gadgets, and time travel defined human possibilities. Real 20^th century problems, like the possibility of thermonuclear war, or the benefits of a planned economy also helped boost the discipline, as did the rise of advanced computing/simulation.
Today, Future Studies is a full-fledged academic discipline, available for study (including PhDs) around the world. Some schools focus on sub-specialties, such as predicting business trends at the Turku School of Economics [2], while others take a more general approach. Their main concern may be summarized by “three Ps and a W”: futures that are possible, probable or preferable, plus so-called “wildcard” futures [3]. At face value, the whole concept of futurism seems a little wacky, but the more you think about it, the more it seems to make sense. More traditional fields such as history and sociology attempt to reverse engineer complex systems (i.e. society and culture) to make sense of what has happened. Why not try the whole thing the other way around?

Not Just Science Fiction
It may be true that futurism tries to make sense of a great deal of non-static, complexly interrelated factors, but it can be broken down into more tangible components. This is done every day not just by professional futurists, but by people in more mundane professions such as stock traders, meteorologists, and insurance assessors. One common predictive method in all of these disciplines is predictive modelling, or building a simulation to describe possible outcomes given possible constraints. Systems engineering, too, builds projects around estimations of future states, for example, building a “smart” supply chain that can respond to up-to-the-minute demands.

Other methods employed by futurists have been adopted from the social sciences. For example, social network analysis uses the nature of connections within a community to predict how that community will respond to changes in the environment [4]. It was originally used in anthropology and sociology but is becoming more and more common in other “futuristic” fields like epidemiology and marketing. Another example is the Delphi Method, which uses structured interviews and feedback to combine and extrapolate from the opinions of experts [5].

FUTURES MAY BE POSSIBLE,
PROBABLE, OR PREFERABLE.

 Yet for every interdisciplinary success, there are methods that appear to be very puzzling, at least to an outsider. For example, most people are familiar with trend analysis, which identifies factors that strongly influence the present, and uses them to project future scenarios. However, future studies also employs Emerging Issues Analysis [6], which does the exact opposite: identifying unimportant forces or events in the present, and predicting what could happen if they were to become important in the future. There are also a host of other methods based on “visioning” and “future biographies” which are significantly heavier on imagination than math or statistics. But if they end up being accurate (see, for example, H.G. Wells’ accurate predictions about modern warfare [7]), are they any less valid?

Think Like a Futurist
Would it surprise you to learn that you are likely also a futurist? While your day-to-day may not involve planning for the rise and fall of geopolitical powers, most readers of this newsletter make their living by making and testing predictions. In the form of scientific hypotheses. After all, having semi-reasonable expectations about your experiments means that you will most likely make efficient use of your time and resources in the lab. The role of prediction in biomedicine has been extensively studied, and is beginning to be rolled out in concrete practice. Less is known about how skillfully biologists can tell the future (see Box 1).

Thinking about the future, especially in an academic context, can have profound implications for the way we envision and plan for the consequences of our actions. But one side effect is that it also calls practitioners to question their assumptions about the present. If you fervently believe that, say, a certain candidate winning the American election would result in disastrous foreign policy decisions, what does that say about foreign policy at present? Or the electoral system that would get them there in the first place? At the end of the day, predicting the future calls for a profound understanding of the present. Whether or not you choose to make future studies a full-time occupation, that should be a universal priority.




[1] Alkon, Sci Fict Stud 1985
[2] University of Turku
[3] Wikipedia
[4] Otte and Rousseau, J Inf Sci, 2002
[5] RAND Corporation
[6] Inayatullah, Foresight 2008
[7] The Telegraph

by Constance Holman, PhD Student AG Schmitz
this article originally appeared September 2016 in Volume 09 Isuue 3 "Happy Anniversary MedNeuro!"