The future isn’t what you think it’ll be

The future is a seductive concept. It tantalizes us with promises of progress, innovation and change, driving our imaginations toward a horizon we can never reach. I have dabbled in predicting the future, myself. However, the future we envision is already outdated. 

For the 1900 Paris Exposition, a French businessman commissioned artists to imagine what the world would look like in the year 2000. The accuracy of the resulting illustrations was a mixed bag.

The artists were right on the nose in some respects. One image apparently predicted FaceTime; another, a war fought by combat vehicles. One print showed a train suspended above a track, which looked a lot like a modern monorail. Another image predicted mass agricultural machinery.

But most of the other images are bizarre. One depicts a legion of flying firefighters. In another, a ship is carried above the water’s surface by a pair of blimps (the need to fly a boat above the surface on which it is designed to travel is not clear). The strangest images feature an underwater race of humans riding live fish and a classroom where children seemingly learn from electric brain shocks.

In order to predict the future, we draw from the trends we see around us. However, this approach can lead to a narrow and often misleading view. The future, by its very nature, is shaped by unforeseen variables. The French futurists of 1900, who were seemingly inspired by science fiction writer Jules Verne, focused on deep-sea travel and other forms of transportation because several innovations of their time were in those areas. They could not have predicted the personal computer revolution or the internet..

Humans also have a tendency to embellish the time frames by which technological advancements will be possible. It was not long ago that self-driving cars were Silicon Valley darlings. In 2015, The Guardian proclaimed that we’d all be “permanent backseat driver(s)” by 2020. Car manufacturers General Motors, Honda and Toyota made similar forecasts. They did not come true.

Such predictions might have excited investors and the general public but were not grounded in reality — developing the technology needed for these innovations ended up being very difficult. Self-driving vehicles may very well be the technology of the eventual future, but what is clear is that initial timelines were dead wrong and that nothing about the future is certain.

Many predictions of the future come from science fiction. The seminal 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey” captivated audiences with its portrayal of what the world could look like in the year 2001. The movie is still imaginative by today’s standards but did indeed nail several aspects of the present, albeit several years later.

Perhaps the most memorable prediction in 2001 was that superintelligence would surpass human intellect. By 2001, no such technology existed (though a computer was able to defeat the best human chess player as depicted in the film).

Today, that seems like a foregone conclusion. Technology giants Google, OpenAI, Meta and others have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence development. Meanwhile, chatbots such as ChatGPT have become increasingly powerful. Such initiatives have led many to believe that AI will make humans obsolete, ruin the world and take everyone’s jobs. Are these apocalyptic predictions going to come true?

History shows that these preconceptions will probably look silly in retrospect. When the radio was invented, critics called it “un-American” and “just another disintegrating toy.” Following the introduction of the telephone, many people refused to use them for fear of electric shocks. 

Some skeptics of technology are even experts in their field.“The cinema is little more than a fad,” filmmaker and actor Charlie Chaplin declared in 1918. “It’s canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.”

Consider the current state of AI. While tools like ChatGPT and image-generating platforms can produce astonishingly human-like content, they are still fundamentally limited by the data they are trained on and often are very wrong. For example, Google’s rollout of AI-powered search advised users to glue pizza and eat rocks. The answers appeared to be based on satirical Reddit comments. The technology is very likely to improve, but there are no guarantees.

So, what will the future look like? I will not pretend to have any specific answers. What can be gleaned from the past is that the future will, more likely than not, be better than today — technological advancements in the 19th and 20th centuries extended and improved our lives immensely. AI and other impending technologies may certainly have some serious drawbacks, but they will also be useful in other respects. Its eventual functions may be completely unfathomable to us now.

The future might be uncertain, but it’s not something we should leave to chance. Even though we can’t predict exactly what’s coming, we have the power to shape it. The choices we make today will influence the world of tomorrow. Yes, the unknown can be intimidating, but it’s also full of possibilities. By staying focused on what matters to us and making thoughtful decisions, we can help ensure that the future turns out better than we imagined.

Hayden Buckfire is an Opinion Analyst who writes about American politics and culture. He can be reached at haybuck@umich.edu

The post The future isn’t what you think it’ll be appeared first on The Michigan Daily.


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