Jamais Cascio: The Future Teller

It means I’m an easily distracted generalist.

I realized we have all of these ideas about the future that emerged 20, 30, 40 years ago that remain stuck in our heads as the default vision of the future, such as jet packs or flying cars. When I introduce myself as a futurist, these are often the first things I get asked — you know, “Where’s my jet pack?” We have in our heads these legacy futures, these old visions of tomorrow that really no longer apply and yet still shape our beliefs and expectations about what’s around the corner. More recently we have things like singularity, a concept embedded in a 1990s vision of computing technology. The way it was described 20 years ago still remains the core description of the concept, even if and even when our relationship with technology has evolved considerably. When I think about and write about legacy futures, what I’m really saying is, we need to move away from these reflexive visions.

Yes, it does. And so part of the process I use when I do foresight work is to avoid making single-line predictions. Actually, anyone who gives you a single prediction about the future is probably trying to sell you something. People who do foresight work professionally these days tend to use scenarios — that is, a set of divergent, possible and plausible future narratives.

There’s certainly a role for governments and government institutions. They are ultimately the ones who make policy into laws, and there has to be buy-in at that level for anything to be able to move forward because they can really get in the way. But more importantly, they’re one of the handful of institutions that have the potential to have a longer term perspective, an institutional memory that lasts longer than any one person. Religions are one example; universities are another and governments are yet another. So there’s definitely a role. Now, that doesn’t mean governments are the perfect source. And it certainly doesn’t mean they can’t become problematic. I think we’re at a particularly pathological era in American government, but that doesn’t have to last. It can’t last.

Very much so. The way the rules for public companies are structured, they almost have to look at the short-term view in order to remain viable. That’s because we have rules around fiduciary responsibility, etc., that tend to force companies to appeal to the near-term interest of shareholders rather than looking out in the long term. You have a handful of companies breaking the mold: for example, Google in its initial public offerings, and Facebook. They both had a similar kind of statement saying, “Anyone who invests in this company be aware that we’re going to make some long-term decisions from a long-term perspective that won’t have immediate returns, so you’ve got to be ready for that.” Even so, there’s still an enormous pressure on these companies to try to meet the quarterly expectations of Wall Street.

I don’t think the oil age is going to end because we’ve run out of oil. The notion that we’re going to keep using petroleum or keep using natural gas until it runs out is kind of silly. And yet when I’ve spoken to energy industry executives, quite a few of them had this notion that we’re going to keep using oil as our primary source for transportation fuel throughout the century. That’s ridiculous. Not just because of any peak oil issues and not really even because of carbon or global warming issues, but simply because that’s an assumption that we’re going to remain stuck in a particular paradigm of technology. That just doesn’t hold true.

A realization that the world changes. I sometimes say to people that I’m a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. I look around and I see all sorts of reasons to be frustrated with the way world looks today. But, as I said in Aspen, the way the world looks tomorrow isn’t based solely on the way it looks today.

Yeah, I do. It’s actually one of the ways I rationalize my enormous carbon footprint from traveling around the world. What I hope is my writing and the talks that I give allow people to step back and reconsider, basically look at the world from a perspective they haven’t thought of before, and hopefully make better choices, have a better vision of what they can do with their lives and with their companies and countries.

One of the things I try to talk about in many of the talks I give is this recognition that the future is not something that happens to us; the future is something we create with every choice. If we start thinking that the future is going to happen to us regardless and there’s nothing we can do, it makes it easy to give up. But if we recognize that the future is our creation, that like it or not we have a responsibility, then at least there’s a chance that the people who hear this will step back and think more constructively, in a more sophisticated way, about the impacts of what they choose.