Not predicting the future
John LeGates has a tremendous experience in working with ICT-policy issues, as well as with policy analysis. When I meet him I want to discuss the future, but he starts off with issuing a caveat: he does not know how to predict the future, and it is clear that he does not think that anyone else does either. His grounds for this belief are simple: look back ten years and see who actually managed to predict the future.
He is his own counter-example, however. Back in 1980 LeGates wrote a paper that reduced the entire media industry to panic. He tried to sketch the plausible implications of information technology on the media world, and when I ask him now what he thought he got wrong, what he would change, he thinks for quite some time, and then answers, serioiusly, that he probably wouldn't change anything except for the timing. In a sense he thought that what is happening now (see the earlier post on a crisis in American media) would happen sooner, but it is happening now.
Well, what about the media then? LeGates predicts a two-tiered development (or rather: observes today that news industries are dividing into two distinct markets: the global/national and the local. Local news will always be needed, but global/national news may become commodities. This is not a novel idea, there are others who think the same. And on the commodity market of global and national news we could easily imagine that we will see a market for analysis and refined commentary emerge. The blogs are early entrants in this market, though LeGates thinks that they lack editorial quality (but that this might be changing). Personally, I think that editorial objectivity may have a niche market, but lessons from early American media seem to indicate that partisan, vile and propagandistic media can succeed quite well.
And the media is, of course, not the only sector of society that is being disrupted by the new technologies that develop. The natural question to ask is of course if the future will continue like this. John LeGates thinks it will not – he thinks we will see even more instability and an increased rate of change. While he is reluctant to predict the future, he notes that there are things happening now: forces, actors, trends – that can be used to understand the present, and often this is as useful as you could expect. One of the strongest and most persistent trends is that price/performance is increasing continually. And this in turn will lead to evermore instability and innovation. Often disruptive innovation, at that.
LeGates mentioned Moore's law as an example. I ask him whether he thinks that there are bounds to the development of price/performance and Moore's law. He smiles and says that there has always been such limits. And funnily, he notes, these bounds will always be reached in eight years or so. With regular intervals a paper is published that states that things cannot continue to evolve like they have sofar – but during the 40 years LeGates has been working with technology policy, well, they have continued to develop quickly breaking through all bounds.
The bounds, he explains, are there. But they are functions of the tools we have today. So when somebody say's that Moore's law will only hold true another 8 years, well they are correct: but only if we assume that nothing happens in eight years. And this never happens. During the eight years advances, changing technology bases and other trends eliminate the bounds. Progress knows bounds, but it keeps pushing them ahead.
This is really interesting. There should be a word for this phenomenon, and it is reminiscent of the worry horizons I tried to explore in a previous post. This boundary horizon is where our current tools will become worthless and fail to accelerate change. Over time it would be reasonable to guess that the boundary horizon has become shorter and shorter, and of course, on could formulate the singularity as the point where our tools become worthless the moment they are invented. The relationship between the tools of progress and progress is not well explored, and the tool horizon/boundary horizon may well be a useful concept to introduce in futures studies.
What slows this down then? Well, one thing, we agree – is regulation.John LeGates explains that all technologies go through phases and that during it's development at technology ”acquires the usually stakeholder accretions”. That is, the technology becomes politicized. This phenomenon might even be accelerating. As our society becomes more and more technology focused we seem to think that technology needs to be analysed and assessed from a societal standpoint earlier than before.
LeGates says that when he discusses this with large corporations, a worrying pattern is emerging. Many large companies note that they get more back from a dollar spent in the regulatory/legal department than in R&D. This is, of course, an extremely short-sighted view, but it seems to hold true. This encourages lawsuits over patents and copyrights, lobbying for retaining different regulatory perks (especially for large telcos) and other legal/regulatory strategies over basic research and development.
It seems as if R&D is perhaps best conducted, not within old firms, but in new entrants. Overall it may well be true that it is cheaper to buy these entrants than to finance research of your own. This would lead, in the long run, to an innovation system where large companies invest little or nothing in research. But the big question is if this is rational: if a dollar invested in research in a large company typically, over a time of ten years, returns two dollars, and if that same money could be used to by innovative firms the problem becomes two-fold: what are the costs for acquiring capital for these small innovative firms and what are the losses the large company suffers (or the gains) when it is continually forced to merge with smaller, more innovative companies? The equation looks quite complicated.
John LeGates finishes with an interesting observation: he notes that there is so much happening today that we tend to miss, and that there is no need to try to predict the future. The only thing we have to do is look around us and identify where we are today. That in itself is a very hard task. What is the state of the art in computer science, nano-technology and biotech? Who knows?
Maybe this is already the future.