Meditation on the Future

AWM #64: Predicting, imagining, and building the world to come 🗼

Some days ago, I was busy writing my Predictions for 2050 essay for The Classical Futurist when, in a bout of Twitter-enabled procrastination, I chanced upon this picture.

It is ‘Paris of the Future,’ by French comic artist Mœbius. It is grand. It is dreamy. Nothing of the current Paris is recognizable, except for its most salient symbol, the Eiffel tower; but the tower is dwarfed by the scale of the futuristic city. The tall, intriguingly designed buildings are breathtaking. They show a level of detail rarely seen in imaginary architecture: it feels like science fiction, it clearly belongs to the future, yet it departs from the simplistic smooth surfaces that are typical of the genre. We see some movement, some life: unorthodox flying machines; a few people with bizarre clothes; a small dinosaur pet. And on the side of the copper-colored structure in the forefront, right under the three characters gazing at the cityscape, we read a quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, from his unfinished book Citadelle.

L’avenir, tu n’as pas à le prévoir, mais à le permettre.

You don’t have to predict the future, you have to enable it.¹

And there I was, having fun predicting the future, but not doing anything special to enable it. I wondered: is that bad?

No, of course not. We do need people to predict the future. Forecasters who can spot trends in the weather or the market before anybody else. Futurologists who can visualize long-term scenarios, allowing us to adapt our plans according to the range of possibilities. Artists who, like Mœbius, can dream up tantalizing visions, or warn us against the bleakest outcomes, taking advantage of our collective human superpower: imagination.

All this work is admirable, and yet it is true that it seems to fall short of actually building the future. That is, inventing new things; creating new organizations, or reforming existing ones; discovering new truths; and also providing the labor necessary for all the above to have a true impact.

Artists perhaps I should include in this category. True artists push back the frontiers of what is possible; at their best, they are enablers. In Strange Loop Canon, Rohit suggests (seriously, I think?) that the most impactful possible job is science fiction writer:

If you're Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury, William Gibson, Iain Banks, Ada Palmer, Zelazny, you're not just read for enjoyment, but you're allowed to have edit access to the brains of the best, brightest and most wilful of our species. Everyone from Paul Krugman to Elon Musk got inspired by your visions, and the giant chasms betwixt.

Of course, as he says, the problem with this is that you won’t know who you have inspired, and the inspiration may happen many years after your death. Still — if you want to solve for impact, it’s something to keep in mind. Dream up the future, and inspire.

Maybe there is in fact no fundamental distinction between building the future and dreaming it up.

Instead, the true distinction might be between letting oneself being swept by the unending current of time, and trying to use that current to go places. After all, the future is going to happen whether we build it or not, whether we imagine it or not. The question is: where along its current will you end up?

Predicting is not a bad exercise; but it is incomplete. If you only predict, then you are a spectator. If you dream up, if you build, then you are an actor.

(If you mindlessly do the labor of others, with no awareness of where they’re trying to steer the future, then you are an extra, playing a useful but not especially rewarding part; or perhaps not even a useful one, if you happen to be building a Rube Goldberg machine. Consider doing something else.)

It certainly feels like a big part of society is just letting the currents sweep them wherever. Most of us, in fact, aren’t in a position to steer anything; we are too busy trying to look back even as the river of time pushes us forward. This is conservatism, in the broad sense of wanting to conserve the things we hold dear, of not wanting them to change. We are all conservatives to some degree; this is healthy, but it is also a blind spot, a choice of comfort over good.

Making an effort to predict the future, like I did this week, forces one to turn to the bow of the ship and look at the blurry mist we are headed into, catching only glimpses, but sometimes impressive ones: new worlds being colonized across the solar system, maybe, or simply bizarre, gleaming, gigantic Paris. The mist is uncomfortable, but you have to look. Being a spectator is the first step to being an actor. If you don’t watch the show, then you won’t be able to play in it.

(I realize I am mixing two metaphors here, the boat on a river, and the people in a show. The future is these two things and more.)

What can happen when you begin watching is that you may feel an itch to get onto the stage. You write, say, about space, about Lunar and Martian colonies; and then you begin wondering why you’re not working in the space industry. Or any other worthy problem: increasing human lifespan, or reforming our institutions, or creating great art and architecture.

You can’t do all of it, of course. You have to choose. That is the metaproblem. There is no secret to solving the metaproblem, but you can do worse than dreaming up your ideal future and deciding to work on whatever is needed to build that.

Right now, that’s where I am. I haven’t chosen yet. I have tried prediction; now I must try imagination, and then set to work.

---

1. My translation. Other translations I found online:

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.

It is important not merely to foresee the future, but to bring it about.

The future is not yours to anticipate, but to allow.

It seems to often be mistakenly attributed to Saint-Exupéry’s best-known work, The Little Prince, but that’s probably just because it is Saint-Exupéry’s best-known work.