
Asking the wrong questions - kurren
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/01/11/wrongquestions
======
ChuckMcM
I really liked this article because it was a concise demonstration of the
'known' solution problem. A while ago[1] there was a discussion of what folks
from the 19th century thought the world would be like in the 20th century. The
common theme is that the futurists could never anticipate a change to a
technology they didn't have any experience with. The rise of communications as
a means of linking people together was completely missed, even by the Dick
Tracy types who had wristwatch phones. Why? Because not only did it
communicate like everyone had experienced (telegraph, telephone) it
_persisted_ with bulletin boards, MUDS, Facebook, and Twitter.

That is why I always try to ask a question my Dad suggested I ask when looking
a future predictions, "What is so common place that they can't see it
changing?" That is so difficult to do. Things like "What would the future be
like if there literally was no disease and any physical injury could be
patched up quickly?" Or "Energy is suddenly free?" or "Lie detection becomes
infallible?" etc. Very tough to do.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13101643](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13101643)

~~~
pmoriarty
_" The rise of communications as a means of linking people together was
completely missed"_

Not by everyone.

Take a look at _" The Machine Stops"_ by E.M.Forster (of _" A Room with a
View"_ and _" A Passage to India"_ fame).[1][2]

In 1909 he predicted something like the internet, chatrooms, internet
addiction, and various other things that have since happened.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops)

[2] -
[http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html](http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html)

~~~
ChuckMcM
I don't disagree, my point wasn't that nobody gets it right, it was that in
order to get it right you have to think about the things which you take for
granted being different. And that is not a natural act :-). Some of the best
science fiction that anticipated the Internet has been stuff that assumed
telepathy and looked at issues associated with that. We hit some of those
problems with voice activation and bluetooth headsets :-).

------
VLM
Two problems in the article analysis

One is the classic hard vs soft sci fi. A classic example in book form is
Stranger in a Strange Land reads like a story about 60s boomer hippies from
India who meditate and get high and die in an allegory of Jesus, because it
is. There's a very thin wrap of search and replace science fiction over that
hippie story most famously a giant plot hole where the author wrote in video
telephone video conferencing without following up on the hole in the plot
generated by being able to see the other party. In comparison, hard sci fi
takes into account and weaves a story about the human effects of technology...

The other problem is in the "The authors polled a range of experts". Asking my
plumber about theology or my lawyer about physics is obviously dumb, and in
pop culture we accept that asking a 50s dude about the 70s is pretty much a
waste of time. However in all fields of human activity if you want an
intelligent commentary on contemporary computer programming you have to either
hatch or grow a contemporary computer programmer. The opinions of a dude in
another field from decades ago are only accidentally going to be correct.
Regardless who was an expert in automation in the 60s, I'm pretty sure they
weren't being asked because they almost certainly didn't have cool
authoritarian credentials because the topic wasn't cool enough at that time,
so by definition they were talking to the wrong people. The history of many
present day trends and concepts shows they were not very cool before they
became cool, therefore asking contemporary experts on the topic of cool will
mostly not work.

~~~
coldtea
> _In comparison, hard sci-fi takes into account and weaves a story about the
> human effects of technology..._

I find two problems with the above analysis.

Oftentimes soft sci-fi (PK Dick for example or even someone like Frederic
Brown) identifies the "human effects of technology" far better than someone
from the "hard" camp, such as Clark or Asimov.

Second, the article specifically covers bad predictions made by hard sci-fi
and concerning use and impact of technology itself.

> _The other problem is in the "The authors polled a range of experts". Asking
> my plumber about theology or my lawyer about physics is obviously dumb_

Not that obvious to me. That's a great way to overcome systematic bias and
domain blindness and get some outsider insight. You talk about being silly to
talk to a "plumber about theology", but I've heard that a carpenter is
supposed to have made some great contributions to the field, as did some
fishermen.

~~~
VLM
Oh there's some overlap as in all things very little is binary.

None the less PKD doesn't really tell "human vs technology" stories. Take for
example "A scanner darkly" which is an interesting psychological thriller and
story about chemical addiction. To quote the wikipedia: "A Scanner Darkly is a
fictionalized account of real events, based on Dick's experiences in the 1970s
drug culture. Dick said in an interview, "Everything in A Scanner Darkly I
actually saw.""

"Man in the High Castle" is alt history action. Its not really a story about
technology.

"Blade Runner" is film noir action flick with a dose of moralizing about
racism and dystopia.

I'd say the thing that defines PKD is technology as escapism. Yeah OK "a
scanner darkly" is about speed freaks but he wanted to tell a psychological
thriller about addiction without people casually tossing it away as "the speed
freaks movie" so he invented a whole substance D mythology to prevent people
from taking the easy way out in their analysis. Ditto Blade Runner where the
technology was a cloak to hide aspects of modernity he didn't want to talk
about, not a central part of the story.

Sort of like how some fantasy pencil whips away aspects of the modern world
the author doesn't like in order to pare down to just what the author wants us
to focus on.

Technology as a zoom lens, not in the zoom lens. PKD is a cool author but in
many ways he doesn't even write sci fi.

How about another definition, soft sci fi can be turned into any other scenery
with mere cut and paste, and tada "a scanner darkly" is about elves smoking
too much pipe-weed in Tolkien world. But hard sci fi requires a major and
substantial rewrite to change the scenery, not just cut and paste. KSR's Mars
trilogy isn't going to Venus or ancient South America any time soon.

The problem with the carpenter you mention is out of millions of pro and maybe
a billion amateur/ancient carpenters only that one had much insight. Its a bad
odds game.

~~~
coldtea
Those are his more psychedelic works sure. But take something from Dick like
"The Second Variation". Or "The Electric Ant". Or "We can remember it for you
wholeseale".

Or here's his version of the future of IoT, home automation and subscription
payments, which as someone in an increasingly number of "forced on my throat"
subscription schemes (Adobe, etc) I find surprisingly prescient:

The hero in Ubik tries to get out of his own house:

"The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." He searched his
pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door.
Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the
nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you." "I think otherwise," the door
said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."
...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and
shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. "You discover I'm right," the
door said. It sounded smug."

> _The problem with the carpenter you mention is out of millions of pro and
> maybe a billion amateur /ancient carpenters only that one had much insight.
> Its a bad odds game._

I find the opposite. All the important contributions to theology and fields
such as philosophy have been made by outsiders. Once degrees and tenures
started rolling in, the substance starts rolling out. At best those tenured
bores can do meta-analyses.

------
niftich
This is the premise of 'disrupt', isn't it? That the existing business models
or technological solutions are so thoroughly shaken by the appearance of
something new that doesn't pass for a mere iteration of the same. Electricity
was not directly comparable to steam, despite having some of the same uses at
first, cars were quite different from horses, and the packet-switched internet
behaves differently from circuit-switched telephone lines.

Part of this phenomenon of even experts unable to predict the new is that
often our current technology is capped by our societal understanding of
physics. Before the Wrights and other early pioneers, we knew that powered
heavier-than-air flying was possible for light things like birds, but weren't
sure whether the same applied to large, heavy frames, or how we'd be able to
deliver enough power to the machine while keeping the weight down. But after a
couple of early success, a vibrant field of haphazard experimentation and
serious scientific research opened up, and we learned a lot about aerodynamic
lift.

Before the transistor, it was difficult to seriously posit that electricity-
powered, non-mechanical computers would be ubiquitous not just to the point of
every government and large enterprise having them, but also every single
person possessing multiple miniaturized versions on their person. The
invention of integrated circuits was a transformational achievement: it
enabled us to go from having very scarce computing capacity to having a slight
excess, and so new programs emerged to harness that ability to do calculation.
VR and AR in turn aren't that transformative yet: they're simply video games
where a portion of the input comes from the 'real world'.

Today, we're at a UI/UX/AI/ML crisis, where we have immense computing
resources at our disposal and still lack an effective ability to communicate
our intent with the machine. We dip down to the ancient metaphor of
manipulating a pre-set UI with a pointer like a mouse or our fingers or our
eyes, or we have to speak audibly to those within earshot so a microphone can
capture our command, ascertain some meaning, then map it to one of many
predefined actions. These seem like the dark ages. It's not hard to guess that
something revolutionary is going to happen in this arena, and will require
actual scientific discoveries to make it possible.

------
stygiansonic
Interesting aside: One of the RAND's predictions (No. 24) is for "
_International agreements which guarantee certain economic minima to the world
's population as a result of high production from automation_", which sounds
pretty much like Basic Income, along with some of the same arguments we've
heard recently about why it will be increasingly needed. (Not saying I agree
nor disagree)

~~~
gpvos
The RAND study is from 1964. There have been several experiments with basic
income systems in the US and Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, and I may assume
that the general idea is even older.

~~~
paulajohnson
It is. The idea was floated by the US founding fathers as a form of
compensation for having all the land parceled up and owned. Further back you
have the Levelers who were essentially proto-communists.

------
oftenwrong
One way to detect suspect predictions is to look at which ones suggest
improvements to things we have today without changing them significantly.

For example, people envision self-driving cars that are exactly like the cars
we have today, only automatic. They predict that they will still be big,
expensive, complicated, multi-person vehicles. I'm sure that category will
continue exist, but why will that remain the norm? The size and complexity of
cars are major drawbacks (e.g. storage, traffic, cost). With bicycles, we can
see that small individual vehicles have significant advantages due to their
size, cost, and simplicity. With self-driving cars, I think there will be room
to borrow some of those advantages. Today, we have to build cars with safety
as a major concern, but when self-driving vehicles are common, we will not
have to. If we are free to relax during a car journey, the ability to travel
at high speed may not be such a major concern, either. The typical self-
driving car could easily be something inexpensive, small, and simple like the
PodRide instead:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lKq1fGtXFM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lKq1fGtXFM)

~~~
Ntrails
>If we are free to relax during a car journey, the ability to travel at high
speed may not be such a major concern, either.

Most of the people I've spoken to firmly believe self driving cars will be
faster, not slower. They'll be safer and more consistent at speed so it's
reasonable to trust them to do so safely.

When the train takes 4 hours and I can drive it in 2h30 - I take the car. Just
the fact that I get to "relax" is not sufficient.

~~~
oftenwrong
Most car trips are much shorter than that, although that could change when
driving is no longer necessary.

For an occasional long-distance trip, it would make sense to buy a ride on a
purpose-built high-speed self-driving vehicle. Kind of like a personal train
cabin.

For day-to-day commuting and errands, people could be able to spend much less
for a smaller, slower, simpler vehicle that is potentially cheap enough for an
average person to own.

------
fancy_pantser
When I see things like the RAND 'long-range forecasting' study, I always look
to see if they specify ubiquity -- it's very different to assert that we'll
have ultrasonic implants for the blind in a laboratory setting vs. being
commonplace and woven into the fabric of society.

As William Gibson is fond of saying, "the future is already here — it's just
not very evenly distributed." Predicting what will become integral to our
daily life is much more interesting/difficult than determining how long it
would take to develop a specific technology's proof-of-concept.

------
scardine
Thanks for this piece, it made me recall the joy of spending my afternoons in
the library and the vivid dreams I got from science fiction books - I remember
reading Verne's "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" as a kid in the 70's and
picturing the Nautilus as a nuclear submarine in Victorian clothes.

Back then the cold war was rampant and Brazil was under military dictatorship.
Now I'm living in the future, and it is half familiar and half surprising.

------
jwatte
Applied AI will be the next "nobody knew how fundamentally things would
change."

I don't believe in the singularity (at least as currently envisioned) but I do
believe we need to figure out what a society must look like when most human
beings are, almost literally, not useful for commercial employment.

Like, the whole tenets of a market economy and capitalist ownership will smash
into the tenets of human worth and the function of society, with violence and
consequences much greater than we've seen until now.

We can see it coming. It's obviously clear. And nobody in charge is taking
about it, much less doing anything about it. A totally avoidable tragedy,
walked into on purpose.

~~~
averagewall
If technology makes the cost of supporting a person's life is nearly zero,
then the wages they'll demand can also approach zero. So a human can undercut
a robot worker on cost.

Currently, that doesn't happen because humans are so expensive to maintain -
they'd sooner starve to death than work for less money than they need to keep
themselves alive. But it's more than before. We do have a huge tertiary sector
of the economy which is basically humans being employed to do low-value or
unnecessary work because they're so plentiful and cheap.

------
thinkalone
For anyone interested: There's an enjoyable radio adaptation of 'A Logic Named
Joe' from X Minus One in 1955
[https://archive.org/details/XMinusOne55122831ALogicNamedJoe](https://archive.org/details/XMinusOne55122831ALogicNamedJoe)

------
barrkel
This is a bit banal. Nobody can predict second and third order effects
reliably because they don't know how to weight one predicted effect vs another
to know how they'll intersect and interact.

Extrapolation for any one technology usually works well for a short distance
into the future (a decade or so), but the chances of a technology being
blindsided by something else entirely rapidly rise over time.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It's not second or third order effects, it's the way that technologies
facilitate social changes that trips people up.

The astounding thing about the Internet isn't just that it's possible to do
all kinds of science fiction things with it, but that it has no single
inventor.

In fact a public internet for shopping, dating, and photo sharing was never
even considered as a goal when the core technologies were being RFC'd.

The real value of technology only appears when it intersects with user land.
The broader the take-up, the bigger the potential for bottom-up social and
political effects.

Telegraphy, radio, heavier than air flight, internal combustion ground cars,
TV, and even printing were all defined by the political and social changes
they created far more than by the physics that made them work.

So traditionally when someone prognosticates about a new shiny thing they
assume their culture won't change and the technology will somehow fit into it.

Far more often, the most interesting thing about new technology is the way it
affects belief systems, economic and social activity, and political power
relationships.

------
singham
I will relate to my observation in Harry Potter books. Harry Potter universe
has time machine which we know scientifically are impossible while in the same
HP universe, Hermoine has to physically go to the forbidden library to read
books. JK Rowling couldn't think of wikipedia or internet which both exist in
real world but not time travel.

~~~
averagewall
Strong encryption is another thing that sci-fi authors seem to miss. For
example 1998's Moonwar has people sneaking communications on laser beams
instead of radio waves because spies won't be able to eavesdrop on the
straight-line laser without physically going to its location. That, despite
the internet already using encryption for financial transactions in real life.

~~~
niftich
Yeah but how do you do key distribution and management? The physical security
and "forward secrecy" (in the loose sense) afforded by an ephemeral
transmission that can only be received in a fixed location is non-negligible
[1].

[1]
[http://www.gdsatcom.com/email/3-22-11.htm](http://www.gdsatcom.com/email/3-22-11.htm)

------
Veen
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre writes about why the future is inherently
unpredictable in his book _After Virtue_. It's in the context of social
sciences but it applies just as well here. There's a decent summary here[0]

[0]:
[http://www.thenewatlantis.com/doclib/20120203_aftervirtuecha...](http://www.thenewatlantis.com/doclib/20120203_aftervirtuechaptersummary.pdf)

> MacIntyre argues that "there are four sources of systematic unpredictability
> in human affairs" which preclude social science from being like natural
> science (93). The first is radical conceptual innovation, which can be
> explained in retrospect, but inherently can only be predicted when the
> innovation has already occurred. MacIntyre notes that this also means that
> the future of scientific innovation cannot be predicted, invoking the
> Church-Turing thesis as further proof. The second source is the fact that
> "the unpredictability of certain of his own future actions by each agent
> individually" implies the unpredictability of that agent by any other agent,
> and hence an aggregate unpredictability to the social world (95). The third
> source "arises from the game-theoretic character of social life" (97).
> Social life in fact embodies multiple games, players, and transactions and
> thus cannot be studied as a single instance, reducing the predictive power
> of game theory. The fourth source is "pure contingency", the way in which
> "trivial contingencies can powerfully influence the outcome of great
> events", such as the length of Cleopatra's nose, or Napoleon's cold at
> Waterloo (99-0).

------
congerous
I have to say I find this piece pretty disappointing. Slightly smug
throughout, which is easy in retrospect, with approximately zero to add to the
conversation. The thesis seems to be: The future is hard to predict, and even
if you can, it's hard to get the timeline right. No shit. Is this what VCs do
with their spare time? Remember granddad and contemplate uncertainty?

------
jankotek
> _Centralized (possibly randomized) wire tapping._

I think some of those predictions were pretty spot on.

~~~
saghm
I think the point the author was making was that people predicted this would
take much longer to become feasible than other things like "radar implants for
the blind", which obviously was not the case.

~~~
xherberta
How cool that they actually don't need implants! The existing hardware can be
hacked to provide sonar capabilities.

------
makerbraker
We carry the PSTN over the Internet over private IP networks that interconnect
with each other over the PSTN.

I know, it's nitpicking.

~~~
SSLy
That last one part i don't believe in.

~~~
ComodoHacker
You don't believe in ADSL?

~~~
SSLy
Check the sibling comment for expressing my concern clearer than I could.

------
CurtMonash
One of my favorite examples of SF writers underestimating the pace of certain
changes is a scene early in Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation -- which is set
1000s of years in our future -- showing the life of a teenage girl before she
starts adventuring.

Sitting in the bedroom of her suburban house, she uses the new technology of a
voice-activated typewriter to write a paper for history class. Looking over
this homework assignment, her father reprimands her for one of her writing
choices, and she sullenly revises the paper accordingly.

(The choice, as you will likely recall if you read the Foundation Trilogy, was
to brag about her grandmother, the heroine of the previous book.)

------
choxi
It's a little gloomy to see how early most of the predictions are, they were
overly-optimistic by 10-20 years in most cases.

Has anyone ever tried aggregating popular predictions over time? It would be
interesting to see a history of predictions for self-driving cars up to now.

------
dwaltrip
My main take-away from this article was that people often use the underlying
paradigms of today (perhaps unknowingly) to predict surface level details of
tomorrow. "Asking the wrong questions", as the article byline states.

Instead, we should try to predict how the fundamental paradigms will change,
and then deduce visible, commonplace details from that.

I did just started reading "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Kuhn,
which is all about paradigms (of a specific sort). It's good stuff.

~~~
tlow
Kuhn argues that it would be difficult to discern if one were inside of a
revolution as it was occurring, correct?

So how does one ask the "right question"?

~~~
dwaltrip
I'm not sure. But I think knowing that the default mode is usually to ask the
wrong questions can help us. It provides a new lense for analyzing any ideas
that come up: "What assumptions am I sub-conscioisly making here? What current
paradigms does the idea depend upon?" etc.

------
intrasight
I enjoyed the photo, the family history, and the premise of "asking the
right/wrong question". I think that all technologists - or perhaps everyone -
can and should take a step back from their daily grind and ask some questions.

I think the wisdom of the crowd can be leveraged in asking questions about the
future. There are sites like longbets.org where you can weight in.

It is one of the great gifts to the human species to be able to contemplate a
future beyond tomorrow.

------
skywhopper
I am going to choose to believe that the wrap-up paragraph, asking "who will
have the right kind of driving data for autonomy?" is a subtle wink, because
the current conventional wisdom about autonomous cars -- that they are coming
soon, and that machine learning on massive datasets is the key to their
success -- is very likely going to end up being one of those things we talk
about jokingly in 50 years. Ha! Remember when they thought we'd have a colony
on the moon in 1990, that machines would have genius IQs by 2000, and that
cars could drive themselves by 2025? Oh, the people of the past were so cute.

------
SandersAK
I thought this would be about how we have prioritized the advancement of
technology for the few over the welfare of the rest.

Maybe it should be titled "Still asking the wrong questions"

------
walshemj
I am not surprised that a telco centric forcasts would be locked into a
switched circuit mind-set.

eve in 96/97 interviewing at a british telecom board the 3 (all mainframe
guys) just did not get the internet at all - ironically the board was at 207
old street

------
mhb
It would be great to read more about the grandfather and the glider.

------
facepalm
Any reason to expect women will be more likely to be rocket pilots in the
future than truck drivers today?

~~~
CurtMonash
In Starship Troopers, Heinlein suggested they'd be pilots due to better
reflexes.

I have no idea whether that had scientific grounding.

