Who said our brains _needed_ consciousness to anticipate the future? The only claim I've seen is that it's (part of?) the particular mechanism our brains happen to use. This is akin to asking why birds need to flap their wings to fly when we have airplanes that can fly with fixed wings.
What I'm saying is that consciousness doesn't add anything to the art of 'predicting the future', and plays (as far as I can see) no discernable role in this art.
