Nick Foster's matrix might be revealed in a mix of principles:
Technology is the study of means, as John Stuart Mill put it. (Mill contrasts this with science, the study of causes.) A technology is a verb, a process to obtain a result. We often see the manifestations (tools, mechanisms, products), but those merely support and guide the process.
- Any intervention has both intended and unintended effects.
- Effects may be manifest or latent, similar to Robert K. Merton's notion of manifest and latent functions.
- Effects, whether manifest or latent, may be short-term or long-term.
- The overall process may be readily communicated (learned, sold, advocated, adopted), or difficult.
- Implementations and interactions may be simple or complex.
That's five dimensions rather than two, though there's a strong correlation between most of the last five might be collapsed to a simple/complex or easy/difficult axis. And of course, the distributions aren't binary but continuous, though they're probably not strictly normally distributed.
Optimists deal with the intended, manifest, short-term, and readily grasped.
Pessimists deal with the unintended, latent, long-term, and that grasped only with difficulty.
In discussing latent and manifest functions, Merton makes the observation that:
Discovery of latent functions represents significant increments in sociological knowledge .... It is precisely the latent functions of a practice or belief which are not common knowledge, for these are unintended and generally unrecognized social and psychological consequences.
There are other elements to this, including positivity bias and the power of denial over unpleasant truths. These seem fairly evident in the futurist trade.
I read Alvin Toffler's Future Shock for the first time last year, on its 50th anniversary. My overall impression was that the book actually holds up quite well, though its best points are generally those looking at the long-term complications of technology. Individual technology advocates are most likely to be wrong, almost always because they were grossly overoptimistic (again, with a few exceptions). Many of the social predictions seem quaint, but that's almost always because they did in fact come true, and we're living in the world that's resulted from this, such that the view from the other side seems naive. The psychological elements, the ongoing psychological strain of dealing with continuous change, seems highly apropos.
AI tends to accentuate many of the types that Foster describes, and the trends in Merton's rubric above.
AI millenarians (Musk, EA, MIRI) combine certainty that superintelligence will come about with concern that it will be bad. They are in Foster's "shouldn't" class.
AI boosters, which are most of the people working on AI in big tech and startups, are in the "could" bucket. They still see the rainbows, short term and long term.
AI pragmatists (Hinton, LeCun, Ng) minimize what AI can do, focus on near term gains, and on the difficulties in achieving them. These people are also mostly in big tech and startups, but usually closer to the code and the data. They are the "shoulds" and sometimes the "mights".
But there are a couple other dimensions to AI that I'm not sure I have the right words for.
There's a certain kind of person who is more of an adventurer. They just want to be close to the action, almost regardless of the outcome. They are building AI, sometimes very powerful AI, but the ultimate consequences of that work are less important than the fact that they, as individuals, are at the fulcrum of this historical moment.
And there is a large faith-based element to AI, which I suspect applies to other futurist topics to a lesser extent. And that faith-based framework creates tribal arguments about unfalsifiable claims, like the advent of superintelligence. Instead of "should" or "should", they fit into the "will" class, and they provoke skepticism that is just as strong and irrational. Pragmatists sometimes tip over into this group.
> Optimists deal with the intended, manifest, short-term, and readily grasped.
Pessimists deal with the unintended, latent, long-term, and that grasped only with difficulty.
Man, this is DEEPLY untrue if taken as a rule. Some of the most naive, shallow, and short-term thinking I’ve seen has been by pessimists and technology skeptics.
Malthusian predictions are the most glaring and there’s a 200 year long history of its wrongness, spanning over the most explosive expansion of both population AND wealth/wellbeing in human history.
And I know many of us on HN are sick and tired of tech bulls**ters and are understandably jaded about many aspects of tech progress, but Malthusian ideas have, when some have really taken them to heart, led to some pretty rotten results, such as the British letting the Irish starve. But we still have plenty of similar zero/negative-sum thinking today on both the left and the right (although it seems the vanguard Left today is Degrowthist, there was a time when it was the Left that was most optimistic for the glorious future and accused “Limits to Growth” types as using Malthusian ideas to reinforce the status quo).
The reality is that humanity has massive potential, but also massive agency for good AND ill. To surrender to zero sum, degrowth/Malthusian/neoLuddite thinking has huge consequences because it leaves us without the tools we’ll need to address the problems of today and the future. Malthusians can’t only see the short term use of resources by people, not how people working together can actually create greater abundance long term. They look at the amount of land, the number of mouths and number of births to extrapolate poverty and starvation but they don’t look deeper, to the Industrial Revolution that was happening under Malthus’ own nose, how those people working together increase yields and develop better medical technology to resolve the problems that in the short term seemed insurmountable. Progress has negative consequences, but the status quo is absolutely murderous long-term.
I'd suggest that the apparent shallowness of technology skeptics comes from two principle factors:
- The most readily-dismissed skeptics are those whose critiques are readily grasped ... and wrong. Effectively this is a strawman dismissal, as the strong criticisms are not addressed substantively. (Your own criticism fails to detail what specific elements of Malthusian though, either original or current, you disagree with.)
- Those who are prone to dismiss skeptics are themselves frequently falling victim to the biases I've mentioned.
The principle omission from Malthus's calculus was that humans would spend the next 200+ years consuming the great prize of stored fossil fuels in the Earth, a nonrenewable resource which would eventually overwhelm its environmental sinks as well, at rates of up to 5 million times those of formation.[1] Increases in net human productivity track very closely to per-capita energy usage.[2]
Note that in Adam Smith's own arguments over how nations grew their wealth, he also missed the role the Industrial Revolution and fossil-fuel powered machinery would play. That's a significant omission, because Smith was a Scott, living and working in Glasgow at the same time as James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, and more than that, arranged for Watt's appointment to the University of Glasgow and had intimate discussions with Watt about his work. The net result of this is one brief mention within Wealth of Nations, concerning the event by which an improvement was made to the engine (a boy wanting to play with his friends). Even Smith's contemporaneous biographer, Dugald Stewart, fails to mention Watt at all.[4]
The significance of the Industrial Revolution was not evident even to those smack in the middle of it. Nor was it especially beneficial to the bulk of the population until the rise of the labour movement in Britain. The Irish Potato Famine (1845--1852, 1 million deaths, a 20--25% fall in Ireland's population from which it has not yet recovered)[5], for what it's worth, happened directly in the middle of the first Industrial Revolution.
The core of the "limits to growth" view is just that: that growth has limits. That unconstrained, those limits will out. Just where those limits lie, or what mechanisms might further delay their realisation for another few decades, isn't always clear. But pointing out the moral reprehensibility of one means of imposing them doesn't mean others won't eventually manifest. War, disease, and famine are the usual suspects. It's interesting to note that ideological rejection of Limits to Growth was led by both the left and the right.[6] Singing "la-la-la" and closing ones eyes is merely wishful thinking and the fallacy of argument from consequence.[7]
The underlying motivation I find most compelling in the Limits discussion is of coming up with better understanding of what growth is, what causes it, what the specific mechanisms of technology are, and were limits might be found. My realisation in studying the question for well over a decade is that these questions aren't well-answered by the proponents of unlimited growth, that their reasoning often appears motivated (whether consciously or not), and that there's a widespread agreement among economists that growth --- the topic of Smith's foundational book --- is NOT well-understood.[8]
I do not see any proof that the Malthusian predictions were wrong, on the contrary.
There has been indeed as you say "an explosive expansion of wealth".
While so much wealth would have been enough so that a much smaller population could have lived much better, the increase of wealth has been used so that a larger population lives about as well as before.
While modern technology provides a number of devices that allow me to spend much less time with chores than my ancestors, e.g. microwave oven, refrigerator, automatic washing machine, computer, mobile phone, there are a lot of things that I cannot hope to ever be able to buy, even if I am supposed to be a well paid professional, which my grandparents were able to buy from their salaries, e.g. large houses and land.
Moreover I am not even able to buy food of a quality comparable to that of my grandparents. While food is very cheap now, food of a quality similar to what they had can no longer be found anywhere that I am aware of.
I have never seen any evidence supporting this dream of "people working together who can actually create greater abundance long term".
People working together or single will continue to discover more efficient ways to make everything that we need, but no matter what they do, they cannot create an extra piece of land for me to have a house, or an extra forest like those in which I was happy to wander as a child, but which now do not exist any more, having been replaced by cultures or buildings or just wasteland.
In A Farewell to Alms, UC Davis professor of economics Gregory Clark makes the cogent point that both the richest and poorest people who have ever lived, are alive today.
Modern technology makes possible great wealth. It also makes absolutely crushing poverty ... survivable. Though not especially enjoyable.
>Pessimists deal with the unintended, latent, long-term, and that grasped only with difficulty.
It's a sign of extreme optimism to think that unintented, latent, long term and difficult to grasp implications can be predicted at all when the subject is as complex as "everything human beings value."
I made no claim that unintended / long term / latent / difficult-to-grasp concerns can be accurately predicted. Difficulty of demonstration does not mean "less likely to occcur".
However the more common issue is that they're simply entirely ignored or dismissed, often with quips similar to the one you've used here.
Typically by those who are unwaveringly optimistic about the intended, manifest, short-term, and easily-grasped aspects of phenomena or interventions.
One of the most cogent arguments for limits I've found is in William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, most especially the first three chapters. The book is available on the Internet Archive:
Other examples of dismissed consequences can be found in the works of Naomi Oreskes, notably Merchants of Doubt, on the negative long-term latent and complex consequences of asbestos, lead, CFCs, cigarette smoke, and fossil fuels. There are also the consequences of pesticides (both environmental contamination and increased resistance), antibiotics (resistance), various medications (thalidomide comes to mind), advertising, shipping (invasive species), just off the top of my head.
Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome argues compellingly that civilisations co-evolve with their plagues, which raises some interesting implications.
I've been suggesting in conversations elsewhere that we're living in an era of consequences.
I've taken pains to try to find the strongest arguments from each side. The limits arguments strike me as considerably stronger. You can find much of that covered in other comments in this thread, notably in this comment (again I emphasize Ophuls' work):
I think what you want here is a radar chart, not a 2-2 matrix. I suspect most people embody these different types to varying degrees over time, topics and circumstances.
Big time, the world has (might have?) a severe lack of metacognition, diversity of thinking styles and capabilities (perceived upper bound), self-awareness, curiousity, etc.
Another useful distinction might be between people who make predictions, prescriptions, imaginings, warnings, etc., about things they are already expert in (a scientist making narrow claims about their specific domain, a SF writer unpacking the social ramifications of some technology in their story), and a self-described futurist, who has made it their job to talk about the future in a broader way.
That is, people who you would describe as futurists post hoc, and people who have it on their business cards. I am highly skeptical of the latter!
I don't find the distinction is quite so clear. There seem to be two forces coming to bear.
One is specific expertise in some domain. Here, there's a challenge in that generalists must of necessity have lesser specific expertise than, well, experts. This a general problem (so to speak) of synoptic or syncretic works. (One such has a wonderful disclaimer in its preface, I'll see if I can dig that up.)
The other is self-interest in a specific application area. This is where knowledge becomes secodary to bias, and there are numerous cases of people with deep expertise in specific fields proving poor counsel for considered and complete judgement of them. Edward Midgely (inventor of two of the greatest scourges of the 20th century, leaded petrol and chloroflourocarbon refrigerants) is perhaps the exemplar of this tendency, though he has ample company.
As I mentioned earlier in thread, Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock (1970), does pretty well in giving both the optimistic and pessimistic side of technologies. In my estimation, the book's strengths largely come from critics, its weaknesses largely from specific domain experts. Toffler himself (and his often under-credited wife) are not domain experts themselves.
There's a generalist-class which often climbs on the cheerleading wagon, though, and that is those who advocate for numerous technologies, though they might better be seen as specialists in advocacy, public relations, and propaganda. Beware those whose principle interest is in making others look good. (Or bad.)
There are also experts who have voiced strong cautions over specific technologies. They're often sidelined for doing so (a general hazard of whistleblowing), though some have seen success. One such case is Paul Baran, a co-inventer of packet-based switched networks, the technology on which the Internet was based. Baran wrote numerous articles whilst at RAND cautioning against risks of computing in the 1960s, many of which read as highly relevant and prescient even today. Those are now freely available to the public at my specific request:
It's definitely a fuzzy distinction. Candidly, I'm skeptical about generalized methods that make claims about the future and pretend to do so rigorously.
The image that comes to mind when someone says "futurology" is those 19th century drawings of people riding flying bicycles to work: breathless excitement, comic in hindsight.
To the extent that someone claims they can forecast something with so much uncertainty, the hair on my neck starts to stand up.
And maybe I'm condemning a straw man, but it seems like this is your generalist-class, and most of the other groups who would not be as likely to self-identify as a futurist per se.
I found the quote I was looking for, it's in Arthur S. Iberal, Toward a General Science of Viable Systems (1972), and he's quoting Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (1962). The passage concerns looking backwards rather than forwards, though the sentiment is similar:
There is a strong tendency to depreciate works ... which are created by single mids, and the depreciation becomes the more emphatic the nearer such works approximate to being 'Universal Histories'. For example, Mr. H. G. Wells', The Outline of History was received with unmistakable hostility by a number of historical specialists. They criticized severely the errors which they discovered at the points where the writer, in his long journey through time and space, happened to traverse their tiny allotments. They seemed nnot to realize that, in re-living the entire life of Mankind as a single imaginative experience; Mr. Wells was achieving something which they themselves would hardly have dared to attempt -- something, perhaps, of which they had never conceived the possibility. In fact, the purpose and value of Mr. Wells' book seem to have been better appreciated by the general public than by the professional historians of the day.
As to specificity of predictions, the example I like to use is of distinguishing between chronological predictions, that a specific even will happen on a specific schedule, and trigger or relational predictions, that one event or set of relationships predicates another.
If a few minutes after 9 a.m. on the morning of 10 September 2001, you'd been standing on the corner of Liberty and West streets in lower Manhattan, looking north, and somebody were to ask you how much longer the two towers across the way would stand, your guess might have been decades to a century or more. If someone asked you the same question 24 hours later, your estimate might have been revised downwards considerably.
Geology is a study which is remarkably imprecise in predicting when specific large-magnitude events will occur (earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, etc.), though it has developed a very strong facility for suggesting where such indcidents are likely (and more pointedly, where not). The temporal uncertainty is a given due to the domain, characteristics, and timeline. The locational certainty is due largely to the predictability of what dynamics and structures give rise to events. (Yes, there are still surprises in both dimensions, though these tend to accrue additional knowledge.)
All of the social and behavioural sciences have the handicap that the studies themselves exist within the system they are studying. Psychology, economics, sociology, political science, etc., operate within domains in which they are themselves among the variables and causal agents. Physical and biological sciences, for the most part, do not. This is seems to me a principle further confounding factor for the behavioural sciences, though it's not an insurmountable one. Even within those domains, activities and actions exist within constraint parameters, and eventually those constraints (one might call them ... limits) interpose.
Peter Turchin is among those who's been doing interesting work in computational history, with some success.
22 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 55.1 ms ] threadTechnology is the study of means, as John Stuart Mill put it. (Mill contrasts this with science, the study of causes.) A technology is a verb, a process to obtain a result. We often see the manifestations (tools, mechanisms, products), but those merely support and guide the process.
- Any intervention has both intended and unintended effects.
- Effects may be manifest or latent, similar to Robert K. Merton's notion of manifest and latent functions.
- Effects, whether manifest or latent, may be short-term or long-term.
- The overall process may be readily communicated (learned, sold, advocated, adopted), or difficult.
- Implementations and interactions may be simple or complex.
That's five dimensions rather than two, though there's a strong correlation between most of the last five might be collapsed to a simple/complex or easy/difficult axis. And of course, the distributions aren't binary but continuous, though they're probably not strictly normally distributed.
Optimists deal with the intended, manifest, short-term, and readily grasped.
Pessimists deal with the unintended, latent, long-term, and that grasped only with difficulty.
In discussing latent and manifest functions, Merton makes the observation that:
Discovery of latent functions represents significant increments in sociological knowledge .... It is precisely the latent functions of a practice or belief which are not common knowledge, for these are unintended and generally unrecognized social and psychological consequences.
Robert K. Merton, "Manifest and Latent Functions", in Wesley Longhofer, Daniel Winchester (eds) Social Theory Re-Wired, Routledge (2016). https://www.worldcat.org/title/social-theory-re-wired-new-co...
There are other elements to this, including positivity bias and the power of denial over unpleasant truths. These seem fairly evident in the futurist trade.
I read Alvin Toffler's Future Shock for the first time last year, on its 50th anniversary. My overall impression was that the book actually holds up quite well, though its best points are generally those looking at the long-term complications of technology. Individual technology advocates are most likely to be wrong, almost always because they were grossly overoptimistic (again, with a few exceptions). Many of the social predictions seem quaint, but that's almost always because they did in fact come true, and we're living in the world that's resulted from this, such that the view from the other side seems naive. The psychological elements, the ongoing psychological strain of dealing with continuous change, seems highly apropos.
I'd just sort of stumbled across a reference, then kept finding good stuff in his work.
His son, Robert C. Merton, is a Nobel laureate economist, FWIW.
(Cue the old economics-sociology rivalry.)
AI millenarians (Musk, EA, MIRI) combine certainty that superintelligence will come about with concern that it will be bad. They are in Foster's "shouldn't" class.
AI boosters, which are most of the people working on AI in big tech and startups, are in the "could" bucket. They still see the rainbows, short term and long term.
AI pragmatists (Hinton, LeCun, Ng) minimize what AI can do, focus on near term gains, and on the difficulties in achieving them. These people are also mostly in big tech and startups, but usually closer to the code and the data. They are the "shoulds" and sometimes the "mights".
But there are a couple other dimensions to AI that I'm not sure I have the right words for.
There's a certain kind of person who is more of an adventurer. They just want to be close to the action, almost regardless of the outcome. They are building AI, sometimes very powerful AI, but the ultimate consequences of that work are less important than the fact that they, as individuals, are at the fulcrum of this historical moment.
And there is a large faith-based element to AI, which I suspect applies to other futurist topics to a lesser extent. And that faith-based framework creates tribal arguments about unfalsifiable claims, like the advent of superintelligence. Instead of "should" or "should", they fit into the "will" class, and they provoke skepticism that is just as strong and irrational. Pragmatists sometimes tip over into this group.
Man, this is DEEPLY untrue if taken as a rule. Some of the most naive, shallow, and short-term thinking I’ve seen has been by pessimists and technology skeptics.
Malthusian predictions are the most glaring and there’s a 200 year long history of its wrongness, spanning over the most explosive expansion of both population AND wealth/wellbeing in human history.
And I know many of us on HN are sick and tired of tech bulls**ters and are understandably jaded about many aspects of tech progress, but Malthusian ideas have, when some have really taken them to heart, led to some pretty rotten results, such as the British letting the Irish starve. But we still have plenty of similar zero/negative-sum thinking today on both the left and the right (although it seems the vanguard Left today is Degrowthist, there was a time when it was the Left that was most optimistic for the glorious future and accused “Limits to Growth” types as using Malthusian ideas to reinforce the status quo).
The reality is that humanity has massive potential, but also massive agency for good AND ill. To surrender to zero sum, degrowth/Malthusian/neoLuddite thinking has huge consequences because it leaves us without the tools we’ll need to address the problems of today and the future. Malthusians can’t only see the short term use of resources by people, not how people working together can actually create greater abundance long term. They look at the amount of land, the number of mouths and number of births to extrapolate poverty and starvation but they don’t look deeper, to the Industrial Revolution that was happening under Malthus’ own nose, how those people working together increase yields and develop better medical technology to resolve the problems that in the short term seemed insurmountable. Progress has negative consequences, but the status quo is absolutely murderous long-term.
- The most readily-dismissed skeptics are those whose critiques are readily grasped ... and wrong. Effectively this is a strawman dismissal, as the strong criticisms are not addressed substantively. (Your own criticism fails to detail what specific elements of Malthusian though, either original or current, you disagree with.)
- Those who are prone to dismiss skeptics are themselves frequently falling victim to the biases I've mentioned.
The principle omission from Malthus's calculus was that humans would spend the next 200+ years consuming the great prize of stored fossil fuels in the Earth, a nonrenewable resource which would eventually overwhelm its environmental sinks as well, at rates of up to 5 million times those of formation.[1] Increases in net human productivity track very closely to per-capita energy usage.[2]
Note that in Adam Smith's own arguments over how nations grew their wealth, he also missed the role the Industrial Revolution and fossil-fuel powered machinery would play. That's a significant omission, because Smith was a Scott, living and working in Glasgow at the same time as James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, and more than that, arranged for Watt's appointment to the University of Glasgow and had intimate discussions with Watt about his work. The net result of this is one brief mention within Wealth of Nations, concerning the event by which an improvement was made to the engine (a boy wanting to play with his friends). Even Smith's contemporaneous biographer, Dugald Stewart, fails to mention Watt at all.[4]
The significance of the Industrial Revolution was not evident even to those smack in the middle of it. Nor was it especially beneficial to the bulk of the population until the rise of the labour movement in Britain. The Irish Potato Famine (1845--1852, 1 million deaths, a 20--25% fall in Ireland's population from which it has not yet recovered)[5], for what it's worth, happened directly in the middle of the first Industrial Revolution.
The core of the "limits to growth" view is just that: that growth has limits. That unconstrained, those limits will out. Just where those limits lie, or what mechanisms might further delay their realisation for another few decades, isn't always clear. But pointing out the moral reprehensibility of one means of imposing them doesn't mean others won't eventually manifest. War, disease, and famine are the usual suspects. It's interesting to note that ideological rejection of Limits to Growth was led by both the left and the right.[6] Singing "la-la-la" and closing ones eyes is merely wishful thinking and the fallacy of argument from consequence.[7]
The underlying motivation I find most compelling in the Limits discussion is of coming up with better understanding of what growth is, what causes it, what the specific mechanisms of technology are, and were limits might be found. My realisation in studying the question for well over a decade is that these questions aren't well-answered by the proponents of unlimited growth, that their reasoning often appears motivated (whether consciously or not), and that there's a widespread agreement among economists that growth --- the topic of Smith's foundational book --- is NOT well-understood.[8]
________________________________
Notes:
1. See Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_C... (PDF)
2. Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization (2018) and Energy in World History (1994) both illustrate this in depth. dredmorbius ↗ NB, for other books looking at history through the lens of history:
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/ee8c190017d501391a81002590d8e...
There has been indeed as you say "an explosive expansion of wealth".
While so much wealth would have been enough so that a much smaller population could have lived much better, the increase of wealth has been used so that a larger population lives about as well as before.
While modern technology provides a number of devices that allow me to spend much less time with chores than my ancestors, e.g. microwave oven, refrigerator, automatic washing machine, computer, mobile phone, there are a lot of things that I cannot hope to ever be able to buy, even if I am supposed to be a well paid professional, which my grandparents were able to buy from their salaries, e.g. large houses and land.
Moreover I am not even able to buy food of a quality comparable to that of my grandparents. While food is very cheap now, food of a quality similar to what they had can no longer be found anywhere that I am aware of.
I have never seen any evidence supporting this dream of "people working together who can actually create greater abundance long term".
People working together or single will continue to discover more efficient ways to make everything that we need, but no matter what they do, they cannot create an extra piece of land for me to have a house, or an extra forest like those in which I was happy to wander as a child, but which now do not exist any more, having been replaced by cultures or buildings or just wasteland.
Modern technology makes possible great wealth. It also makes absolutely crushing poverty ... survivable. Though not especially enjoyable.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691141282/a-...
It's a sign of extreme optimism to think that unintented, latent, long term and difficult to grasp implications can be predicted at all when the subject is as complex as "everything human beings value."
However the more common issue is that they're simply entirely ignored or dismissed, often with quips similar to the one you've used here.
Typically by those who are unwaveringly optimistic about the intended, manifest, short-term, and easily-grasped aspects of phenomena or interventions.
I've addressed specific dismissals and their proponents numerous times on my subreddit, search "cornucopians":
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=cornucopians&r...
One of the most cogent arguments for limits I've found is in William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, most especially the first three chapters. The book is available on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/ecologypoliticso0000ophu/page/n7...
As well as many libraries: https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=au%3Ao...
Other examples of dismissed consequences can be found in the works of Naomi Oreskes, notably Merchants of Doubt, on the negative long-term latent and complex consequences of asbestos, lead, CFCs, cigarette smoke, and fossil fuels. There are also the consequences of pesticides (both environmental contamination and increased resistance), antibiotics (resistance), various medications (thalidomide comes to mind), advertising, shipping (invasive species), just off the top of my head.
Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome argues compellingly that civilisations co-evolve with their plagues, which raises some interesting implications.
I've been suggesting in conversations elsewhere that we're living in an era of consequences.
Members of each group do this to each other, although perhaps not identically.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dredmorbius
And in the posts surfaced in this search:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=cornucopians&r...
That is, people who you would describe as futurists post hoc, and people who have it on their business cards. I am highly skeptical of the latter!
One is specific expertise in some domain. Here, there's a challenge in that generalists must of necessity have lesser specific expertise than, well, experts. This a general problem (so to speak) of synoptic or syncretic works. (One such has a wonderful disclaimer in its preface, I'll see if I can dig that up.)
The other is self-interest in a specific application area. This is where knowledge becomes secodary to bias, and there are numerous cases of people with deep expertise in specific fields proving poor counsel for considered and complete judgement of them. Edward Midgely (inventor of two of the greatest scourges of the 20th century, leaded petrol and chloroflourocarbon refrigerants) is perhaps the exemplar of this tendency, though he has ample company.
As I mentioned earlier in thread, Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock (1970), does pretty well in giving both the optimistic and pessimistic side of technologies. In my estimation, the book's strengths largely come from critics, its weaknesses largely from specific domain experts. Toffler himself (and his often under-credited wife) are not domain experts themselves.
There's a generalist-class which often climbs on the cheerleading wagon, though, and that is those who advocate for numerous technologies, though they might better be seen as specialists in advocacy, public relations, and propaganda. Beware those whose principle interest is in making others look good. (Or bad.)
There are also experts who have voiced strong cautions over specific technologies. They're often sidelined for doing so (a general hazard of whistleblowing), though some have seen success. One such case is Paul Baran, a co-inventer of packet-based switched networks, the technology on which the Internet was based. Baran wrote numerous articles whilst at RAND cautioning against risks of computing in the 1960s, many of which read as highly relevant and prescient even today. Those are now freely available to the public at my specific request:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/baran_paul.html
I've compiled a listing of other early cautions concerning privacy and surveillance around computer technology:
https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105074933053020193
The image that comes to mind when someone says "futurology" is those 19th century drawings of people riding flying bicycles to work: breathless excitement, comic in hindsight.
To the extent that someone claims they can forecast something with so much uncertainty, the hair on my neck starts to stand up.
And maybe I'm condemning a straw man, but it seems like this is your generalist-class, and most of the other groups who would not be as likely to self-identify as a futurist per se.
There is a strong tendency to depreciate works ... which are created by single mids, and the depreciation becomes the more emphatic the nearer such works approximate to being 'Universal Histories'. For example, Mr. H. G. Wells', The Outline of History was received with unmistakable hostility by a number of historical specialists. They criticized severely the errors which they discovered at the points where the writer, in his long journey through time and space, happened to traverse their tiny allotments. They seemed nnot to realize that, in re-living the entire life of Mankind as a single imaginative experience; Mr. Wells was achieving something which they themselves would hardly have dared to attempt -- something, perhaps, of which they had never conceived the possibility. In fact, the purpose and value of Mr. Wells' book seem to have been better appreciated by the general public than by the professional historians of the day.
As to specificity of predictions, the example I like to use is of distinguishing between chronological predictions, that a specific even will happen on a specific schedule, and trigger or relational predictions, that one event or set of relationships predicates another.
If a few minutes after 9 a.m. on the morning of 10 September 2001, you'd been standing on the corner of Liberty and West streets in lower Manhattan, looking north, and somebody were to ask you how much longer the two towers across the way would stand, your guess might have been decades to a century or more. If someone asked you the same question 24 hours later, your estimate might have been revised downwards considerably.
Geology is a study which is remarkably imprecise in predicting when specific large-magnitude events will occur (earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, etc.), though it has developed a very strong facility for suggesting where such indcidents are likely (and more pointedly, where not). The temporal uncertainty is a given due to the domain, characteristics, and timeline. The locational certainty is due largely to the predictability of what dynamics and structures give rise to events. (Yes, there are still surprises in both dimensions, though these tend to accrue additional knowledge.)
All of the social and behavioural sciences have the handicap that the studies themselves exist within the system they are studying. Psychology, economics, sociology, political science, etc., operate within domains in which they are themselves among the variables and causal agents. Physical and biological sciences, for the most part, do not. This is seems to me a principle further confounding factor for the behavioural sciences, though it's not an insurmountable one. Even within those domains, activities and actions exist within constraint parameters, and eventually those constraints (one might call them ... limits) interpose.
Peter Turchin is among those who's been doing interesting work in computational history, with some success.