The Economic Future. Brilliant

The powerful opening line of William Gibson’s debut masterpiece Neuromancer definitively sets the tone for what was and perhaps remains,

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

The powerful opening line of William Gibson’s debut masterpiece Neuromancer definitively sets the tone for what was and perhaps remains, the single most influential science fiction novel in shaping the public consciousness.

Neuromancer was published 30 years ago this year (1984). Gibson was predicting our rather grim future and popularised the idea of cyberspace (a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions). He described a (internet) network that can be jacked into, while in the real world characters flit from Tokyo to theSprawl, an urban agglomeration running down the east coast of the US. Neuromancer gave us not onlycyberspace, but also the matrix and dub music (a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalised pop). The cities along the Eastern seaboard from Boston and Atlanta have yet to merge into a single megalopolitan Sprawl but it is only a matter of time. Starbucks has become Beautiful Girl, a franchised coffee shop seen on nearly every street corner. Microsoft was founded before the novel’s publication, but Gibson’s microsofts, small computer chips that insert directly into the brain, may well represent the company’s ultimate goal.

There is a character in BBC’s The Fast Show, who was an over enthusiastic Manchester teenager. He believed everything was‘Brilliant!‘. He marches around many diverse locations biggingthings up with boundless energy. Amongst the things Brilliant thinks are brilliant are: shelves, gravity, the Mafia, holes, yesterday, Ronnie Corbett, sequels, holidays, echoes, several different types of natural disaster, paint, kids, pavements, the sky, mothers, microwaves, old people, sex, the Romans, shepherds, Jesus and golf.

Something else that is brilliant is the power of predicting the future. One of the buzz words of the moment is Nowcasting. It has recently become popular in economics and uses standard measures to assess the state of an economy, e.g. GDP, which are only determined after a long delay and are even then subject to subsequent revisions. While weather forecasters know weather conditions today and only have to predict the weather tomorrow, economists have to forecast the present and even the recent past.

It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. – Yogi Berra

Billions of dollars are spent on experts who claim they can forecast what’s around the corner, in business, finance and economics. Most of them get it wrong. Data analysts forecast demand for new products, or the impact of a discount or special offer. Scenario planners produce broad-based narratives with the aim of provoking fresh thinking about what might happen. Nowcasters look at Twitter or Google to track epidemics like Ebola, in real time. Intelligence agencies look for clues about where the next geopolitical crisis will emerge and banks, finance ministries, consultants and international agencies release regular prophecies covering dozens, even hundreds, of macroeconomic variables.

Real breakthroughs have been achieved in certain areas, especially where rich datasets have become available e.g. weather forecasting, online retailing and supply-chain management. Yet when it comes to the headline-grabbing business of geopolitical or macroeconomic forecasting, it is not clear that we are any better at the fundamental task that the industry claims to fulfil – seeing into the future. Philip Tetlock at the University of Pennsylvania has found most forecasters do only slightly better than chance.Chimps randomly throwing darts at the possible outcomes would have done almost as well as the experts,” is how one political scientist summarised the findings to the New York Times.

Forecasting with the power of a Gibson novel may be possible when you have clarity and imagination. Some people (called by the popular press as Superforecasters ) may be able to predict geopolitical events with an accuracy far outstripping chance. The most helpful advice on how to become a Superforecaster (or a predictive science fiction writer) can be derived from using some clear rules:

COMPARE & CONTRAST. Comparisons are important: use relevant comparisons as a starting point. Turn up the contrast and use false colour.
WATCH, LOOK & LEARN. Historical trends can help (but cannot predict future trends accurately). There is a look at history unless you have a strong reason to expect change. Ethnographic understanding is needed at the highest level.
META DATA. Average opinions matter; experts disagree, so find out what they think and pick a midpoint. Big data and understanding of statistical analysis.
DO THE MATHS. If possible use the most powerful model-based predictions available. The numbers are the starting point for understanding.
UN-BIAS VISION. Predictable biases exist and can be allowed for. Don’t let your hopes influence your forecasts, for example; don’t stubbornly cling to old forecasts in the face of news.

Night city was like an experiment in social Darwinism designed by a bored researcher who kept his thumb permanently on the fast forward button.

Predictive capabilities frequently serve as a metric for judging the worth of near-term science fiction. In many ways, Gibson’s prognosticative capabilities continue to impress thirty years later. Certainly, he misses the mark on some counts. He amusingly chooses the megabyte to represent units of big data. His world invokes powerful computer terminal fixtures and sleek cybernetic implants, but omits the intermediary stage of handheld technology like smartphones. He has changed the world through the sheer power of his dream and vision. Even though Gibson imagines such a ferociously revolutionary world from the 1980’s, he tempers this dream that could easily be that of ecstatic revelation with the knowledge that, as with all things, there will be some winners and some losers.

Need to make a major decision about your future or predict a trend? Want to write the next Neuromancer? Embrace uncertainty and identify your biases. Of course, if you are a Superforecaster already, you probably saw that advice coming.

Be Amazing Every Day.

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