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FUTURES LITERACY: A DANCE BETWEEN IMPROVISATION AND PLANNING

By Riel Miller, Kushal Sohal,

Anna De Mezzo

MOSTLY, at the corner café, when someone asks you a question and you say: “I don’t know”, the expectation is that there is a way to find out. It is assumed that knowledge is attainable even if it isn’t immediately at hand. Same expectation applies to a somewhat stronger admission of ignorance – such as “No, there isn’t any way to know”. Even then, the typical reaction is not that the topic is irremediably unknowable, rather that there is just some obstacle that needs to be overcome. Today the default view is that humans can gain knowledge of anything. All we have to do is put our minds to the challenge. A comforting confidence in light of the widespread assumption that as a rule wanting to know is good thing. Who can argue with the proposition that it is better to be informed than not?

Well, perhaps surprisingly the study of human anticipatory systems and processes, points to situations where the affirmation of unknowability and the rejection of the desire to know are fundamental to enhancing human perception. Perhaps the most familiar situation where this stance towards knowing is a prerequisite is when dancers or musicians improvise. By definition planning, a score or choreography, that lays out the notes or steps in advance, is the opposite of improvisation. When an artist improvises, on the basis of considerable, usually planned, mastery of many pre-conditions, they do not and should not know in advance what they will do. No additional or better information is needed. Nor should they aspire to know what notes or movements they will use in advance. Since both are irrelevant, nay contradictory, to the invitation of improvisation – to be unplanned, generating novelty in the emergent moment.

Fine, as far as it goes, but improvisation is for marginal creatives and the negligent who failed to plan sufficiently, right? After all you should know in advance and if you don’t you just didn’t try hard enough or pay sufficient attention to what was either already known or at least knowable. Why get blindsided by a pandemic? Why do things that end up moving the planet off of the climate patterns that were formative of today’s path dependent and brittle ways of organizing the species’ activities? Should’ve known better, right? Alternatively, could it be that these unanticipated situations are, at least in part, due to living with the expectation that the future is knowable and therefore fair game for human manipulation? From the Delphic Oracle to your favorite reigning deity of the moment the promise has been that at least some expert knows what’s going to happen. In the land of the blind the one-eyed person is king, of course.

Only, as we gather knowledge about the different reasons and methods humans deploy to harness their ability to imagine

situations that are later than now we begin to discover that abandoning the double-barreled premise, that the future is knowable and that we should strive to know it, actually blinds us. Or, to put it in terms of planning versus improvisation, it inhibits our ability to both create and take advantage of novelty. Which is rather obvious once we look at how people actually engage with their anticipatory systems and processes. Try sticking to the plan for a conversation, a marriage, or the search for meaning over a life-time. Nope. In these situations the abandonment of planned, pre-conceived futures, is the pre-condition for sensing and making-sense of the previously unknowable – what didn’t and couldn’t exist on the basis of prior conditions. If you insist on your past futures (the futures you imagined in the past) you will simply remain unaware and/or unable to invent the novel. Complexity, the inescapable creative state of our universe, enables and entails improvisation.

So, what have we been observing at UNESCO over the last decade as we attempt to explore and describe the diversity of human anticipatory systems and processes? That planning and improvisation are both present in the actual why and how of using-the-future.

The evidence of this dual presence arises in the Futures Literacy Laboratories, experiential action-learning voyages codesigned by UNESCO and local champions aimed at making explicit and making sense of participant’s anticipatory assumptions— namely, the reasons and methods they use to imagine the future. In a recent FLL, UNESCO worked together with the Disaster Risk Reduction unit of the United Nations (UNDRR) to explore the future of Disaster Risk Governance.

Both disaster and governance are inextricably linked to the future (on the one hand futures to be avoided and on the other futures to be mastered). And in both cases, the tendency is to search for knowability, or the next best thing – probability.

What happens in an FLL is that participants begin to expand their awareness of anticipatory systems and processes. Of course, the standard predictive approaches to imagining the future emerge from the Lab, but so do traces and hints of other reasons and methods for imagining the future. On July 14th until 16th UNDRR and UNESCO co-designed and implemented a Futures Literacy Lab (FLL) on the future of Disaster Risk Governance. The lab involved 26 participants from the Asia-Pacific region, covering a fair diversity in terms of age and profession and representing both the private sector and international organizations. A team of 14 local and international facilitators guided the Lab through the three days. The objectives of the Lab spanned from exposing participants to Futures Literacy to increasing capacity for youth and young professionals on the topic and changing the mindset around traditional approaches to Disaster Risk Governance. A report of the process and what was learned will be forthcoming, but what is already clear to the UNESCO FL team is that the Lab once again generated evidence of the diversity of anticipatory systems and processes. Participants revealed many different anticipatory systems and processes that use probabilistic imagining as an approach to controlling the future. The Lab also generated preliminary evidence of other ways of using-the-future, ones that open up different perceptions of the present, such as sources of fragility, and different ways of thinking about enhancing resilience.

The FLL offered participants an opportunity to experience how lettinggo of planning the future, even when using multiple and open futures, opens up new fields of perception. The Lab also demonstrated how difficult it is to let go of the dominant reasons and methods for using-the-future. Participants are unsure of why and how to combine planning and improvisation. It is hard to grasp and practice, what in Futures Literacy terms involves both ‘anticipation for the future’ (AfF) and ‘anticipation for emergence’ (AfE) (see Transforming the Future, 2018). The experience of revealing the anticipatory assumptions, including those related to the purpose of imagining the future, is only the beginning of a longer learning voyage. ONE narrative of human history is the story of technological development, of how human beings, as a species, have conquered and tamed the natural environment through increasingly sophisticated technology. In this narrative, our current moment can be seen as a unique turning point. For example, note the language employed by Klaus Schwab, the Founder of the World Economic Forum, and his framing of our current epoque, the Fourth Industrial Revolution: “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another… The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent. When compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is evolving at an exponential [emphasis added] rather than a linear pace.”

Are we human being stuck deep in the rapid currents of technological development, doomed to be swept away uncontrollably? What is the nature of technological development? This article will examine this question through the theory of technological development in the work of futurist Ray Kurzweil in The Age of Spiritual Machines. A critical examination of Kurzweil’s model of technological development will come with insights with which to reflect on the framing of technological development in our time. Taking from these insights, I will suggest another way of viewing technological development. The way in which we conceive of technological development is of utmost importance; this will be made apparent by way of a case study on the future of work.

Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines is a work with recognition and influence in the futures studies community—it was listed as one of the Most Significant Futures Works by the Association of Professional Futurists in 2008. In the book, Kurzweil advances a deterministic theory of technological development that inevitably leads to a certain conclusion. A brief elaboration of the theory follows; the reader may skip the next paragraph to skip ahead to the implications of Kurzweil’s theory.

In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil’s theory of technological development is centered on the Law of Time and Chaos. The Law is built on his observation of exponential trends, some of which include the exponentially slowing pace of the universe, the exponentially quickening development of computing, and the quickening pace of evolution for lifeforms on Earth. The speed of change is described by the interval between salient events, or “events that change the nature of the process, or significantly affect the future of the process” (p. 29). So, the exponentially slowing pace of the universe does not refer to the speed at which it expands. Instead, it refers to the fact that, within the first 20 minutes, the universe passed through numerous salient events (the Planck epoch, the Quark epoch, the Hadron epoch, the Lepton epoch, and the Photon epoch), whereas now, hundreds of

“DO WE MAKE TECHNOLOGY OR DOES TECHNOLOGY MAKE US? EXPLORING TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM THROUGH RAY KURZWEIL”

By Kevin Jae

NOTES:

1Schwab, K. (2016 Jan 14). The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourthindustrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/ 2Kurzweil, R. (1999). The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Penguin. 3Association of Professional Futurists. (n.d.). Past Winners. https://www.apf.org/page/ PastWinners 4Wikipedia (n.d.). Timeline of the early universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_ the_early_universe 5Wikimedia Commons. (n.d.). File:PPTCountdowntoSingularityLog.jpg. https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PPTCountdowntoSingularityLog.jpg 6Manyika, J., & Sneader, K. (2018). AI, automation, and the future of work: Ten things to solve for. McKinsey Global Institute. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/futureof-work/ai-automation-and-the-future-of-work-ten-things-to-solve-for#

Figure 1. Countdown to Singularity (Logarithmic Plot)

millions of years pass without a salient event occurring. He connects these exponential trends together to deduce his Law of Time and Chaos, where “in a process, the time interval between salient events… expands or contracts along with the amount of chaos” (p. 29). Returning to the example of the universe, there is an increasing amount of chaos due to entropy, expanding the time interval between salient events. The inverse law is the Law of Accelerating Returns, where “as order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes)” (p. 30). Evolution is a particularly important exponential trend for Kurzweil’s narrative. An evolutionary process continually pursues complexity by creating a greater order, and for Kurzweil, technology is another mode of evolution. Technology also builds on order to develop exponentially and, as per the Law of Accelerating Returns, time speeds up (i.e. salient technological developments occur at shorter time intervals).

The implications of Kurzweil’s deterministic theory of technological development can be seen in Figure 1. There is no human agency in Kurzweil’s theory. Just as evolution follows a non-human logic, technological development is driven by an internal logic that is beyond human control. Technological development, for Kurzweil, seems to be a teleological history—it leads inevitably to the Technological Singularity. It follows that each technological advancement on the road to Technological Singularity is also pre-determined; new, salient technologies are stepping stones for the next stage of evolution. As Figure 1 shows, the evolution to life was destined to lead to homo sapiens sapiens and homo sapiens sapiens was destined to be swept up by the current of technological evolution that will eventually subsume him in the Technological Singularity. In this narrative of the world, another conclusion follows as a result: technology is the Great Cause and human actions and behaviours are the effect; technology determines human actions and behaviours, leaving no room for human agency. Human beings do not create a future; the future is determined by the inevitable, accelerating progress of technology that ends in Singularity.

It would be intellectually dishonest to propose this reading of Kurzweil without a note of reflection. Kurzweil never explicitly declared allegiance to this “hard” technologically deterministic viewpoint. Instead, I have created a caricature of Kurzweil’s perspective to illuminate certain absurdities. It is still true, after all, that Kurzweil describes his theory of technological determinism using terms like the “Law” of Time and Chaos and the “Law” of Accelerating Returns—the term Law seems to suggest something immutable and pre-eternal, such as the Laws of Physics: Kurzweil’s Laws seem to suggest that they are outside of human control. However, caricatures and absurdities can be enormously productive. With the previous discussion in mind, we can apply the insights of this discussion to the discourse around the future of work.

“Automation will displace some workers. We have found that around 15 percent of the global workforce, or about 400 million workers, could be displaced by automation in the period 2016–2030. This reflects our midpoint scenario in projecting the pace and scope of adoption. Under the fastest scenario we have modeled, that figure rises to 30 percent, or 800 million workers.”

The discourse on the future of work is often framed in the manner of the quotation above. Firstly, technological progression is unavoidable; secondly, technological progression will inevitably automate a large number of workers; ergo, it is necessary for workers to reskill and upskill and adapt to the changing technological landscape. This narrative resembles Kurzweil’s theory of technological development. There is no discussion about the role of human agency in the creation of technologies. Technological development and the type of technologies that will be developed are a given.

Once we recognize the human factor in technological development and recognize that human beings have agency to create the technological landscapes that they desire, then we can have new discussions about the future of work. For example, instead of replacing workers wholesale, what if we could develop technology that can replace certain aspects of work, especially the dirty, dangerous, and demeaning aspects of work? There could be selective automation instead of the wholesale automation of jobs. At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, human beings could also choose to strategically halt the development of certain technologies that come with great risks. Exponential technological development, an uncontrollable whirlwind that threatens to blow us away, is not determined. Instead of having our techno-scapes pre-constructed for us, we should recognize that we have agency to create technologies that suit our preferred collective futures. Automation will displace some workers. We have found that around 15 percent of the global workforce, or about 400 million workers, could be displaced by automation in the period 2016–2030. This reflects our midpoint scenario in projecting the pace and scope of adoption. Under the fastest scenario we have modeled, that figure rises to 30 percent, or 800 million workers. 6 ”