Changing the Future

If you knew what the future would be, could you change it?

Sci-fi loves that question; philosophers argue about it since it impacts the determinism v/s free will debate. And then are people who analyze the question with data! Like Scott Adams, who framed the Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters:

“Simply stated, my observation is that whenever humanity can see a slow-moving disaster coming, we find a way to avoid it.”

Adams’ examples of disaster scenarios that got averted because we anticipated them and had time enough to do something about it include the Malthusian doomsday (population would grow exponentially while food production would only grow linearly) and the Y2K problem.

I think there is something to Adams observation. Except that he should an additional condition: People should have the freedom to do something about it.

To see why that additional condition is needed, think of George Orwell’s prophetic books, Animal Farm and 1984. Guess what? Communism played out exactly the way Orwell predicted. Why? Because the citizens of those countries never had the freedom to do anything about it.

On a slightly lighter note, people don’t always agree that something is a (future) problem to begin with! This may not make much sense until you think of the online privacy debates. Now take these lines predicting the impact of computers, the Internet and social networking in an Whole Earth Review article by Larry Hunter:

“The ubiquity and power of the computer blur the distinction between public and private information. Our revolution will not be in gathering data — don’t look for TV cameras in your bedroom — but in analyzing information that is already willingly shared.”

Now here’s the kicker: these lines are from a 1985 article for! Later in that article, Hunter made this prediction:

“Soon celebrities and politicians will not be the only ones who have public images but no private lives — it will be all of us.”

(Again, to appreciate how far back this prediction was made: Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook, had just been born when these lines were written!)

So if Hunter’s predicted the impact of Facebook and Twitter on privacy decades back, why wasn’t something done already? Well, because not everyone agrees that privacy is an issue.

I guess we should add another question to the list: If you knew what the future would be, would you change it?