We are being pitched futures all the time. Every advertisement, every political campaign, every quarterly budget is a promise or a threat about what tomorrow could look like. And it can feel, sometimes, like those futures are happening, whether we like it or not—that we’re simply along for the ride. But the future hasn’t happened yet. We do, in fact, get a say, and we should seize that voice as much as we possibly can. But how? I’ve spent the past eight years making over 180 episodes of a podcast about the future called Flash Forward. Here, in a three-part series, are the big things I’ve learned about how to think about what’s possible for tomorrow. (This is part 2. Read part 1 and part 3.)
It’s easy, and often quite fun, to laugh at past predictions about the future. In the 1905 book A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist, author T. Baron Russell predicted the demise of stairs. "The plan of attaining the upper part of a small house by climbing, on every occasion, a sort of wooden hill, covered with carpet of questionable cleanliness, will of course have been abandoned,” he writes. “It is doubtful whether staircases will be built at all after the next two or three decades." There are hundreds of listicles online full of incorrect predictions—everything from Time magazine confidently declaring that remote shopping will never succeed to The New York Times claiming that a rocket could never leave Earth’s orbit.
It’s also easy, although perhaps less fun, to feel as though we ourselves, right now, are just on the cusp of something worth predicting. And if you believe the people who get to hold microphones and make speeches, or go on podcasts, or tweet viral Tweets, we are indeed right on the edge of something revolutionary. What that revolution is changes—maybe it’s apocalypse, or the singularity, or war, or a cure for Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t really matter, exactly, which cliff we’re leaning off of. The important part is that we’re always a half-step away from whatever is on the other side.
But are we? Can we actually know if we’re in the moment of change? Some historians and philosophers argue that it is impossible to know whether future people will care about our current events, because we don’t know what happens next. Others say that no, it’s absolutely possible to know in the moment if an event is historic. “Most of us have had the experience in our own lives—unfortunately, maybe too regularly lately—where things happen in the world and we think, wow, that's a big deal,” says Matt Connelly, a historian at Columbia and author of the book The Declassification Engine. For Americans, moments like the planes hitting the Twin Towers or the uprising on January 6 come to mind. “Moments where you think to yourself pretty quickly, ‘I'm going to be telling my kids about this.’”
But those big events are rare. And for every one of them there are smaller events that wind up being critically important only in hindsight. When Van Leeuwenhoek showed people the first microscope, nobody really cared. When Boris Yeltsin picked a guy named Vladmir Putin as his successor in August 1999, most people—even in Russia—didn’t think it would be a globally historic choice. When Alexander Graham Bell pitched his new invention, the telephone, to Western Union in 1876, the company laughed him off and called the device “hardly more than a toy.”
So which side of this argument is right? And how would one even figure that out? This is what Connelly set out to do in 2019 with his paper called “Predicting History.”
Tracking past predictions to see whether they turn out to be correct is hard to do. One way to figure out how good (or bad) we are at predictions would be to start polling people now about current events, and then wait 30 years and go back and see if those polls were correct. But nobody is doing that, Connelly says, because that experiment would be impossible to get funding for.
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Instead, Connelly and his colleagues had to find a proxy, something that could stand in for this long-term, multiyear dream data set. They settled on a collection of diplomatic cables sent within the US State Department. These are messages between diplomats and the US government, and when diplomats send these cables they add in all kinds of tags and categories that help the cable find its way to the right person. These tags and categories, such as things that were classified secret, or urgent, or were addressed to the secretary of state, then helped Connelly decide if the diplomat thought an event was critically important and perhaps historic.
In the data set that Connelly used—cables sent between 1973 and 1979—1,952,029 had been declassified and released by the US Government. On a practical level, Connelly and his team couldn’t go through each and every one of these nearly 2 million messages to figure out what ended up being historically significant. But it turns out they didn’t have to. The State Department had already done that for them.
The US Department of State has a team of historians whose job it is to assemble an official historical record of the country—a record which includes a sample of cables. In other words, US historians later decided which of these cables were worth saving and putting in the official historical record. Only about one in a thousand State Department cables are chosen for this official archive.
All Connelly and his team had to do was compare the level of importance given to a cable at the time it was sent with whether it was important enough to include in that volume. They found that in the moment, diplomats were not all that good at knowing what was going to wind up being important later. And this goes both ways, with both false positives and false negatives. Only about one in a hundred cables deemed urgent and important at the time wound up part of the historical record.
For example, one cable classified as SECRET at the time related to negotiations involving Napoleón Duarte before the coup in El Salvador. These negotiations seem to have been really important to the person reporting on them, but in the end the meetings didn’t really matter—the US government’s financial and military support of Duarte made a much bigger difference. That cable didn’t make it into the official Foreign Relations of the United States.
On the other hand, there are cables that nobody thought were important but that actually did mark a historic moment. This includes, for example, cables that revisited the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Those were labeled at the time as low-urgency, bureaucratic missives. But in hindsight they mark something deeply historic.
In the end, the answer to our question about predictions is not earth-shattering: Sometimes we can predict what will matter, but not nearly as accurately as we might like to think.
But it still raises a question: Given these results, knowing that even experts are not good at this kind of thing, what is the value of making predictions? Connelly says it isn’t always about being right. “There are people who have been predicting there's going to be a nuclear terrorist attack in the next 10 years, and they've been doing that for 30 years now,” Connelly says. You might look at that track record and scoff about the foolishness of prediction. But Connelly takes another lesson from those warnings. “Those people were actually pretty influential in getting resources behind trying to scoop up loose nukes and trying to find new jobs for chemists and physicists who otherwise were out of work.” In other words, it was the warning itself that forced the action that made that prediction false.
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Of course, not everything can even be predicted. Take earthquakes, for example. We know why they happen, we know the basic geological processes that create them, and yet “it's possible, it's a fundamentally unpredictable process,” says Susan Hough, a seismologist at the US Geological Survey. Earthquakes begin deep underground, in places we don’t have access to. And you can’t easily simulate them in the lab, they require way too much pressure and intensity. “To understand earthquakes. You have to wait for them to happen,” says Hough. (So really, seismologists are just like us! Sitting around, waiting.)
And yet, humans can’t help themselves with their prediction addiction. If you do a quick search online, you can find all kinds of people making claims about where the next big earthquakes are going to be, based on their own attempts at modeling everything from actual earthquake data to lunar cycles to the movement of Mars. “It attracts outright charlatans, and it attracts people who I think are just honestly fooling themselves. They think they’ve found patterns, and they don't really understand the statistics,” says Hough.
It’s a fool's errand to ask people to stop predicting the future. Even if we know we’re mostly wrong. We just love the wager. And human evolutionary history has required us to get good at trying to predict things. That’s how we survived. “Every single one of us is the great, great, great grandchild of humans that were under incredible pressures to take in tons of information, to process it really quickly, to make definitive decisions that have life-or-death stakes,” says Liz Neeley, science communicator and founder of the firm Liminal. Just like we are wired to imagine better things, we are also wired to try to guess what might happen next.
But it can feel like that guessing is getting harder. Another bit of Connelly’s study involved trying to train an algorithm to predict what might or might not be important later—and one thing they found was that the more potentially newsworthy events there were, the worse the algorithm was at guessing right. And today, it feels like there are so many things happening all at once. Like we’re constantly hurtling toward the edge of something. And that feeling can be both exhilarating and awful.
Have you ever stood at the edge of a cliff, or a building, or a high place and looked down and had an odd curiosity about what it would be like to leap? We’re not talking about true suicidal ideation here. It’s just this terrifying exhilarating pull into the abyss. About 50 percent of people report having this impulse. The French call this feeling the call of the void; in English it has a much less poetic name: “the high-place phenomenon.”
There’s an allure to the edge, when you’re safely standing next to it. It’s thrilling because it offers all the excitement and potential of big change, of a new beginning, of a leap—but without having to suffer the tumble down the cliff. You’re not actually going to jump. It’s more about the potential. The what if. The precipice.
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When you first walk up to the edge, it’s alluring. But if you’re forced to stand there, to lean over it constantly, something else happens. There’s an exhaustion and a numbness. It’s like you’re listening to a song that just keeps building and building and building. And you’re waiting for the beat to drop, and it just doesn’t. That level of frenetic, anticipatory energy simply isn’t sustainable.
A lot of us feel like we are at an 11 a lot of the time, when it comes to thinking about the future. Those who want to drive and shape and force the future use the emotional power of the precipice to force us to feel a sense of inevitability. That their predictions, conveniently aligned with their business interests and investments, are inevitable. That unlike those fools in the past, this time we’re going to be right about technology by embracing it, by leaping into future with both feet. Like there’s no point in resisting. No point in asking questions because really we’re just, almost, already nearly there. No time to waste. It’s time to jump whether you like it or not.
We can’t predict how the future will go. Will there be nuclear war? Will wealthy nations get their act together about climate change? Will you fall in love? We know the answers to these questions about as surely as we know whether there will be a magnitude 6.2 earthquake on Wednesday at noon. Which is to say, we don’t.
And yet, people are going to keep claiming that they can tell you what’s coming—whether it’s the singularity or the next earthquake. “I don't think we're ever going to let go of the hope,” says Hough. “Just this idea that an earthquake can hit at 2 in the morning, out of the blue, is not something that, you know, anybody likes to live with.” And it’s useful to return to earthquakes once again here—because even if we can’t make exact predictions for when one might strike, we actually do know how to prepare so that we’re as ready as possible.
Often, this doesn’t look nearly as sexy as predicting. For earthquakes, preparation is about building codes. Nothing is less sexy than building codes. And yet, updating our structures and spaces to be safer is how we don’t die under a pile of rebar and cement. And you can do that without knowing when the earthquake is coming. “We all want prediction, right?” says Hough. “But the building around us doesn't give a rat's behind if the earthquake is predicted or not, it's going to have to withstand the earthquake or not.”
It doesn’t take much to see the parallel here to so many other things. We don’t have to know exactly what’s going to happen and when to get ready for it. We can peel our eyes and hearts away from the pull of the cliff and focus on the structures that will keep us safe, that will support us in the meantime, that we can improve and act upon right now. And then, when we’re ready, we can choose whether or not to jump.