In his book Poetics, Aristotle said “it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen, -- what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity.” It bears mentioning that in Ancient Greece, poetry included drama and stories. So, for our purposes we can substitute the word writer for poet with the understanding that we are talking about writers of fiction. This gets a little tricky as Aristotle distinguished between poets and writers who wrote about history. Our modern-day sensibilities might see this as a distinction between fiction and non-fiction. But histories back then were not necessarily non-fiction as the events that occurred might well have been embellished or spun in favor of the winners (who would have written them) or to emphasize values such as bravery in warfare.
But what we want to emphasize here is that stories contain what is possible given our understanding of probability and necessity. Or, more simply put, stories must be believable given our understanding of human behavior and the human condition. Given this, one could claim, without overstatement, that all stories explore possible worlds. So, how is that any different from what the book I am currently writing on Writing Stories to Explore Possible Worlds is about?
The answer can be found in an apocryphal quote from Marshall McLuhan which says, with some literary liberty, that looking to the past to understand the future is like driving while looking in the rear-view mirror. I have to take the literary liberty because there is some dispute over the exact wording and whether or not he actually said it. But, even if I made it up, it is a wonderful insight.
Think about it for a moment. Looking to the past to understand the future is like driving while looking in the rear-view mirror. Is it even possible to drive by looking in the rear-view mirror? Well, if the road ahead is very straight, and you are driving very slowly, and there are no obstacles in the road, then you might get away with it. However, if the road begins to curve or you begin to speed up, or unexpected obstacles appear, then looking in the rear-view mirror might not work anymore. In fact, it will, at some point, become extremely dangerous to do this. And, yet, for most of history, we have looked to the past to understand the future.
That was OK as long as the future was a lot like the past (a straight road) and things didn’t change very quickly (driving slowly) and we did not encounter anything unexpected (obstacles). However, we know that the pace, magnitude and unpredictability of change have grown increasingly for the past century or so, with more and more unexpected phenomena appearing out of nowhere. So, maybe we need to start looking out the front window of the car rather than the rear-view mirror. Maybe we need to look to the future in order to understand the future rather than looking to the past. But, in order to look to the future, we need to use our imaginations. Our imaginations are our headlights into the future. I already addressed this briefly in my book Predicting the Future and will get back to the imagination at some point in a future post. But to address the topic is this post, we need to ask why the rate of change is speeding up, if it is likely to continue, and if the rate of change is likely to increase.
There are three reasons that I see which are behind the increasing magnitude of change. I should point out that there are numerous opinions on this, and many people might come up with different answers. However, I see three main causes. So, I will address them. First are uniquely human characteristics. Second is increased population. And, third, is the amplifying effect of technology. Technology includes things like language, logical reasoning and science as well as more obvious examples such as computers, communications technology, and biotechnology. However, technological amplification can be seen in nearly every aspect of human life from food, to buildings, to weapons and so on. These affect the future in varying degrees as well.
How does being human cause the future to change more rapidly? Most living things on earth evolve slowly at the rate of biological evolution. Humans evolve socially and culturally as well, which occurs much more rapidly. And we evolve cognitively through new ideas which is even faster yet. In addition, non-human species evolve with changes in their environment or circumstances. Humans are constantly on the move changing their environment and circumstances. Crocodiles haven’t evolved much in he last 100 million years. Modern humans evolved about 200,000 years ago, developed language about 50,000 years ago and built the first cities around 10,000 years ago. So, we are on a roll.
How do population and social conditions cause the future to change more rapidly? It appears that cultural evolution and cognitive evolution are the fastest ways in which humans evolve. Both require ideas. The more people there are (and the better educated they are) the more ideas there are. So, growing populations (especially educated populations) increase the rate of conceptual evolution. And changes in our conceptual reality causes the future to be increasingly more different from the past.
How does technology cause the future to change more rapidly? Technology has always increased the rate of change for humans. Technologies include the discovery of fire, invention of the wheel, development of metallurgy, advances in science, development of information technology and so on. One could also include advances in food production, improved medicine, the railroads and so on. You could also include cognitive technologies such as language, logic and scientific method. But, one would have to keep adding things all day if you didn't stop somewhere. Technology amplifies the rate of change allowing us to communicate better, think faster, grow more food which affects population, and exert greater control over the environment.
So, as the future changes at an increasingly more rapid rate, the net result is that it comes at us faster and faster. And in order to deal with the onslaught of change, we need to get a lot better at figuring out what is coming our way and what we need to do about it. One way to do that is to use our imaginations and write stories about possible futures.
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