One of the memories I have from my school days is the visit of the “careers advisor”, a strange diplomat from the adult world come to impart her wisdom upon the young. I don’t know whether it still works this way, but in my day careers advice was not a regular part of the curriculum, just an irregular visit by some outside agency. Which is fortunate perhaps because the advice they gave was usually, at best, entirely useless. At worst, dispiriting and psychologically damaging.

“Our records show you’re good at maths. How about working in a bank?”
“Good at art eh? Ever thought about becoming an art teacher?”

Perhaps it wasn’t really her fault that every job I have done in my professional life didn’t actually exist when I was at school. In fact many of the technologies I’m working in at the moment didn’t even exist this time last year, this is how fast things are moving in my field. My career would have been extremely hard to predict, because there was a Black Swan involved – the Internet.

“Black Swan” is a term I probably need to explain before I proceed. There used to be a saying in Medieval England that something was about as likely as “finding a Black Swan”, meaning it was highly unlikely, akin to “when pigs fly”. According to historical record, this term was in widespread use until the 17th Century and the discovery of Australia, which bought with it the first sighting of a Black Swan in 1697. In scientific terms this is known as a paradigm shift, it was a discovery that couldn’t be incorporated into the current understanding, it had to redefine it. And clearly, the metaphor could no longer be used.

Nassib Taleb, in his book of the same name, defines the Black Swan as an event which is 1) hard to predict, 2) highly consequential, and 3) wrongly retro-predicted. The history of human culture is a progression of these Black Swans: the internet, the home computer, the motor car, wikipedia, Harry Potter, Princess Diana, facebook, the Renaissance. World War I was a Black Swan, it may look predictable in hindsight, but prior to it actually happening it was near unimaginable.

Cultural Myopia

If the careers advisor had any imagination about her, she might have talked to me about the job of the Futurist, which is perhaps my dream vocation. It’s basically like being a science fiction author, except better paid and doesn’t require an understanding of character and narrative etc. You basically just dream up big ideas, which is what I spend most nights doing anyway, but instead of losing sleep over them, a futurist sells their ideas to capitalist interests for them to worry about instead. There aren’t many people in this field – Raymond Kurzweil maybe, Bruce Sterling possibly – but if Black Swans are as frequent as Taleb makes out, the very concept of futurology becomes ridiculous. The progression of human culture is about as predictable as the stock market, the weather or any other chaotic system.

Figure and Ground

In trying to predict a chaotic system, a system where there are enough elements for it to be incalculable, we may not be able to accurately predict an outcome, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t still discern patterns. For example, we cannot predict the weather any further than two or three days in advance, but we can still say with confidence that it will be warmer in the summer than it will in the winter. It is by looking at the patterns of the past that we can make predictions for the future.

It is an oft observed phenomenon that every technological leap we make seems to be propelled by either porn or communication, two of the basest human functions, two things it is safe to predict there will always be a demand for.

While the Internet may have been a Black Swan, I’d like to think that a lot of its applications could have been foreseen (which is easy to say with hindsight). The aforementioned wikipedia and facebook for example are the newest of the new (although facebook, a year old now, is already starting to seem like yesterdays news), and weren’t actually possible before the WWW, but the principles behind them – sharing knowledge, keeping in touch with friends – are as old as civilisation.

Marshall McLuhan, sixties cultural theorist, of “the medium is the message” fame, in his later career came up with another epithet which I think is much more useful – “Ignore the figure and watch the ground”. What he’s saying is, when looking at culture and/or technology, don’t be distracted by the phenomenon itself, instead look at what’s going on around it, the effects it is having on the world. This is where the real story is.

While the technological changes themselves might not be easy to predict, the ripples that surround them will likely be quite familiar. Which means we probably can get an idea of where we’ll be in twenty years time, all we need do is look at the past, and squint a bit.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 10:25 pm and is filed under computers ate my brain, evolution, philosophy, society, tech, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.