Confessions of a Futurologist

February 2008, London: “What do you know about Iceland?” I was on the rock face when the call came in. For all I knew it was a joke, or a trick question.

“Don’t shop there,” I said, thinking she might be talking about the down-market frozen-food retailer.

“No, Iceland the country,” my agent said.

“Oh, Iceland the country,” I said.

There was an audible sigh on the other end of the line. We probably should have left it at that. In light of what happened, so should the rest of the world economy. Maybe you’re going to tell me I should have seen it coming. I’ve heard that before. After all, I’m a futurologist.

Phone me any Tuesday afternoon back then and there was a good chance I’d be on the rock. It wasn’t a real rock, but a great big plastic one in the corner of my fitness club in South London. Great exercise, plus I liked the metaphor. Bounding ever upward, never looking down: futurologists don’t get vertigo. It made it tricky when my mobile phone rang, but I kept it on hands-free.

“Well,” she said, “Kaupthing is Iceland’s biggest bank, and they’re offering a fat fee and saying they’ll take two hundred copies of your Big Ideas book into the bargain. So, at the risk of repeating myself,” she continued, “what do you know about Iceland?”

I don’t know what you do, but for a long time I was in the oracle business. Just when I was breaking into the profession, in the late 1990s, we future-workers became the evangelists of the corporate world, so there was plenty of demand. You’re probably skeptical. You’re thinking: How come you know this stuff? Actually, my track record is pretty good. It’s the others I worry about. In a wholly unregulated profession such as futurology, there are always going to be a few duds. Built into the discipline is a tendency to exaggerate the shock of the new – it helps to drum up business. Pull a startling prognostication from the hat – flying cars by 2030, for example – and you win cachet and kudos; by the time it’s failed to materialize, it’s a fair prediction you’ll have scarpered. There are only five other futurologists alive whom I respect, and I’m not telling you their names. Not yet, anyway. Competition.

Photograph by Dan Hirslund / Unsplash.

Predicting the future isn’t as easy or as glamorous as it sounds. It’s boning up on the business press, gobbling up books and reports, haring through vast troves of data to get a handle on what’s coming around the corner. Then there’s the fun stuff: ethnographic field trips to see consumers in their natural habitat – the supermarket or the nightclub, mainly. The real money, however, comes from the lucrative speaking engagements my agent occasionally dangles in front of me. Companies who want you to tell them their future, mostly. Some want you to tell the unvarnished truth; others want a breezy uplift to send their employees back to the office with a skip in their step. Either way it’s a great opportunity to get out there, take the temperature, and press a little flesh. It’s not as easy as it looks. Sometimes you’ll get a clever moron, some natty little try-hard from middle management who wants to bring the futurologist back down to earth. Like the guy who, in the middle of my slide show at a “Packaging Towards 2020” conference, hollered, “How about you tell me my future?” Maybe you think I thumped him. Not my style. Bad for business. “Stand up and tell me your name, son,” I said. “I can’t tell you your future if I don’t know who you are.” Then I covered my eyes with my hands and came over all possessed, like I was reading the runes. “I’m getting a very strong sense,” I said. “I’m hearing P45.” Game over.

Three weeks later I’m in a skyscraper in Westminster, being shot by an elevator straight to the twenty-ninth floor. The venue is called Altitude 360; it’s right at the top of the building, with a panoramic view out over the London night. The company has three thousand employees worldwide, and all the important ones are here in this room. The point is to make everyone feel like they’re on top of the world. It isn’t difficult. It’s February 2008 and from tiny origins Kaupthing has grown to become the biggest bank in Iceland; almost single-handedly it’s turned the Icelandic economy from a sleepy fishing backwater into a twenty-first-century finance house. Everyone wants to work there; according to a survey carried out by the University of Iceland, the bank is by far the most prestigious employer in the whole country. Against the odds, it’s also become a hub of banking innovation. Kaupthing’s managers have hammered together complicated new banking products like credit default swaps, which no one quite understands but which are making so much money that no one cares. Even then, the bank seems to be lending out more money than it actually has. Wild speculation has broken out about where it’s all coming from – according to some conspiracy theorists, it’s a front for the Russian mafia.

With all this money sloshing around, Kaupthing parties have become legendary. They’ve chartered a plane to take London bankers salmon fishing at an Icelandic lake, they’ve hosted a party at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, and they’ve hired Tom Jones to play the Natural History Museum. To kick off their beano in St. Tropez they paid a waiter to dress up as Spider-Man and spray the contents of a thirty-liter champagne bottle over their audience of billionaire guests. When they’re not partying, Kaupthing’s managers are buying up everything and everyone in its way and lending out money to other companies to do the same; now, with a London office, they plan to take on the rest of the world.

That’s when they send for me. The bank’s Icelandic owners are all bronzed, youthful-looking Vikings – one of them has been elected the world sexiest billionaire by the Financial Times – and this evening most are here in the room, mingling among their troops and plotting their next advance. The idea is to get everyone thinking about the future. To fit the “Banking Towards 2013” theme, everything in the room has been decked out in silvery stuff – finance sector meets Star Trek. Future-focused, so I’m already upbeat. Heavy traffic means my taxi arrives late, and an organizer hurries me through to a window-lined restaurant where someone is plodding his way through an introductory welcome. Then it’s my turn, and, to a crackle of genteel appreciation, I bound onto the podium. They’re a serious-looking lot, the two hundred suits sat beneath me, so I start out at an easy gallop, the microphone in one hand. Glo-calization, the revenge of the pro-sumer, the potential for mass-customization, the rise of Ch-india, all the usual crowd-pleasers and portmanteaux. This time, however, it doesn’t seem to be working; not only that but they’re staring right through me, sort of expectantly. I throw in my line about futurologists “delicately fingering their crystal balls.” It’s the futurologists’ equivalent of a mother-in-law gag, but I’m hearing no laughs. Just the opposite; you could hear an icicle drop.

And then, quite uncharacteristically, I falter. A waitress weaves her way through the tables with a silver champagne bucket, and I wonder what she’s making of all this. Outside a plane chugs its way along the night sky and, momentarily, I think it might be headed in my direction. Black Swan, I think: extremely improbable. Then again, I think, how probable is it that a room full of hardened banking professionals should be waiting for me, the social-scientific equivalent of a fortuneteller, to tell them their future? What do these people want from me, and what do they expect me to tell them? It’s one thing being enthusiastic about the future – it’s how I got into this business, after all – and quite another to think you can nail it with any kind of certainty. I could rattle off a list of current trends in the hope that things might stay the same. If the stuff’s already been made – children or consumer goods, for example – it’s not hard to predict in what quantities they’re going to be around. But these bankers don’t really produce anything. They’re engineers of a kind, building financial vehicles of dizzying sophistication, leveraged on a tight rope so high they haven’t even had time to catch their breath.

So I clear my throat and decide to tell them the truth. “I was all set to tell you exactly how life is going to look in the year 2013,” I say. “I could tell you who’s going to win the upcoming British general election, who’ll win the most medals in the 2012 Olympics, the likelihood of any major terrorist attacks. But it would be a bluff on both sides. Futurology is a bastard discipline,” I tell them. “It’s the catch all for a collection of activities that are as old as the modern age. Human beings have always wanted to know what’s coming next, but when life was nasty, brutish, and short, there was no need to speculate about what the future might bring. Only in the late Middle Ages did the pace of technological change quicken so much that it became a reasonable assumption that tomorrow might look substantially different from today. And only with the rise of science over superstition did humans begin to think they might have a future on the planet and be able to control it. But” – and here I’m becoming a little philosophical for my banking audience, but I don’t care – “how can we be absolutely certain where our future lies? For most of its life, being a futurologist has been like being a dentist in the seventeenth century, when all you needed was a bit of string and a good sales pitch. Since generations of previous soothsayers’ promises have stubbornly failed to materialize, it’s not hard to understand public skepticism. Take The Jetsons,” I say. “Great show, and futurology made popular, and it assured kids growing up in the 1960s that one day they would fly to work, erase housework with the touch of a button, and go for weekend breaks to Neptune. But it didn’t happen. One recent survey found Britons disappointed with the rate of technological advance. At the age of fifteen, one in three had imagined that robots would be doing the household chores by the turn of the millennium and half had banked on scientists discovering a cure for cancer. Almost one in five had been led to believe that they would be driving around in flying cars. They weren’t happy to be still stuck in traffic jams.”

A throaty giggle rises from somewhere near the back. They’re staring at me quizzically now, as if everything I’ve said thus far has been a practical joke, as if I’m about to belly laugh and unveil a PowerPoint with everything they need to know. On occasions like this the experienced future-gazer is in need of one of two things: a game-changer or a prop. The prop is easy. One future-thinker I know was once introduced to Michael Jackson in the foyer of a London hotel. Not one for small talk, he demanded to know what was going on with the gas mask and the chimp. “It’s all razzle-dazzle,” winked Jackson, just before he headed out of his hotel into the crowds. Same with futurology, and it starts with the three N’s: name recognition, name recognition, name recognition. Alvin Toffler sounded like something you’d take a bite out of at the funfair, but that didn’t stop the author of Future Shock from selling millions of copies of his book. At one stage, trying to keep up with the internet gurus, I seriously contemplated changing my name to Jimmy Whizz. The internet evangelists are the new kids on the block of futurology, and their pitch is that the internet is going to be the death of everything except them. Big smiles, funny names, peculiar hair – they seem to know the drill. The truth is that many are only recently out of prison – and I’m not telling you what for.

And then, plucked from thin air and courtesy of the net-heads, comes one of my eureka moments. The organizers have left pens and paper on each table and big silvery-black boxes in the middle in case the audience wants to get involved in the future thinking. Those boxes, I announce with new confidence, are actually time capsules, and into them I want everyone in the room to place their own predictions for where Kaupthing and the banking industry is going to be in the year 2013. I’m warming to my theme now, so I give them the whole spiel, or at least what I remember of it. Decisions taken independently by large groups, runs the idea, are almost always better at predicting the future than those taken by a single futurologist – even when those groups aren’t very bright, which, I assure them, isn’t going to be a problem this evening. The idea started life in Iowa in the 1990s, part of a scheme to let people trade shares over the internet based on how they think political candidates will perform in elections. When the results seemed uncannily accurate, it quickly expanded to let punters bet on the prospects of celebrities and politicians – even the US military got in on the action, when a futurologist at the Defense Department devised a scheme to let the public bet on future terrorist attacks. It’s cobblers, of course, but a good way to get the audience on side. “This evening,” I shout into the microphone, “every single one of you is going to be a futurologist,” and I invite them to write down their thoughts and place their predictions in the silvery time capsules. The results, I say, will feature in a post-conference mail out.

And that’s it from me – thanks everyone for coming, the future looks bright, blah blah blah. But even before I scuttle off stage, the curtain behind me rises to reveal four eighteen-year-old girls wearing identical silver micro miniskirts and holding violas. The audience in front of me lights up like a Christmas tree, and I realize I’m toast. I saunter back down through the audience at a leisurely pace, making a point of glad-handing a few of the head honchos. I ask one of them which way back to the elevator, but he isn’t listening. He’s still staring at the stage.

I don’t know what happened to the time capsules. For all I know they went straight in the bin. That may have been a mistake. Six months later Kaupthing blew up in spectacular fashion, sending the Icelandic economy into meltdown and one of the first of many shockwaves through the world’s financial system. The result was to precipitate the most serious recession in Western countries since the 1930s, and to put several Kaupthing employees in prison. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Britons had been enticed into squirreling away their savings in one of its British subsidiaries; when the Icelandic government looked like it might refuse to guarantee their deposits, the fall of the Icelandic banks became an international diplomatic incident. Until very recently, fraud investigators in several different countries were still poring over exactly what went wrong at Kaupthing, and why no one seemed to see it coming.

Which was, admittedly, my job. Given the apocalyptic collapse in the bank’s fortunes over the following eight months, they might have expected their last ever futurologist to have given them a steer, at the very least. Not great for business. Then there’s the question of ethics. That “wisdom of crowds” thing I pulled from the hat was largely hocus-pocus, and there’s no reason to think their predictions about the future would have been more reliable than my own. What they might have been useful for, however, was telling tales on corporate malfeasance; since everyone wrote down their answers in private, employees may have said what they really thought without any pressure from their peers. If only I’d read through those predictions about banking in 2013, maybe I could have blown the whistle. My defense, should the early morning knock on the door ever come, would be that I tried to disavow the whole grubby business of telling them their future. But they didn’t want to know.

It was shortly after the Kaupthing event that I quit the futurology business. When I look back now, it marked my first real wobble of conscience about my career path, that road to Damascus moment when I realized that most of it was nothing more than high-brow entertainment for bored executives. Within a year or two, I was taking the real road to Damascus, having reinvented myself as a war reporter covering the conflicts in Syria and South Sudan. It was time to live a little more seriously, and closer to the wheel of history. Perhaps, as a recovering Irish Catholic, crossing borders illegally and throwing myself into reporting intractable conflicts was a kind of penance, payback for the easy money which had come my way in speaking fees. In Syria there was certainly less flim-flam about corporate silos, internet-based decentralization, and the joys of a brave new globalized world. For the most part, the people I met were more principled and courageous, and had real stories to tell. They were also nicer and more hospitable. Even the food was better.

But it wasn’t just me who’d lost faith in futurology. What those banking executives were really looking for was a black box. What’s a black box? It’s a kind of enigma machine for social change. What it usually means is a system or a device where the data going in and the data coming out are observable but what’s inside – what drives the box to create the conclusions it does - remains largely a mystery. For those of us whose job was predicting the future, it became a kind of holy grail – a sort of universal predictor machine that houses the definitive answer to the question of what’s coming next. The gimmick I dreamt up for those bankers sounds simple enough, but its structure was a little opaque. Even if I had taken the trouble to read through all their predictions about life in 2013, I’d still have needed a way to add them up, and for that I’d need a black box.

A black box can be as low-tech as a mathematical formula or as high-tech as Google’s algorithm. For future-gazers at the giddy turn of the millennium, it became our proprietary methodology, our secret sauce, that mysterious combination of art and science that allowed us to make these outlandish statements about what the future holds. But what was beginning to dawn on me around the time of my less-than-glorious Kaupthing appearance, I think, is that the black box approach to thinking about the future doesn’t much work. The best future-gazers are actually storytellers; putting one thing after another to make sense of the material and draw an audience in. They allow us to rehearse potential eventualities, and play to our all-too-human suspense about what’s going to happen next. Think of what they do as a kind of speculative fiction, one which requires an imaginative leap.

In any case, amid all the hollowing out and introspection that followed the 2008 recession, professional futurologists found their services less and less in demand. The gigs began to dry up.  Some of our competitors in the public speaking business became a little catty. What happened to the futurology game? they’d quip. Was there no future in it? In fact, in a harbinger of what was to come, professional soothsayers were being replaced by machines. While I was busy dodging checkpoints and secret police in Syria, the traditional business of futurology was quietly being usurped by computers crunching masses of data out there on the internet and elsewhere, including just about everything ever written down or photographed. The result was a more sophisticated kind of black box, one that predicted what was going to happen in the future on the basis of what had happened in the recent past. It worked on its own terms, giving us a second-by-second readout of the twists and turns of the collective psyche, but as creative futurology it didn’t have a lot to say.

Today, teetering on the brink of another global conflict, we are back in more serious times. The conversation about the future has moved on to the myriad possibilities for global annihilation. The stock market is riding high on a new kind of black box, artificial intelligence – the use of all that data to train machines to think like humans. It’s the ultimate in black box boosterism. For the most part, AI simply repeats back to us what we already collectively know. Having it hold our hand is not going to be enough. All the same, at the time of writing it’s almost single-handedly holding the stock market aloft and taking us all nervously, vertiginously, with it.

Like the futurologists before it, it’s also unlikely to be able to predict its own demise. All of which brings me back to February 2008 and that Kaupthing gig. Even now I sometimes imagine an overworked Icelandic administrator, working late one night to sort through Kaupthing’s assets in an empty building. His flashlight beam rests on two hundred unread copies of Big Ideas by James Harkin, and the mere sight of it causes him to mutter some ancient Icelandic obscenity under his breath. But it wasn’t all my fault. If any of those seated in front of me knew the fate that was about to befall them, it didn’t show. They’d been enjoying the ride so much that they didn’t want to look down. Neither did I.