Historian vs. Futurist on Human Progress | Niall Ferguson and Peter Schwartz

[Music] you good evening I'm Stuart brand from the long now foundation we're gonna have a vote shortly so I'm going to need lights up in the house where we won't know who won next speaker you should know is on a Wednesday May 21st at sick ball Kabir who is the guy who started Grameen Phone in Bangladesh which started the cell phone revolution which is bringing about 2 billion people out of poverty these days and his theme is that that works for technology across-the-board technology empowers the poorest after that my old teacher Paul Ehrlich in June June 27th he's taken on a new field in his 70s which is human cultural evolution and he'll be talking about that I think for the first time in June now the idea of the long now actually its size was determined by Peter Schwartz who's here in the middle seat that it's ten thousand years of the past because what's how long we've been doing agriculture and towns and domesticating animals and ourselves and things like that and the next 10,000 years with the idea that whatever the story is we're right in the middle of it not at the end not at the beginning the right in the middle but one of the peculiarities is this odd asymmetry between the last 10,000 years and the next 10,000 years past and future are different animals and they have different disciplinarians who teach us about them and very few in fact I think no futurists have actually had historical training is that right Peter yeah there you go and not that many historians even want to speak about the future that we have won tonight so there's a philosophical epistemological disciplinary mindset between these two areas which is quite different and so tonight we have leading practitioners one of each now the way these long now debates work we've had one so it's now a tradition is the audience decides who goes first that person then comes up here and holds forth for exactly 15 minutes and goes and sits down and is interviewed by the second speaker for 10 minutes just basically drawing them out it's not a debate point making deal it's a it's an interview and then that person who's doing the interview has the job of summarizing the first speaker's argument to that person's satisfaction and then they reverse roles second speaker comes up for 15 minutes gets interviewed for 10 minutes and so on all this time some of you will be writing questions I hope which will be forwarded up to Kevin Kelly who will process for the best ones and bring them up to be I'll be up here on the stage and at that point and throughout the questions will be keeping questions coming up you guys are in the thick of it as well I've been asked to give some framing for how to vote and one is in a story and one is a futurist the existing entity that in a sense both are dealing with is this recent book by Neil Ferguson called the war of the world it is about the 20th century in it is a dark bleak grim book the age of hatred is the subtitle in England not here and Peters books tend to be things like inevitable surprises the art of the longview one called the long boom and they're all future-oriented so we're about to have a vote and you are too you should be thinking about what you want not join some title flow but actually you know do your vote it'll be a hand and if you want to say something you can and I don't know which one I'll go first okay who want Neil Ferguson to go first all right hands down how many want Peter Schwartz to go first I make that as slightly less do you guys agree that the Neal is we just won the vote do you think Neal won the room or we could do this like the Democratic primary and [Laughter] Neal you're on well it's a great pleasure to be here I'm a huge fan of the long now we've been trying to make this happen for some considerable time and I can only say it's a great honor to be on the same stage as Stuart and Peter since time is not on my side I'm now going to cut the flattery and get straight to the point there's one thing that I think Peter and I agree on and that is that there is ladies and gentlemen no such thing as the future there are only future's plural however there is only one past I'll be at a past which can be interpreted in multiple ways now I want to explain to you what the past is and then what history is the past it used to be said is another country that's not true it's another planet and it's a planet inhabited by the dead and the dead outnumber us massively according to the population Reference Bureau from 50,000 BC when Homo sapiens first appeared until the 1990s I haven't updated the figures a hundred billion human beings have been born so the current world population is about six percent of all the human beings who have ever lived and the past is that other planet where the dead majority lives what historians do is to try to understand that planet what they can't do and I want to be very clear about this they can't establish universal laws of social or political physics with reliable predictable pars there are two reasons for this the first is that there's no possibility of repeating the experiment called history the sample size of human history is N equals 1 the other problem is that you can't really have physics when the particles have consciousness particularly the kind of consciousness that human beings have evolved which interestingly enough turns out to be especially skewed when it comes to understanding the past our heuristic biases are very bad when we try to assess past events so that's what historians can't do but ladies and gentlemen they can do some important things nevertheless they can do is first they can analyze and interpret human experience in the past at multiple levels we can go from the micro the individuals experience to the macro the entire experience of humanity over short or long time periods it's a very flexible discipline in that sense and we work in a certain rough-and-ready way that's not such a bad thing we can with a rather coarse-grained approach we can draw analogies between different situations in the past all between situations in the past and situations in the present for example we can quite easily make comparisons between financial crises over time they have certain common features even although no two can be said to be identical the same goes for geopolitical crises and Wars the other thing that historians can do which is quite clever in my view there hardly any of them do it I do it compulsively as we can imagine or simulate alternative pasts and I used the term advisedly because there is only one path fake pasts that didn't happen but might have and they're a terribly important device for understanding what did happen it was a great Lewis name you who once said that historians could only really be said to be doing their job well if they had an instinctive sense of what didn't happen part of the point of my book the war of the world is to explore a particularly important counterfactual scenario needless to say we have jargon for this procedure a what if question what if question is what if World War two had broken out in 1938 that's a very core of the book I'm not giving up away too much when I say that it would have been a shorter war and many many fewer people would have died but now the critical thing to understand is how historians do what I have just described how do we do it well the answer is that we commune with the dead we do sounds quite weird when I put it like that to be honest being historian as a rather morbid possibly psychotic activity I genuinely prefer the company of the dead I spend much more time with dead people than with people like you and I'm sure future psychologists will explain this in ways that are not favorable to me however I have a rationale for this at which I will explain RG Collingwood who is one of the great philosophers of history produced by my old University Oxford once said in his wonderful brief autobiography and I quote historical knowledge is the reenactment of a past thought encapsulated in a context of present thoughts which in contradicting it confine it to a plane different from theirs that's actually the single most important sentence ever written about historical methodology in my view we are re-enacting past thought and we can only do this by communing with the dead through the records that they have left of their past thoughts what did it feel like to be an ethnic German in Central and Eastern Europe after 1918 that's one of the questions that I try to address in the war of the world but historians don't just do that the other thing that we do simultaneously in a completely different methodological way is that we try to infer what Karl Hempel called covering laws about the way that that the human past has operated from mainly quantitative data there is a kind of rough-and-ready covering law at the heart of war of the world and it goes like this if you have simultaneously economic volatility ethnic disintegration and empires in decline each of these begins with the letter e which makes it easy to remember then the probability of a high level of organized lethal violence is significant probability not certainty this isn't a law it's not a model in the way that social scientists would tend to to think it's just a statement of a rough regularity take these things together economic volatility ethnic disintegration and empires and decline and violence is likely to be significantly higher than under different circumstances now what if futurists do if that's what historians do in a nutshell the answer is that they infer future scenarios on the basis of past examples and past data but without necessarily acknowledging that the analogies they're drawing are historically inspired they claim to be concerning themselves with the future but in reality they are as much concerned with the past as historians because what else do they have to go on it's not the power of prophecy with which Peter is endowed what he is trying to do is infer from the past future plausible scenarios now I don't think that's a bad procedure and I want to make it clear that this is not the House of Commons and I'm not here to oppose everything he says on the contrary we in fact have much in common and being asked to do this forced me to ask myself what don't we agree about we've known one another for at least 10 years and much of the time we are in almost beautiful and perfect harmony but it seems to me there is a methodological problem that Peter not being a historian may underestimate about what he does and the problem is this if you are constructing future scenarios on the basis of past data without adequate historical training you are more likely to be susceptible to the kind of heuristic biases that I mentioned before because scenarios are in fact as he himself acknowledges plots for unmade movies that is what they are and it seems to me that they are inspired as much by his own personal predictions as by any very rigorous assessment of past data I won't go through the full list of heuristic biases of which I think he may be guilty though it is quite tempting I wanted because time is limited give you a tale of five futures the two futures that are implied in my book and which I made explicit in an article that was published in foreign affairs shortly after the book was published and the three futures envisaged in Peters book the art of the long view my future is very simple I make the point in the war of the world that we can learn from the history of the 20th century that scientific and economic progress does not reduce the risk of organized lethal violence on the contrary despite the advances that we made economically scientifically and otherwise in the 20th century we proved to be capable of unprecedented levels of murderous behavior we should learn from this that globalization is vulnerable may even generate its own destruction that there is a potential for conflict regardless even of levels of education and that the three things I mentioned earlier economic volatility ethnic disintegration and empires and decline can still cause high levels of violence in our time the implicit second future is that we learn from history and make sure or at least endeavor to make sure that these things do not coincide again in other words aware of the fragility of the order we call globalization we do our best not to have a 1914 the ass belongs use a wonderfully stimulating book and deserves all the praise that's been heaped upon it and it contains three future scenarios for the period between 1991 when it was written and 2005 and it's fascinating to read these now three years after 2005 the three scenarios Peter favors three rather like the UN with its population projections there's they're cheerful there's a gloomy and there was just right the Goldilocks future the three futures have some of you will doubtless know from your reading the following titles new Empires market world and change without progress I'm not sure which movies inspired the first two but he admits that the third the pessimistic one was inspired by Blade Runner it's clear that of the three the middle Goldilocks projection has come closest to being right it is a kind of vision of globalization and there's much in it that I admire an understanding of the way in which computer microworlds he uses a term that hasn't really caught on would transform the way in which the world works there's even a 1997 financial crash full marks however there is a missing elephant or rather giant panda in scenario one China quote goes its own way preoccupied with territorial disputes with India in scenario two China causes a financial crisis by defaulting on its debts to Japanese banks and scenario number three the Bladerunner scenario China fights a major war with India using Pakistani weapons the only thing that I can find to salvage this story is that China in scenario three quote exterminated the Tibetan independence movement well that may turn out to be dead right but everything else that Peter wrote about China in his best-selling book has been wrong and to be wrong about China is to be wrong about the single most important thing that has happened since 1991 that seems to me to illustrate not that the perils of being Peter Schwartz on the contrary it Ellis traits the perils of being a futurist the inherent impossibility of making predictions about a system as complex as the world of human beings could not be better illustrated than by this glaring omission in all three of the scenarios in the art of the longview how can we work together it seems to me we can work together that futurists can learn from historians and historians from futurists I think our best hope is to make historical inquiry more rigorous than it is and I want to make it clear that I don't in fact regard my profession as particularly impressive when it comes to standards of scientific and scholarly rigor historians need to know more about chaos theory they need to know more about complexity theory they need to know what a power law is and they particularly need to understand evolutionary biology they need to learn from the sciences much more than they do here I think we would be in complete agreement but I want to conclude ladies and gentlemen by suggesting that futurists really do need to learn from historical method they need to understand better that point that Collingwood made that it's not enough just to understand the world as some kind of hydraulic system it's important to get inside the heads of the dead and if you don't do that it seems to me your future scenarios are likely to be worth rather less than the paper that they're printed on thank you very much indeed if I wasn't - okay well first of all thank you both for the flattery and the critique so I have a few questions to see if we understand first of all what you're saying I want to come back later to the questions of your view of the world and where it's headed and so on which you touched on as well but I want to spend a few minutes on what I think was your most central point which is the issue of how we think about the future and what the nature of learning from history is so first question you alluded to heuristic biases and you know you said well you could enumerate them and be fairly explicit about them please well where to begin one of the the greatest problems that we have when we're thinking about the future is that we're attracted to certain scenarios more than to others we have a certain confirmation bias illustrate this point with another part of your book you were strongly attracted to the importance of the teenager right and the global teenager is a key player in your book I think that's the classic product of a strong prior that you instinctively felt this was important because you were once a teenager when teenagers mattered it would be typically a baby boomer who thought that teenagers would continue to matter they don't matter they become less and less important with every passing year the demographics not only of the United States but of China itself make teenagers increasingly unimportant as a group but because you had a strong prior in favour of thinking they mattered you wrote a whole chapter about the global teenager and I I strongly I strongly feel that the global teenager is a minor player compared with the global oldie and I would certainly you know say that having addressed the major benefactors of the Hoover institutions who are the global holdings that's a good example okay another point you made which i think is is actually quite profound and worth exploring for a moment I think because you you you know I think time was running down and you touched on it without exploring it further and that is what the sources of learning in a sense for the historical community in terms of being able to look at novelty and new things like the frontiers of science and so on and you touched on a few of those biology complexity and so on expand a bit more how you would see those kinds of ideas coming to play in the world of history because I think it is a challenge you know bringing these worlds together well it's it's most easy to do if you're like me concerned with economic and financial history Peter because that there's no question that when it comes to trying to understand financial crises there are all kinds of benefits to understanding complexity that that's to say that in many ways financial systems do behave a lot like complex systems in the natural world that the regularity of financial crises does not follow the the bell curve normal distribution there are very fat tails in the history of finance and this is a recurrent feature that takes you all the way from the South Sea Bubble of 1720 to the present and so simply understanding a little bit about distributions of extreme events understanding a little bit about how systems can become critical seems to me absolutely essential if you want to if you want to understand how financial crises occur that's actually more helpful than understanding the theory of modern finance as exemplified that by the black Scholes formula because actually the theories of option pricing is based on a completely false notion about the distribution of financial outcomes to the effect that it does follow the bell curve so that's one that's one example chaos theory was something that inspired me when I was writing a book called virtual history because I was acutely aware of the sensitivity of political and social systems to initial conditions and the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings can cause the the hurricane at the other end of the earth it's important that historians understand this because historians have their own heuristic biases please make let me make that clear one of our heuristic biases is we really do want great events to have great causes we hate the idea that a war as big as the first world war could have origins that date back no further than July or June of 1914 we want big origins for big Wars we want the origins to be in at least the 1890s maybe even the 1870s and I've read books that date the origins of the first world war back to 1815 which is a hundred years before it broke it broke out now that seems to me to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the historical process that a small Mis judgment and I think there was a small miss judgment on the part of political actors in European capitals in 1914 sufficed to cause four and a quarter years of carnage one last thought which is particularly important to me at the moment is understanding evolutionary biology if you are writing as I am at the moment a history of world finance or rather a financial history of the world I think that's a better way to put you can plug the name of the books okay which is going to be entitled the ascent of money if you're old enough you'll remember burn off skis a scent of man it's an ironic pun on that 4,000 years of financial history strongly resemble the history of evolution in the natural world it's almost all there there are their great dying's there was speciation there was natural selection and one could think therefore of the story of financial history as a very compressed evolutionary story there are differences some of the mutation is conscious it's Lamarckian not Darwinian but it's nevertheless it seems to me a very helpful way of thinking about it profoundly important historical process I hardly need to say how important it is this year I might say Stuart are big fans of a book called why big fierce animals are rare which is all about in fact precisely that kind of evolutionary thrust right ok pushing on I you moving now across in some sense the boundary between methodology and substance you said something I think very important but it was in the context of alluding to methodological issues and that had to do with the notes of the future your view of the future was simple that Science and Technology had not reduced the risk of increasing violence but you also have a clearly the example in modern history of mutually assured destruction in which we avoided the cataclysmic war how do you deal with the differing effects of Science and Technology in that arena as well as others that may have reduced the levels of violence from as a result of economic progress and better healthcare water environment all those kinds of sources of conflict that emerge from advances in science well are two ways of thinking about this one is that mutually assured destruction might easily have led to mutually assured destruction and it only just failed to by a hair's breadth on at least two occasions and one can't again allow the retrospective fallacy to turn the Cold War into the long piece I'm certainly old enough to remember how very unfair to be steering the abyss of nuclear destruction in in the face I must say that the more one thinks about the history of the Cold War the more one becomes aware of close it came to disaster particularly in the Cuban Missile Crisis and although the stakes weren't quite so high in 1973 the nuclear arsenals were substantially larger so the risks were even more terrifying so I'm not sure I buy the idea that just because post-hoc there was no third world war ergo Hawk therefore it was because deterrence worked I think we were lucky a 1914 could have happened in the early sixties or the early seventies the other way of looking at it is that of course there was a third world war it was just and this is a point I make him in the war of the world it was the third world's war that having established Arsenal's that were too powerful to use on each other the superpowers waged a war that was just as destructive in terms of human life as the first world war indirectly by proxy through a succession of third world countries and so in a sense the volume of violence didn't decline in the world after the invention of the atomic bomb it didn't decline in a substantial way by the end of the century that was still the potential for genocide and it could still be carried out with extremely primitive weapons in countries like Cambodia or Rwanda so that's that's the the double argument that I would make well actually you've in your answer you've actually answered my last question as well because you had alluded to the the forces of economic volatility ethnic conflict and empires in decline as the powerful engines of violence and expressions of hatred etc and the question I really had for you was what was the difference in the first half and second half of the 20th century and you're basically saying if I read you right not much yeah location location location that was the difference because all that happened was that the violence which in the first half of the century was heavily concentrated in Central and Eastern Europe and Manchuria Korea there are these two great killing zones at each end of Eurasia these zones finally become off-limits in the early 1950s Germany and Korea are partitioned and it's realized that fighting over these areas is in some ways too destructive to to happen again but the violence is just moved and takes place in tomorrow in Cambodia in Angola and so on so that's the simple answer and of course that's why my first gloomy scenario about the future is that this could happen somewhere else and the obvious place today where there is economic volatility are plenty death nick disintegration in full swing and an empire in decline is of course the middle east thank you okay well it seems to me you're talking about two obviously related sets of ideas and the first has to do with how one thinks about the future I think the wonderfully elegant eloquent description of the planet of the past very hard to get to we don't know yet how to travel there and so we can only get there my empathy as it were and I thought the the empathy with the dead was a very eloquent way of putting it I think you also clearly challenged how we think about the future in terms of the depth of understanding of history and what one can draw from an extremely complex rich record and what meaning one draws from that and particularly I think you know and one things that I admire about your work is the willingness to consider and learn from alternative interpretations of the past different ways of thinking about what happened and what might have happened as you did both in virtual history and at various points in the war of the world I think you also rightly draw attention to the source of novelty they ought to inform even historical thinking when one draws conclusions for the future and that is sources of new knowledge from the sciences and so on and I think you identified several that I find particularly important biological thinking and evolutionary thinking complexity and chaos and that line of thought I think obviously you also had a critique I think of some of my work you know I think and I'll come back to particularly the issue of China and how and why but I think it is indicative of something which you touched on and which I'll come back to it when I speak and then finally I think you've also provided a framework for thinking about the recent history of the last century and what it implies in particularly the focus on these things that I think this this was new your book I don't think people had put this particular story together of these three forces of economic volatility and its impact on societies and the social fabric the impact of ethnic and religious conflict and its virulence and in depth and the inability of empires to manage the world as it were and sustain an order in both the decline of Britain and the failure of the u.s. to rise to the Imperial challenge and that that leads one to ask serious questions about what may happen not very far ahead particularly looking around what we see as events like financial crises and wars in Iraq is that if it I'm told I'm supposed to say you got it but as I never say you got it under any circumstances what I'll say is yes but there's a couple of points that I would like to just throw in you got is my first one of them is actually self-criticism I wondered if you'd spot the flaw in my argument perhaps somebody else has I don't think I can convincingly show that you would have got China any more right if you had been a historian well I'm going to make that argument myself rule number one I'm from Glasgow get your retaliation in first [Laughter] I wouldn't make the other point you're probably gonna make it I should leave you one head go ahead no no I'll leave you the other one oh I'm always I'm always satisfied with what Peter says that was that was a mere quibble so what I borrow your pen Peter I don't have one I borrowed it from Stuart please I said to my wife Kathleen when we came over here I'm either brave or very stupid to take on Neil Ferguson you have seen why I feel really honored to be on the same stage with Neil I truly admire his work I've read I think everything since the pity of war most of us who write nonfiction wish we could write books with such scholarship depth originality elegance of prose their real page page turners he always makes me think and I highly recommend reading the war of the world which you can buy out there and indeed this debate came about from a dinner that Neil and I had about 18 months ago while I was beginning to work on a new book and that book was optimistically titled the case for optimism I had just finished the war of the world and was shattered it really challenged my thinking as each of his books has done forced me to reflect on my basic assumptions about where we were headed and what it meant and it basically stopped my book I said all right I have got to confront the issues that Neil raises in his book and really think them through in a very fundamental way and I've spent the last 18 months doing that so in a sense you're a part of my thought process by having this debate I have forced myself to reach some conclusions about the arguments which Neil so eloquently made in his book and as Neil rightly puts EDA's alternative past I do alternative futures but here's where I want to take a small a line of difference and that is that you know you talked about the land of the dead what we futurists have imaginary friends imaginary friends in the future as it were and and that is that we on the one hand really do need to do good history and I will allow that from time to time we fail in that but I spend most of my time reading either history or science the things that change the future the frontiers of the new and you know we have to live in science with the laws of physics there's no real beam me up Scotty but you know yes to the flip phone we have what Star Trek saw then so imagination sometimes works and Neil unlike most historians brings imagination to his task that's indeed what part of the virtual history task is and indeed in the case of China mine was a failure of imagination not a failure I think of history in fact we were probably too bound by our view of the limits of how much China could evolve and if anything I would say many of my historic mistakes have been not from a failure of good historical analysis but a failure of imagination but I will allow both of those frankly because I have made both classes of mistakes so now let me turn a bit to how we think about things differently in particular with respect to the book and some of the arguments which you've made about what's shaping modern times in history and I think if I would characterize a very simple framework for thinking about how I think you see it versus how I see it and which leads to different scenarios is I think you see the momentum of history as on a kind of downward slope or at best flat with the possibility that we could get it right and reverse direction and I on the other hand see the moment of history basically on an upward trajectory with the possibility that we could get it wrong and head down so your uncertainty is mainly on the upside and mine is mainly on the downside and in fact I agree with everything in the water of the world until we get to the epilogue which is what deals with the last 50 years it basically the book brilliantly covers the run-up to World War one and all the way through the Korean War as one in a sense continuous context of conflict and this and you touched on this I think in your remarks has to do with how we view the second half of the 20th century versus the first half I think you see them as mostly not very different and I see then the second half is representing real progress where we have meaningfully fewer deaths for example in the first half I think in the book your number is 160 180 million the second half is closer to 10 to 20 what that means is the first half of the Sun century we killed off somewhere on the order of five percent of humanity one in 20 in the second half it was 1/6 of 1% now if you were you know the mother of the soldier who died among those or the family or was raped in Bosnia that matters a lot but I submit that there's a huge difference between killing one and 20 and 1/6 of 1% and what part of the reason is that we made real progress in human institutions that constrained the violence that limited the conflict part it was mutually assured destruction but part it was the rule of law that limited particularly trans-border conflicts to very few most were civil wars they were ethnic and violent and particularly ugly but I submit that nothing reached the levels of the Holocaust in that respect in world war two we also had much wider prosperity with vastly more people enjoying the benefits of progress and much more freedom and democracy in many places and by the way there's also more eco friendly so you know we've seen a lot of progress so unless we blow it we have a chance of getting it better hmm but I will say this I want to set the bar even higher because something you don't touch on your book which i think is a now at issue for the future is climate change and so that could be another set of conflicts or tsa's of conflict and if we don't deal with that then we're leaving something very big if China was the elephant of the last decade climate change is the elephant of the decades ahead so I think there are real powerful forces for progress and if we think about the last 30 or 40 years we've seen enormous changes that have surprised us the rise of the women's movement and how its transformed the role of women in America so today four out of five Americans say they would vote for Hillary Clinton without thinking about zoom it's not a hundred percent but it's four out of five we've seen the population bust we've lowered the population expectations for the future we saw the end of the Cold War basically Soviet Union said it not worth fighting anymore gave up went away without violent revolution and we've seen the dramatic transformations in China all of these things have left the world in a much better place and very hard to have anticipated I got it wrong in China so it is this sense that we can make very real progress so if we think about the issue of prosperity we have a long history of increasing prosperity more countries are in the game first it was the US Europe Japan now China and India lots of new technology that increases productivity knowledge is spreading around the world Wikipedia is the best new any poverty tool we've ever seen spreading access to knowledge everywhere and essentially no cost we see the difference in places like Singapore versus Nigeria where knowledge drives growth and resources failure so many more people have a stake today in the system and preserving what we're doing and indeed I would argue that even today's financial crisis one possible outcome is real reform again part of the learning process of our system I think the second big thing is that we've learned how to contain conflict we avoided the big nuclear war we've had very few real trans-border conflicts that we are have been involved in one right now we have more means for intervention and a great example of getting it right is what's going on today in Kosovo here's Kosovo declaring independence and oh by the way the last time that's happened there was wholesale slaughter this time as a result of the previous intervention we're not doing that the Serbians aren't slaughtering the Kosovars because they learned something along the way they'll get hit if they do and so in fact the system of intervention and Prevention of conflict is working we see it happening and I think we'll be chastened by the Iraq war you know we're going to find that unilateralism doesn't work so we're seeing improvement in the international security systems improve governance more and more countries are better governed China and India today compared before maybe even Russia new regional governance structures EU the OAU global level the WTO Security Council IMF World Bank NATO and in fact one of your articles recently which I loved and reading Neil is a real delight regularly it publishes a great deal you talk about a world of powerlessness and that could become anarchy and like the dark ages but in fact I see and this goes back to the notion of complexity a complex network adaptive learning systems bottoms up emerging system not top-down Imperial system of many actors governments and multinationals small businesses NGOs supranational institutions in a complex web of power not an empire and then finally the climate challenge which I put on the table you know this is a very issue some of you were here last year when I debated Ralph Cabana on nuclear power I think this is a global crisis of great urgency and it's not hard to imagine how it could become a source of conflict the the history could easily be there imagine if the Tibetan Highlands begin to dry up the Mekong begins to dry up the Chinese dams begin to affect the Vietnamese downstream and this is you know here we have the exact ingredients you've talked about the Vietnamese and Chinese don't like each other very much and you could imagine a conflict over access to water on the other hand climate change could be the shared threat that really unites us that creates a new environment for collaboration China and India and in the United States face the same challenge we have huge technological resources and capabilities I can easily imagine the scenario that we work together rather than work apart with rather than conflict its collaboration and that has happened in recent history as well so I think many of the technology options in a world where we both want more electricity more cars are a plausible scenario and particularly given the outcome of this election all three candidates are in favor of dealing with climate change we could see a fundamental change in the very near future so I see a very different future than I think that dark future that is implicit in the war of the world I see a positive second half of the 20th century leading to a remarkable 21st century not utopia but continued progress you know I can see it being driven by increasing global integration technology progress the challenge of climate change and sustained economic growth with some ups and downs but doubling per capita income by 2030 not at all implausible new technologies like synthetic biology leading to a new industrial revolution we had craig Venter here last month talking about how we were going to reinvent the industrial society and be able to essentially make the next several billion people rich without destroying the world's ecosystems using new biological production methods in fact we're just at a meeting the other day seeing literally the first bacteria producing diesel fuel bubbles of diesel coming out basically these bacteria ship diesel and not a distant dream but already out there today so we could see major development in the new infrastructure of clean energy it's a bit like war in that respect but a war on climate change that Spurs growth and leads to high employment leading to narrowing income gaps see growth in China continue to widen a deep and maybe even spread to South American Africa u.s. would back off perhaps our missile base in Europe they're pissing off the Russians a big thing is the question of how many of the countries really work within the systems of international institutions and one could even imagine the evolution of new security organizations that come out of NATO including the BRICS Brazil Russia India China maybe even a new global EPA coming out of Asia these things could contain and limit ethnic violence perhaps even begin to shape new forms of support looking toward Africa and Latin America the brilliant new book by Paul Collier called the bottom billion in which he argues that we need the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for the poor of the world and this includes not merely aid but also security support because obviously what's happening in Africa in big parts of the world are the kind of conflict that I think you talk about and without support security structures it will be impossible to have levels of development but all of that happens best in a multilateral context which I think can actually develop so I think you can see how the momentum of history I think of the last half of the 20th century perhaps may carry us forward toward greater progress and perhaps at mid-century we would look back and say the world is more peaceful prosperous equitable and sustainable and we would thank Neil Ferguson for making clear what the hurdles were ahead and fortunately we would find that unlike his pessimism we were actually up to the challenge and a better world was the result thank you [Applause] while it was a great pleasure to listen to Peter it's my duty now to throw some questions of you my first one is your your faith in in technology is is of course critical to your argument isn't one of the difficulties that war was in fact the great driver of technological innovation in the mid century and it's far from clear that technology necessarily and always has benign Pacific outcomes in fact technology is strangely neutral about our future as a species it can be as capable of destroying us as of enriching us and making our lives more comfortable how do you grapple with that janus faced character of technology in human history well I think you're right I mean it's a both end in fact if you look at I'm an engineer by education not a historian and if you look at the history of engineering it began with fortifications that's what the first engineers were about building forts and then building things to break through the forts so that's basically what it was all about and so it's not a surprise that the frontiers of Technology are at the frontiers of warfare as will and indeed you know there's no question that the down sides both deliberately and potentially accidentally of technology are obvious whether they are as we've seen nuclear weapons or possible biological weapons or other things we have yet to imagine so I don't have any doubt that the destructive potentials both today and yet in the future of Technology are very real that having been said it is also the case that much of what we say today take to be a much better life is the result of technology none of us would want to go to a dentist of 1900 today you know and you don't only needs to think about what drilling would be like without anesthesia to imagine just to see the smallest grain of technological progress but I think one of the best examples you can see is what's happened for example at the environment you know I think it is one of the challenges ahead but if you look at what's happened as a result of things like the Clean Air Act and technology that's come along its equivalent in the UK and in the United States today the air and the Bay Area is much better than it was 30 years ago the bay is cleaner than it was years ago they're fishing in the Thames which they couldn't do 15 or 20 years ago the air in London is you know ain't perfect but it isn't like the cold smog of the 1950s and we've made the automobile of today 90% cleaner than the automobile of 25 years ago so you know I think it's a both end I think human progress depends upon enormous continuing advance in technology we can't solve solve the climate change problem I don't think we can end poverty without doing it and so on but we can get it wrong the biofuels mess that's creating some of the rice crisis that we're having right now is a good example of getting things wrong so technology doesn't automatically guarantee a good outcome what we do with it is obviously what's critical you have to acknowledge that much of the progress in medical science you mentioned dentistry but but progress in anesthesia progress in that field was again accelerated by by warfare actually this seems to be to be one of the recurrent features of our predicament that it seems to take a massive Cataclysm to to make our technological innovation accelerate but there's a piece of sleight of hand that I want to pick you up on you simplified my argument by dividing the 20th century into two halves a very destructive half and a relatively less destructive half but the book actually tries to avoid that periodization by suggesting a period from around 1904 to 1953 of of Megadeth and then this lower level conflict the third world's war in actually less populous places the problem is the period before it that you don't say anything about are you ever worried that you might be like one of those pre-1914 intellectuals who said war is now impossible there was Norman Angell was a normal angel was one that though there was a chap named Eve and blush who argued that war had become technologically far too destructive to be sustainable for any length of time in fact there were a whole group of people who came to the conclusion the technological progress had actually made great power war highly unlikely and indeed that you could see why they thought that because from the 1870s onwards the amount of war and particularly the risk of great power war seemed to be declining something quite interesting that financial markets were much less nervous in the decade before 1914 than they had been in the 1870s and 1880s so if we go back a little bit earlier isn't there a sort of alarmingly similar scenario I hate to use the word scenario a period in which a futurists a Peter Schwartz would have said it's all gonna be fine technology's gonna solve our problems we're all going to live in peace and then 1914 comes along and the books are all remaindered how do you address that problem hey the the best example we could see is Palm Beach 2004 the kinds of events that could deflect history and so an unquestionably I think you're right on this one and and I I see very much the risk here indeed if you'd been here in 1908 you would have been enthralled by all the new technologies the automobile electricity radio the telephone airplanes you know and we would have just had Einstein published you know his epic year and the world was about to change globalization was very real you know travel under the famous quarter the you you have the quote from Keynes that you know soon that after the man could go anywhere in the British Empire and you know not even need any money because everywhere it was all good British Sterling was available so yeah I think the analogy is actually rather apt and it is worrying I think it is genuinely worrying but I think it is a matter of choice that is I think what we saw then and I think your book rightly argues it was staggering misperceptions and misjudgments on the part of political leaders now indeed I think we've just seen one of those catastrophes of misjudgment and incompetence on the part of political leadership play out in Iraq and indeed those events are genuinely worrying and I think you rightly pointed to where the biggest risks in the world live today and we have certainly exacerbated it but it may be an opportunity for the world and we to learn a lesson at a fairly high price I might add but not as catastrophic to say Vietnam was in human death from our point of view at least but having said that I think the analogy ought to give us pause because I think there is enough merit in it and then we ought to be thinking hard about how we not follow that path of kind of cascading events and misperceptions into a war no one wanted well I'm glad you acknowledge that part of my objective in writing a book like the war of the world is precisely to make sure that I'm wrong in other words that the objective is to force people to think about the historical process in such a way that they avoid war of the world the sequel but there's a and a part of your argument that I'm puzzled by and that is your your optimism about the the question of climate change when you make the point that things have got so much better in in England or in California that that's because the industrial world has been relocated to Asia and anybody who spends any time in East Asia will tell you that the peace Super's of old London are nothing compared with the kind of pollution that's being created as a fifth of humanity embarks on a far more rapid industrialization than English speakers ever a dreamt of I mean this is all being done at a breakneck speed and it seems to me that the the optimism that you have that this is all going to be resolved by I don't know microbes that diesel is hard to I have to tell you that the idea that that's going to solve our problems is a stretch for me I really though I'm sure craig Venter is a very smart guy the law of unintended consequences tells me that his diesel shooting microbes will end up destroying mankind taking over the world I don't know I don't like the sign of any of this you know I know what HG Wells would say about those microbes if you were here well the the issue of China and the environment and pollution is probably one of the biggest challenges not only for China but for the world and how do we solve that cuz you didn't really say that they don't aren't part of this wonderful new democratic networked system of global government yes they are I think they are as a matter of fact and well in fact what you know I thought they were still ruled by a communist bottle with a one-party state yes they are but they're also engaged in a great variety of efforts already dealing with the consequences of climate change both in collaborative efforts right here at UC Berkeley for example in a network of scientists and basically technical people in a variety of different domains trying to deal with the shared problems that we both face but for them the biggest issue is coal they've got to clean up their coal they've got to find ways to capture the carbon and sequester it they need clean vehicles they have exactly the same needs for technology that we do and so my view is fairly straightforward there's no it ain't a done deal by any means but very much the same technology challenges that they face we face and that we are likely to be working together in one way or another or competing you know but then driving each other to do better in that sense to develop the technologies of things like clean coal and clean cars because neither one of us will make it without them and one already sees at least the seeds of that in collaborative efforts beginning what if there's another outcome though let's build a scenario in which something much more like the past recurs in which rival empires fight over increasingly scarce natural resources and do not adopt new and more benign technologies because it's just too damn difficult what makes you so sure that we won't be quarreling over coal and oil and particularly oil and natural gas much in the way that in previous eras men fought wars over coal or for that matter sugar which was a great source of energy in there and the 17th century well look it was access to oil the triggered World War two you know and if with the Japanese in particular so I think the risks are very real though interestingly enough I think the risks are greater between say China and and access to Russian natural gas for reasons of substituting for dirty coal cleaner natural gas and the issue of you know who really owns Siberia may become an issue and that one worries me as a source of conflict well I think at this point the time is up and that means that I have to know it's really quite a challenge this it's almost impossible for anybody with jetlag to do but I've now got to summarize Peters arguments in such a way that he will say you got it so my understanding is that your argument is is as follows first that we we both method logically are engaged in in the same activity we use our imaginations and we use our imaginations to try to draw inferences from past data the inferences I draw are about how the dead thought and the inferences you draw are about your imaginary friends and I have a very good doctor that you can see [Laughter] so that's the first point in a sense we're both engaged in in challenges that require our brains computational part to do things that no other computational part can do and and we're not actually ever going to be tremendously effective in that sense that the China question is is the interesting one you put that down to a failure of imagination I think we should try and talk more about that because it seems to me to be at the very heart of what we're discussing here and I still don't really know if had I asked myself that question with a somewhat different set of historical assumptions I would have come up with a better answer than you so that's the first point the second point is I'm a pessimist and you're an optimist that's how I interpreted much of what you said and that you take precisely the same data that I take from the 20th century and come to a fundamentally Pangloss Ian's conclusion whereas I am Cassandra and all I can do is predict yes more carnage I think this is a legitimate point though it risks discrediting us both if we are simply writing books that express our fundamentally different temperaments you the cheerful West coaster me the gloomy despondent Calvinists scoff then there may not be any need to read these books you just look look at our BIOS on wiki and say he's a pessimist he's an optimist that's all you need to know so that that seems to me to be a somewhat problem is problematic proposition I hope that I tried to transcend as best I can my my temperamental difficulties my the Calvinist legacy is one that it's hard to shake off but that's I think at the heart of the second part of your argument so but final part of your argument is that technology is the driver in your approach to scenario building you always list a bunch of drivers they're usually about seven or eight but but it all seems to me that the one that you instinctively want to put at the top and give pride of place to is technology which I suppose is a reflection of your your background as an engineer and hence the notion that out of all the troubles that we currently face there will be technological solutions and that with one bound or one bacterium will be free is that a fair summary of your arguments what do you think unfair summary well the truth is in substance of course it actually is except I wouldn't say that in fact I think it is Pangloss Ian versus a kind of doer Scott I think it is actually the relative weight one gives to the novel versus the methods of history that the forces noting methods the force of history how much how malleable is the human condition how much can we really reinvent what is possible and my impression is you would give greater weight to the force of history and those things that are enduring and I might give greater weight to those things are that are more novel and that challenge some of those things that have persisted for a very long time just one little footnote to it occurs to me at one point that you've made recently very eloquently is that that you may live to be a hundred and fifty which which is an exciting thought though I'm not sure our debate will be that good in 50 years I can't promise to be anything other than gaga if I'm still around but but you know if that is possible you might think that it would radically change our human condition yet the the lesson of history is that making people live longer doesn't radically change the human condition we actually already have done this because life expectancy at the beginning of the 20th century an average male life expectancy even and in developed or relatively advanced European societies was still amazingly low bar our standard late 40s right so we got from 37 to where we are now which in in even the more deprived parts of Scotland is still in the upper 60s it hasn't I think radically changed the world that we've achieved us I don't think that we are in fact significantly more benign I don't think our societies are significantly improved by the fact that people live a lot longer so this is this seems to me to illustrate precisely the point that you make big changes in our technological or biological circumstances seems to leave us unaltered as human beings and the dark forces within us that incline people towards acts of violence or irrational political decisions which are tremendously important they don't seem to we don't seem to be any wiser we're definitely older but I don't think that we're wiser I'm not sure you know you have people now who live multi generationally in other words there are people today who remember the worlds of the 50s and the 40s and even the 30s and I think we have that process and possibility of intergenerational learning far more extensively and far more deeply than we ever have before more 90 year olds who are around teaching their great-grandchildren something of the world in which they once encountered so I think that there is an opportunity not certainly universally taken but I do see it happening and I see it happening frequently of this kind of intergenerational learning that you know we have lots of forgetting as generation after generation died and we have to repeat the crises that happened again and again and not to say that there's universal learning but I think that there is a kind of adaptive process that as we live longer we learn more and more deeply which I sounds like an argument for the the 71 year old rather than the 46 year old in the presidential election but Allah leave politics out of that you guys been characterizing each other and what hasn't been mentioned is that Peter is an old SDS ER and basically a liberal cellular level I was at Columbia today yesterday was the day and Neal for a while there you were the darling of the neoconservatives in this country a comfortable company for them we can talk about that Hoover Institution I remember you recommending and some op-ed that John Kerry should win because he was so inept that he would soon be replaced by a good Republican well actually what I argued in the in that article was that george w bush was so inept that we really should replace him and not give him a second anything yeah that was one of the more prescient pieces i wrote in 2004 but it is there does pessimism and conservatism blend it all does optimism and liberalism blend it all is this it all part of what we're talking about besides engineers and the liberal arts guy well I think if we are going to talk about are as it were ideological priors as well as our cultural background which which historians are trained to do I mean one tries to pick one's cards on the table full disclosure I've done that in all my books full disclosure my grandfather was in the Highland regiments in the in the trenches on the Western Front full disclosure my family had substantial contacts and involvement with the history of the British Empire full disclosure it's not a secret I was an ardent Thatcherite in the 1980s and have certainly been seen as as being on the right since then though I don't think in American terms I'm a conservative that's all but this is a word that means quite different things on the two sides of the Atlantic I'm a liberal fundamentalist I come from the the 19th century Gladstone Ian's tradition in British politics the 18th century tradition of Adam Smith and the Scottish enlightenment and I tend to make my judgments political parties and political leaders on a fairly pragmatic basis are they in favor of the free market and are they prefer are they prepared to defend political Liberty against regimes that threaten it those are the two key questions in the 1980s I think that there's two key questions today so I'm rather wary of being classified as a typical pessimistic conservative because I see myself more as a rather old-fashioned liberal a liberal in the in the Scottish eighteenth and nineteenth-century sense of the word rather than in the Barack Obama sense of the word well you know I think you put your finger on part of my history but not part of what happened subsequently indeed yes I was SDS and you know if in the 60s you weren't you were missing the game right and you know you were there in your own form of your own barricades as it were that having been said what I happened to me was a lot of learning along the way but not in the sense of you know a liberal mugged by history as it were and now conservative what I began to learn was the nature of complex dynamics I took my background in fluid mechanics and tried to understand how actually history works how the future unfolds I spent 10 years at SR I and it would be hard to and I can tell you it was a remarkable moment when I was in the board room of shell thinking back to those moments when we were occupying fair-weather hall at Columbia or when I was in the executive dining room of the CIA thinking back to those moments because I think my thought process evolved not so much ideologically but in terms of methodology how I approached the question and it was when I really began to deal with the question of uncertainty moving from a world that was predictable in its fashion to a world that was both malleable and uncertain and indeed you know my background look I think my friends know I was born in a refugee camp in Germany concentration camp survivors and slave laborers and you have to be pretty churlish not to be optimistic if you've climbed out of that kind of background you know that your parents suffered what my parents suffered and where I began my life and to see what I have experienced that the world at least forded me the possibility of which I took but which if I said gee I'm pessimistic based on that history I would have to be systematically blind to the only the possibility that I enjoy I have to just pick you up on that very briefly and then we'll go to some questions from from the audience I'm glad you mentioned your your parents experience I must say that would make me far more skeptical than you are of the the benefits of of science and technology because you have to ask yourself which country in the world was in the forefront of scientific and technological advance in the 1920s and indeed early 1930s where were the universities most sophisticated in the realm of the Natural Sciences between the world wars the answer is Germany Germany has a commanding lead when it came to Nobel prizes in their hard sciences it was far ahead of the United States until refugees began to arrive predominantly Jewish refugees from the German universities in the American Universities anybody who knows the history of the mid 20th century and particularly the extraordinary role of Germany that most advanced of European countries has to end up it seems to me pessimistic certainly pessimistic about Science and Technology now all right here's a question from from luis rosado what is the next China what well 20 years from now we'd be looking back on and saying that was the elephant we didn't even see it you've written a book about this well what are the inevitable surprises I mean I I basically said climate change is the one in terms of the one that it will be world shaping but I think there's another one that we're in the midst of right now that we we can't see quite yet and you and I were talking about this backstage if the financial crisis that we are in continues down the course that it may be on toward yet a much deeper crisis then there is the real possibility that a long-term historical shift that was almost inevitable with the rise of China and India of a rebalancing of the world financial world may take place in weeks not decades and that the shift of the geopolitical and geo-economic landscape where all the pools of capital flow and the control of the flow of capital moves out of democratic hands into state controlled hands from market hands of the New York markets the London markets into the hands of the Chinese the cadiz the Singaporeans the people with the great Russians and that that could transform the landscape of the world in a rather fundamental way so that's one that I think is sitting out there I think it's a good question I think China will be the next China that is to say that we're getting China wrong again the classic argument that is now conventional wisdom was I think originally Jim O'Neill's at Goldman it was Jim who coined the phrase the BRICS and it's Jim who has these wonderful lines that you may have seen that project China's gross domestic product overtaking that of the United States in 2024 on Tuesday the 15th of March at 10 past 5:00 I promise you that's not gonna happen that is the one thing that you can be sure not because history just is not like that it's not linear when Japan was converging in the United Kingdom a process that began over a hundred years ago it was certainly not a smooth line although ultimately that crossover happened I think that the trend is right but the smoothness is wrong and I think we're heading for a far bumpier ride in China then the conventional wisdom allows China is already more exposed to the consequences of climate change vastly more exposed than the United States because of its very location and topography there's a demographic disaster unfolding as a consequence of the one-child policy I saw some fascinating statistics only this morning at Hoover about the imbalances the gender imbalances in China as a result of sex selection the use of abortion against female fetuses there is going to be a huge oversupply of men and under supply of women in many parts of China and more seriously there is going to be a huge imbalance between the generations within the space of 20 years that is going to cause profound difficulties for China's practically non-existent welfare state so if I had to pick a thing that would be an outlier at this point it would be the China screw-up which I think is the one thing that most people assume isn't going to happen well you know China is getting old before it's getting rich and that's the wrong way to do it sure you know the other way around is a whole lot better none of this has ever been tried before on their scale right so this is this is and I should say this is where historians may not be particularly helpful because we are in a number of very unchartered waters at this point well you know you could add to that by the way the demographics of Russia Russia is in demographic collapse its population is falling it's labor force is falling fast and the only thing covering it is $120 a barrel oiler hmm if the price of oil Falls or they run into hiccups in one way or another they're Russia could really be under enormous similar pressure that China would be - and then what happens if Russia or trying to go into this kind of crisis mode what happens next well I I think this is where the historian can be helpful when politically fragile systems encounter major social and economic shocks they traditionally in the modern period have used nationalism or some other extreme ideology but usually nationalism to try and really jism eyes themselves now I don't know whether you follow this closely I do I think the Chinese reaction to our critique of their policy in Tibet is quite fascinating and startling there are some really amazing videos that you can watch of of a naked ly nationalist nature that don't seem to be government generated might seem to be or not don't seem to be yes my strong impression is that we underestimate the extent to which the internet and the cell phone are allowing not liberal progressive democratic forces to gain ground in China but the opposite they actually allowing a quite old-fashioned and to our eyes almost 19th and early 20th century nationalism to mobilize a generation in ways that I'm not even sure the Chinese leadership are in so again China is the next China the China we're gonna get is not the China of the BRICS story it's a China with profound social and economic problems which it will try to address by the kind of nationalism that we have forgotten exists particularly we Europeans who are kind of post nationalists in our in our ethos our next question comes from Iran Indyk and recently the speaker here was nothing Tom the Black Swan okay so this will be a Black Swan question now the history nor futurism seems to account for random events that dictate the course of both the Fluke of 9/11 for instance and can any analysis of the past or future indicate how to basically deal with these things that come out of left field that are predictable only in retrospect and they're big they change everything well NASA team and I have become pals lately since I reviewed the Black Swan with tremendous enthusiasm and he and I have this project to write a paper which is essentially why can't financial markets predict history and I think one of the things that makes the Black Swan a really good book is its critique of the way that historians convention they think I actually alluded to it when I talked earlier about our desire for enormous causes to match enormous consequences what the Black Swan is about is is partly the poverty of induction as a method but mainly actually the problem of historical thinking in trying to explain crises so it seems to me if you take a Talib like view of the way that our complex modern societies operate you're actually going to start understanding the historical process much better you have to get away from smooth curves you have to get away from the assumption that there are nice regular cycles and historical process this was the thing that historians spent generations looking for and not quite finding the Kondratiev wave all this stuff as if history was some kind of regular rhythmical process but it's not it's actually stochastic it's it's a deterministic system but it behaves in ways that appear random and this is not just true financial markets is also true say military conflicts all for that matter revolutions so my sense is that he's part of a very healthy tendency a tendency whereby people who come from very different disciplines in his case quantitative finance inform the way that we think about the historical process my sense is that some of the best history that will be written in the next generation will be written by people with an interdisciplinary background who are as comfortable with that kind of argument as they are wading through dirty old letters left by the dead well you rightly made the point when in your comments about evolutionary biology as a way of thinking about history and you know evolutionary biology that is non teleological so we don't have purpose and large forces and the choices of evolution are not planned they're the random events that and and mutations that come up and get tried in one way or another and so I think the the idea of evolutionary biology as a way of thinking about history comes much closer to the way in which Nasim thinks about it than the kind of Toynbee esque kind of neat cycles of history or Kondratiev waves or any of those kinds of regularities and that history is I mean biology is much messier than say the pendulum motion of physics that people tried to apply as a kind of analogy to history before I'm sure that's right you thought we were gonna keep talking agreed I heard this couple right I'm sure that's right he said I love these names Pietro OPA though this is to Neil but it's really to both of you what do you believe is the purpose of the futurist do you think the futurist can change the course of history this is a this is reflexive 'ti as I mean we're living history we're thinking history the thinking of history and our features some by professionals like Peter but basically by all of us we're going around with these notions in front of us imagining that that is the path and all the errors notions well the great danger and this one can learn from history is is to believe too firmly in one of your scenarios after all it's not as if futurists are a recent invention it's not as if we only just started to think of scenarios in fact most of history is characterized by the use of more or less crude models to construct futures alarming Goldilocks or exciting and it seems to me that the big problem is that very often these futures are so wrong that they lead to decisions that produce even worse futures the classic example being the one child child policy in China the future that the Chinese Communist Party was staring at which was presented to them by their demographers and and technical experts was a Malthusian one we cannot grow crops and rice as fast as the population is growing we have to do something radical we have to intervene in the way that the planned economy is intervened in everything else in human reproduction and they did and this was a very fine example of a futurist changing the world of a planner changing policy but the unintended consequences are I believe going to make China much less stable place than it would have been if they just tried to increase agricultural productivity and let nature take its course in the way that it's taken its course everywhere else at a certain point there is a demographic transition and people stop having really large families they don't need to be coerced into it so it seems to me futurists are not new what new I think is Peter's methodology where you present at least three scenarios and don't explicitly wait the probabilities actually I hate that about Peter scenarios I want the goddamn probabilities please could you attach some kind of probability to these three scenarios and tell me which one knows the most likely but because you weren't seems to me your role is essentially to present a menu to the CEOs or the managers of sovereign wealth funds or possibly even the rulers of Great Eastern despotisms and say sire I have considered I've gazed into my crystal ball but unfortunately there are three crystal balls and I will present you with these three crystal balls and you choose the one you really like to look off and you know it's gonna be ultimately a matter of taste which scenario any powerful person adopts if you don't if you don't attach the probability so this is a new game where you offer three that they pick one but it could be as disastrous as the old model where you just offer one crystal ball hmm I think not and here I think you got it right up until the pick one and and that is the objective and this is why I got into the business in the first place I mean like a lot of people I was fascinated by the future but because this is in late 60s I didn't see any futures I liked when I looked at the ideologies of left and right and I wanted I realized we needed better tools for making better decisions about the future and that's where this alternative thinking process came from but the important point was not to pick one scenario but to develop essentially the adaptive capacity on the one hand to be able to live with multiple possibilities to be able to influence outcomes on the other and to be able to in a sense be resilient against a variety of possibilities so in its why when I sit with CEOs or government leaders I don't tell them what will happen I'm not staring into that one single crystal ball but rather my measure of success is do they ask better questions and do they make better decisions not did they predict a better future I think the Chinese had a kind of single view and fundamentally misperceived it and it's where governments often get it wrong is that they have this kind of view that's based as much on denial as anything else so I think if one keeps the possibilities open one is far more likely to make much more agile choices in the face of that uncertainty a fellow on a question of that which is when we start a global business network back when scenarios were looked like they were probably about ready to peak when Herman Kahn started him a long time before that and shale picked up on did okay and then g-man grabbed and ran with them and we figured you know usual business fad that would be maybe five years we were lucky we were hoping for ten yeah we were hoping for ten one of our scenarios was ten but that didn't happen that became it wasn't hula hoops it was jogging it was the thing which just became a permanent part of the intellectual landscape of policy of business of government and so on are we to conclude that the only institutions that don't engage in Scenario planning are financial institutions because presumably if financial institutions had heeded your methodology we wouldn't currently be in the mess that we're in because they would have had a scenario in which a liquidity crisis came along and a bank run caused the entire system to Teeter on the brink of collapse no I mean why if we've so much adopted this methodology of the key institutions and our economy screwed up so spectacularly I they're just not hiring you guys that's right but having said that that's a new explanation for this subprime crisis well in fact we did work with one of the banks and they sold their sub prime portfolio three years ago because they did their scenarios and couldn't see any good ones now you know who to her but having said that look when the self-interest is so great that the motivation for self-deception is so great that that's I think a big part of what was going on here in and actually almost always happens in financial crisis it reaches the point where you know you can deceive yourself well you know I'll do one more trade it's you know I'll have like one more shot of heroin and then I'll stop and it's the same way it feeds on itself and you get runaway crises it was what has just happened with the subprime it's happened what happened with the derivatives trading in 1987 it's what happened with some of the bond and realist rate and currency in Thailand in 1997 but now you sound just like me you're getting a whole series of historical examples okay here's a a quote posed as a question it is arrogant to be pessimistic in the face of a 13.7 billion year trend 13.7 billion whoa really deep history right basically since the Big Bang and things been getting worse or getting better that maybe it's an entropic view in the trend building the universe is really in particularly great shape it's not but we can delude ourselves that oh you're missing biology biology is that is the great invention of the universe in a self-organizing way I mean you know this but there are zero species most of them are tiny microbes that don't so much for evolution why can't you produce diesel all by yourselves they did once you know I mean I think the timeframe here is crucial we haven't talked about this but if you think about human history you mustn't think about it as some four thousand you know the civilizations story of four thousand years of continuous advance it's not there's a hundred years of spectacular advance and prior to that is basically Malthus most of human history involves people engaged in subsistence agriculture must have organized civilized recorded human history as people engaged subsistence agriculture being exploited by tiny elites it's only with the Industrial Revolution that the possibility exists through technologies like through technology but my case is made I got my butt in but but please technology allied with major and inexplicable gains in labor productivity it may or may not additional copy ya know a bit greg Clark's book of you farewell to arms there isn't really a very obvious explanation for why it was that the Industrial Revolution saw massive gains in labor productivity in a few countries beginning with Britain you can't actually explain it in terms purely of technology that's one of the things that he shows very clearly and then from that point on there's a sort of exponential growth which is essentially the history of the last 150 years and that gradually improves the loss of the average human being until you're left with Colliers bottom billion that's that's really the way in which we should think about the historical process the biggest historical question which I don't think Greg answers is why did heat the human condition suddenly change when most of history was really a rather miserable affair well and if you look at the numbers in terms of predicted for the US Europe and Japan post-world War two the rate of growth of per capita income exploded relative to history and I would attribute that not only the new technology but the scale of organization in terms of the efficiency of networks of production and so on all of those things experienced unbelievable progress over the last 50 years as compared to even the previous 50 or the hundred and 50 before that so you know we're on an accelerating trend I'm not a decelerating train but you assume Peter and here is our profound difference but that trend can be projected forward whereas it seems to me this phenomenon that we're describing is just an historical anomaly and it would be really very surprising if it were continued in fact it's almost certainly not sustainable over the next 150 years so that is the big difference between us okay so here's a history perspective have there been past technological hurts while Moore's law type curves that accelerated and then broke or were they just part of what you might call the very long early part of this slow astrometric now accelerating astrometric they're saying human nutrition so for most of human history men were and women were malnourished you you can see that by the size of their skeletons that survived they really were rather short and their lives were pretty brief they didn't didn't take long really to be taken out by disease if you were as poorly fed as the average person throughout most of recorded history and then there was a great breakthrough wasn't a particularly happy story I have to tell you because the great brakes were involved in slaving millions of Africans and getting them to produce sugar for the consumption of people in Western Europe sugar is a great source of energy if you want to understand the Industrial Revolution part of the story is that for the first time there are people in the world who properly getting the calories that they need and those people are in Britain and at this point you yet you start to see a shift in the direction of proper nutrition and people start to get better and better fed and by the mid 20th century you human beings getting a really good diet but then you tip over into the obese era because this thing can't be sustained what happens in fact is that the habits of the industrial era let's eat some sugar let's have more sugar hmm that's pretty good let's put some corn oil and sugar and have that too you reach a you point the reach point of diminishing returns and you only have to you know take a walk through I don't know Atlanta Airport to see how diplomatic not San Francisco progress is not like that in the realm of human nutrition which is the central most important driver in many ways in the industrial revolution story there comes a point when you just can't actually get any bigger as a human being you've reached the point and Monty - Monty Python life of Brian when you're about to explode not life of brian meaning of life Thank You jet lag okay here's a specific question from waned and bork mr. Ferguson do you feel the big nets for both of you do you feel the big cause and the current Middle East conflict lay more in modern times or more in the events of a tirado choises histories or something else well I think the conflicts of our time have relatively shallow historical roots though I wouldn't say as often people do say that that they can all be blamed on decisions taken between around 1917 and 1921 it's an easy argument to make that the problems your hero Churchill didn't get it wrong well you see it's easy to blame British and French imperialists for the way in which the Middle East's landscape changed after World War one but this is to overlook a fundamental problem which is that the Ottoman Empire was no it'll indeed the first modern genocide happened before the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 as I'm sure everybody here knows so one can't simply brain blame this on decisions taken when the Ottoman Empire was broken up there was something already badly wrong in that region just as the process of Jewish colonization that ultimately produced the State of Israel predated the first world war can be traced right back into 19th century and I think I would look there one has to look it seems to me to the mid 19th century in the process that leads up to the frost World War and then beyond to understand the problems that we currently face they do have to do with that phenomenon that interests me so much ethnic disintegration when different ethnic and sectarian groups become increasingly hostile to one another to the point of being unable to cohabit peacefully that's a process which is is actually it seems to me the most interesting one to understand in modern history remember Samuel Huntington who predicted in 1993 that the post Cold War era would be about a clash of civilizations well the history of the Middle East suggests otherwise it suggests actually far more complex processes particularly of sectarian violence within so-called civilization and that that seems to me to be a really difficult thing to explain why what is it that causes Sunnis and Shias to engage in systemic violence against one another this is a new phenomenon in the sense that it hasn't been seen much in in recent years but it's an ancient phenomenon because it can cite disputes that go back into deep history one of the things that makes a question like that so difficult is that the protagonists justify their hatred of one another in terms of the distant past and that inclines us to think that all of this lies I don't know as far back as the early history of Islam but I don't think it does I think these are just legitimation of relatively recent disputes between people living cheek-by-jowl in relatively densely populated impoverished cities I think I would add one thing which is alluded into in your observation but I think there's something in let me call it the Arab culture North Africa Middle East that we have seen these kinds of struggles among families the Hashemites versus the sounds and so on all the different sub cultures and very much in the I think the in the spirit of the war of the world but that have been at each other for quite a long time not necessarily fighting out ancient enmities and so on but simply family rivalries cultural rivalries and so on for relative dominance and post-world War one they kind of got locked into national boundaries eg the Saudi peninsula and the Hashemites up towards Jordan etc and we have transposed I think cultural tribal familial conflict into nationalism and that becomes extremely difficult because it then it's no longer quite as malleable and amenable to the kind of compromises that history actually allowed them to pursue in the past the only thing I'd add to that Peter is that before we make any blanket our claims about the character of Arab culture or or for that matter Islam we should remember that although the Middle East hasn't been a peaceful place since world war two but the wars that have been fought there have with one exception been very small yes that's true and that exception is the iran-iraq war most most of the wars in the Middle East that we've seen have been short and duration casualty rates been by mid 20th century standards tiny Europe has been historically a far more violent place than the Middle East it's only very recently that our propensity for slaughtering one another within European civilisation has finally been tamed I mean they did a pretty good job right but even before then think of the 30 Years War Protestants and Catholics have inflicted more violence of one other over the long delay than Sunnis and Shias all for that matter Arabs and Jews and one should bear that in mind before passing judgments on the region we're gonna have to wind down Christian you have to catch a car to the plane but would be interesting to get from one of the questions here what prepares us better for the future prepares us better for the future a pessimistic promoter and optimistic approach oh well I'll take it you're mean there's no catalyst it's an optimistic approach and I and I say that for very simple reason that I think it is you know I'm struck by as it as Antonio Graham sees quote about the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will that is that we need to think hard about how hard and difficult the challenges are but we need to be able to imagine that we can overcome them that if we fail to achieve greatness if we fail to meet the challenges that things like climate change or ethnic conflict or the challenges at a place like China with its environmental and energy challenges represents I think they are mostly failures to be able to imagine better possibilities that motivate people to do things that are different from their historical inclinations so we come to the question of the probabilities to be attached to scenarios and the weights to be applied to them and it seems to me I take a completely different view from you the most important scenario the one you should think about most is the worst case scenario that is the one to focus on because that is the one that will blow you up Goldilocks can take care of herself and as for Pangloss he's just fine the key thing is to look very hard for that worst-case scenario and make sure you have got it right now the argument for historical study that I want to conclude with is this you could try and rely on your own imagination to come up with a worst-case scenario you can do it just from first principles fine but I believe you will do better at identifying that worst-case scenario you will come up with a better range of possible nightmare outcomes if you study history [Laughter] and remember ladies and gentlemen ladies and gentlemen if you way to go outstanding people thank you [Music] you

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 19,646

Rating: 4.6428571 out of 5

Keywords: Culture, Science, Technology, Business, Prediction, Progress, History, Psychology, Conflict, counter-factual

Id: maVZ8Gb9-E0

Length: 100min 57sec (6057 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020