GPT-4 has got people interested in the future again
We’re only a few weeks into 2023, but there has been a sea-change in the thinking of many business people regarding the future. GPT-4 and similar systems look likely to usher in major changes to the way many of us work and play, and they will probably have significant impacts on markets, economies, politics, and international relations. How can businesses become more effective in anticipating and managing these changes in their business landscapes?
A new book which addresses this question of managing rapid change is Nikolas Badminton’s “Facing our Futures: How foresight, futures design and strategy creates prosperity and growth”. Over the last few years, Badminton has worked with over 300 organizations, including Google, Microsoft, NASA, the United Nations, American Express, and Rolls Royce. He also advised Robert Downey Jr.’s team for the “Age of AI” documentary series. Badminton joined the London Futurists Podcast to discuss what it means to be a professional futurist, and how to become one.
Becoming a futurist
At the age of eight, Badminton was captivated by “The Usborne Book of the Future”. Published in 1980, this book described what life would be like in 2000, at the start of the next century. It got some things right, including wearable computing, but it predicted other things which have still not come to pass, including colonies on the moon and under the ocean. Around the same time, he started playing with computers, and he carried on working with computers at university and in his early career, which focused on the use of data in advertising. Before becoming a futurist, Badminton spent most of his career as a consultant, advising clients on technology and business strategy.
In 2008, Badminton moved to Canada. In North America there was much more interest in how technology will shape our futures, and for the first time he encountered people calling themselves futurists. But coincidentally, it was after giving a presentation at a London Futurist event in 2015 that Badminton decided to become a full-time futurist.
The nature of futurism
He describes a typical engagement. Working for a large technology company with 180,000 employees, he said “here are the signals, here are the trends, here are some scenarios we can expect to see, and this is how your objectives and your strategies will be impacted.” Together with an executive – that would become a futurist-in-residence – he reviewed a wide range of outcomes, from demographic trends such as population shrinkage, to government policy on gun ownership and gun crime.
Another example is an engagement for a frozen food company which was poised to make an investment in Valencia, in southern Spain. Badminton drew their attention to a report which described a difficult future of excess heat in that part of the world, and a corresponding “apocalypse windfall” in northern Europe. The company reviewed and revised its investment plans accordingly.
The work generally consists of workshops, and collaborative projects to write fiction that captures what emerge as the most likely scenarios and bring them to life. Clients can be large corporates or startups, and they are all over the world. Badminton works on these engagements with colleagues in an organisation called the Futurist Think Tank. In the last three years, this has become 60% of his work, whereas previously most of his revenue came from keynote talks. So far, he is finding it fascinating and rewarding.
How futurists are trained
If you are an engineer, or a government administrator, and you want to become a strategy consultant, you typically do an MBA and join McKinsey or one of the other strategy firms. There is as yet no equivalent pathway for futurists. There are universities which now offer degrees in foresight, but Badminton’s advice is to travel and experience different types of life and work. You need a broad horizon to be a futurist, and most people will not glean that from the pages of books.
The key is to be open-minded and curious, and shift your mindset from “what-is” to “what-if”. You need to be prepared to ask difficult questions, and see where the logic goes. If the people who championed Brexit had sincerely considered the potential downsides, they might not have pushed as hard for the extreme form of Brexit that was eventually imposed. Who knows, maybe David Cameron, the UK prime minister who launched the referendum which led to the decision, might not have done so.
Dark Futures
Lots of people who call themselves futurists peddle what could be called “future porn”. They gush about what a wonderful world we will live in when we have self-driving cars and robot valets, and they fail to think rigorously about the timelines for the individual technologies, the potential for resistance to their adoption, and the possible downsides. When he hears these people talk, Badminton often wants to put his head in his hands and weep: these glib accounts don’t help people think seriously about the challenges ahead.
We are, he says, born of struggle, perennially subject to war and taxes. He is sceptical that we can reach a society of abundance any time soon. He describes the world envisaged by Peter Diamandis and others as a “pay-to-play situation”, which will not be available to the large swathes of humanity who struggle under a calorific deficit, and are beset by wars and corrupt government.
There are plenty of ways that technology could enable or create negative economic and social outcomes. Badminton has run around 45 “Dark Futures” meetings, in which guests give short presentations about bad or dangerous scenarios such as inappropriate use of surveillance technology, or dirty money being laundered through the property markets of desirable cities like Vancouver and London. These meetings have been held in Vancouver, Toronto, and San Francisco. Expansion to New York and London was stymied by the pandemic.
However, Badminton is an optimist. He thinks our societies are in a constant state of collapse, but we are very resilient, and we keep bouncing back in better shape than before. Alarmism about climate change and capitalism is overblown, he thinks. We do face a number of existential risks like nuclear weapons and asteroids, but there are few of these, and he likes to think of futurists as “hope engineers”.
De-growth
Jason Hickel and others argue that rish humans are placing too much strain on the Earth’s ecosystems. They think we should shrink our economies and become more sustainable. Badminton is attracted to parts of this ideology, but he regards it as “entirely imaginary”, and therefore a useful tool to help develop new ways of thinking, new planning scenarios and new stories.
He does think we should wean ourselves off fossil fuels more quickly, and build circular economies where nothing is wasted and everything is recycled. He would like to see cities built for pedestrians rather than cars (although he is cynical about the Saudi project to build a car-free city called The Line), and greater equality of income.
But unless abundance for all is just around the corner, then slowing economic growth is an affordable indulgence for wealthy people in the West, but a disaster for hungry people in the global south, and for people just about clawing their way into a middle class existence.
Futurism improves company performance
The growth of interest in futurism as a career is a good thing, he thinks, but it is still the case that too few large companies employ full-time futurists. A study carried out in Belgium in 2018 by Rene Rohrbeck and Menes Etingue Kum found that over an eight-year period, future-prepared firms outperformed the average by a 33% higher profitability and with a 200% higher growth. If there is a causal link, then whichever direction it goes, the finding is positive for futurists.