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"In every foresight or forecasting exercise, there are two overarching tensions:
The more certain and detailed the forecast, the more people will accept it and believe it to be useful.
The more certain and detailed the forecast, the less likely it is to happen."
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My preferred approach is to use scenarios, essentially giving multiple examples within the general framework. This illustrates the shape of the broader framework better, and makes clear that no one specific forecast is the "real prediction." Yet the problems with this approach are manifold: coming up with three to five internally consistent forecasts is significantly harder than just coming up with one; audiences will gravitate towards preferred scenarios, sometimes ignoring those that don't turn out in ways they like; and it's difficult to encapsulate multiple scenarios into a short presentation or statement without rendering them meaningless.
"In other words I have a new ambition for my own SF: not as prediction, and not cautionary, either--but aspirational.
The fact is that if I've learned one thing in two years of studying how we think about the future, it's that the one thing that's sorely lacking in the public imagination is positive ideas about where we should be going. We seem to do everything about our future except try to design it. It's a funny thing: nobody ever questions your credentials if you predict doom and destruction. But provide a rosy picture of the future, and people demand that you justify yourself. Increasingly, though, I believe that while warning people of dire possibilities is responsible, providing them with something to aspire to is even more important. The foresight programme has given me a lot of tools to do that in a justifiable way, so I might as well use them."
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