Can the future be predicted?
Some would argue that they do, and not always by fortune-tellers, chiromancers or common swindlers. The military and business worlds have long since equipped themselves with systems for processing knowledge of both the present and the future. With a high degree of precision, these indicate not so much what will happen, but facilitate preparation for the challenge of uncertainty that accompanies consideration of the future. Knowledge of what an opponent or competitor will do has always been mined by armies of spies equipped with spectacular gadgets known from films, if only about the most famous James in the history of cinema. Today, knowledge of our individual behaviour, habits and tastes is shared by ourselves, and appropriately prepared IT systems collect and process it in such a sophisticated way that one leading shopping platform has long boasted that it sends a book to a customer before the customer knows it has been published.
How is this possible?
Every step of the way we surf the web, we leave behind 'micro-traces', i.e. information about what interests us or what has caught our attention. Also, what we 'like' or where we are does not go unnoticed. The abundance of this information is so great that, when put together, it creates something like the DNA of our soul. And certainly our behaviour and... preferences. In this kind of individual data set there is a lot of knowledge about who we are and our life experiences. This knowledge makes it possible to predict, bordering on certainty, our future behaviour; for example, how we will react to the news of the release of a book by our favourite author. We will buy it with certainty from that seller who promises to deliver it to us the next day or the same day it comes out. Simply put, if the system classifies us as an obsessive fan of Mr or Mrs X's literary work, their new book will be sent immediately upon release to the buffer store closest to us. If there are more lovers of this author in the area the matter is a foregone conclusion. That's why it's so important not only to have personalised advertising, but also to know who we are.
Does this mean that we are constantly being followed?
Yes, and it is no secret. Youtubers who do not use specific words at least at the beginning of their uploaded material know this, as the algorithm reacts to certain "controversial" terms and turns off so-called monetisation, for example. It's a bit like in Janusz Zajdel's novel, 'The Paradisiacs. 'Paradisia', where people communicated in a poetic language that was called 'koalang' to convey important but controversial information to each other. To get an idea of the scale of the problem, all we need to do is conduct a simple experiment and talk about fridges at home, so that in a while we see advertisements for fridges on all sorts of sites. This data is used for advertising purposes, but it can also be used for other purposes that we do not know much about. We accept this by using all sorts of services, services and platforms. It is not without reason that someone once said that if something is free, the product is you. In any case, the collection and processing of data about us is a huge business, which may consequently, through the integration of data, lead to our personality having no secrets from algorithms. To realise the scale of the phenomenon, all you have to do when you go to a website is to read the message about so-called cookies in more depth. It tells you who and what data is sent to whom and for what purpose. We can refuse to have data about our behaviour passed on to us, but most people agree to it anyway.
But after all, when I watch a film on YouTube, I don't have to like it at all. I can turn it on and not watch it at all, go to the kitchen and make tea in the meantime. And the whole plan of discovering my tastes falls through.
Not quite, however. Many films have adverts inserted from time to time, which can be rewound a few seconds after they start. If we do not do this, it means that we are not watching the video. Not clicking to pause the ad tells the service that we are not focusing our attention on the video and that the subject matter is indifferent to us. This is akin to the button that train drivers who steer a locomotive have. If they do not press it within the allotted time, it means that the train is running without human supervision, and then the procedure for automatically stopping it is triggered. It is similar here, as it is difficult to imagine a situation where we find the content of an advertisement more engaging than the film itself. Of course, we do not know what analytical methods and research objectives lie behind this kind of possibility, but the worst of the potential eventualities must be assumed. If this information is not processed right now, it could serve as 'karma' for future algorithms.
But we were supposed to be talking about predicting the future
Yes, but we have only seemingly strayed from the essential topic. If a given information system has even an imperfect profile of our tastes and needs, it can predict our future, not only shopping, behaviour with a high probability. Because we are all the Mammoth Engineers from the film 'Cruise': we like the songs we know... All the mercantile-transformed behavioural psychology comes into play here. Even our banal online behaviour and the content we view in its quantity and repetition betray who we are and how we think. All this is still imperfect, but let's translate this kind of knowledge to the level of a few hundred million, or perhaps a few billion, repeated behaviours and choices. It then becomes clear why, with appropriately moderated content provided by social networks, it is possible to influence, for example, the US presidential election. And all this is happening in businesses that are realistically beyond any control. Let me remind you that a platform closed down the profile of a sitting US president a few years ago during the election campaign. And we already have a crisis of democracy on the horizon, but it is also not so much predicting the future as creating it, although if we take a good look at the problem, this is somewhat the case with prediction.
A new sense of dread
Of course, we can take offence at reality like small children who, by covering their eyes, think they are thus becoming invisible. The impact of automation and digitalisation on our lives is a multifaceted and in many ways unexplored problem, because the dynamics of these processes are very high. Simply put, as individuals and communities, we are not adapted to such a pace of change, which usually lasts for generations. Suffice it to point out the impact of various types of social networks on children's mental health or cognitive abilities. It is worth noting the scourge of loneliness that is ravaging Western countries, as the requirements for a potential partner are raised to an entirely unrealistic level by the information bubbles in which young people are stuck. And these are just small examples. The digital revolution has simply hit civilisation's soft underbelly and we are vulnerable. This vulnerability has another important aspect, namely that digitalisation is often perceived solely as an inevitable process of progress, towards which it is not even appropriate to have doubts. There is an excellent book on this subject by Richard Barbrook, 'Imaginary Futures. From Thinking Machine to Global Village". The author described in some detail a phenomenon, namely how societies have been 'fooled' for many decades into digital modernisation, which is about to solve all of humanity's problems. Digitalisation is progressing and the problems are not going away. Moreover, they will never disappear, because the place of the serious ones will be replaced by trivial or artificial ones. There is simply no such thing as a problem-free society. It is a utopia.
Digitisation as I see it has little to do with digital technologies.
It has a tremendous amount, as it forms the basis for our research endeavours. Sociology, anthropology, political science, law and social policy all deal with digitisation in this way. As I mentioned earlier, change is happening so fast that a special discipline dedicated to these processes has not yet emerged. The issues we deal with are interdisciplinary, because the scientific and narrow drawers of specialisation do not match the specificity of the problems analysed. It is simply that the "fragmentation" of scientific and practical knowledge concerning these phenomena requires a new "arrangement". Also in scientific and institutional terms.
From what I hear, we are dealing with a crucial issue for our destiny that is being treated somewhat lightly.
It is indeed possible to risk such a statement, but it is a global problem that is primarily of a conscious, mental nature. It is mainly about decision-makers who, through their carelessness or ignorance, often become unwitting allies of negative developments at various levels. For mass digitalisation, apart from its obvious conveniences, brings with it a number of potential and real risks for which, as a social fabric, we are unprepared, and our concern is not to inhibit digitalisation processes, but to reduce the potential shock when they occur. To adapt them to human measure, not the other way around, because digitisation as it is currently practised sometimes resembles a "Procrustean bed" in civilisational terms. This needs to be changed.
So what is the PTC doing to change this?
I often use the metaphor that PTC is building 'breakwaters' to mitigate the potentially negative effects of Toffler's 'third wave'. In order for this to be effective, it is paradoxically necessary to do the same thing that technology corporations are doing with the help of algorithms: to identify the future or, more precisely, to identify its possible variants. We do not, of course, have a huge knowledge base of people, but we do use other predictive techniques that have been used for a long time, for example in various armies around the world. I am referring here to scenario planning. We have proceeded on the assumption that we can develop alternative futures based on weak, not yet fully defined signals called uncertainties. Here, we need to gather a sufficiently large set of such factors, which is then subjected to a specialised aggregation developed by PTC. This will provide us with the input to build coherent and plausible visions of the future situation in order to propose in advance mechanisms to overcome and mitigate potential problems. We started this process a few years ago with business as that sphere of human activity which, if it wants to survive, must respond to changes in the environment. We observed an increasing reduction in the competitiveness of small businesses as a result of automation and digitalisation. We therefore decided to build both scenarios describing the business outlook for small companies so that they can make better decisions and to create a methodology for changing the business model to one based on the existing potential in the company, which will not require a great deal of expenditure to implement. This was a very ad hoc measure whose potential is still not fully realised.
What about other areas?
This is what the Polish Digital Resilience Agenda 2040 project aims to do. We want to use predictive techniques in a systemic way to develop a whole set of scenarios for key industries and individual types of institutions, so that their managers can prepare for potential changes and challenges. The project is expected to culminate in the preparation of a set of practical solutions that will enhance resilience in the form of various types of recommendations. These will be the basis for changing, adjusting or often building from scratch viable strategies for a given institution.
How does it work?
Apparently, just before lightning strikes, the ground sends a kind of invitation towards it. A fraction of a second before the discharge, small strands of plasma physically break away from the ground to form a natural lightning rod, or perhaps more like an invitation to the lightning. The resultant plasma channel clears the fastest path for the flow of energy, like a trapper traversing an unknown forest and marking a trail for other wanderers. This happens fractions of seconds before the discharge itself, but the presence of rain clouds and changes in pressure foreshadow the storm earlier. In order to build scenarios of the future, it is necessary to collect as many small and seemingly insignificant indicators as possible. Imagine that the world as we know it hardly exists anymore, because it only exists in the minds of our generation. Children who are just growing up already think differently, and we don't even realise it. I once watched a lecture by Sir Ken Robinson, who asked an audience of less than twenty-five years old to stand up. Quite a large group of young people rose from their chairs. He then asked those with watches on their hands to raise their hands. It turned out that only a few people owned timepieces, and this was a time before the advent of smartwatches. What is the conclusion from here? Young people do not need or wear mechanical watches. Perhaps only as jewellery or as a clothing accessory. To find out what is going to happen to the watch market, we need to gather a lot of this kind of information, sometimes trivial, because the future of the industry is hidden in them. They are the carriers of knowledge about the future - the plasma streams ahead of the lightning. If we give such information the right context in the form of a potential larger-scale phenomenon, we obtain different variants of the likely course of future events. This is painstaking and labour-intensive work, but essential to do. It is not the proverbial 'fortune-telling', but a list of potential, probable situations for which it is worth preparing. And this is what the whole process serves. This type of calculation is not only made by armies or corporations, it is also made by us, many times in our daily lives preparing for various eventualities. Predictive research simply tames uncertainty by answering the question "what if?". They are themselves a mechanism for state structures to acquire resilience to threats that are not always so obvious. In the process under discussion, we try to consider what might happen to different areas of our socio-economic life when the scale of automation and digitalisation increases radically. How to prepare for these changes while there is still time. We are in the midst of unprecedented changes to the world as we have known it so far. These are multifaceted and require the creation of new analytical tools. I believe that next spring we will be able to share some of the results of our research and start a broad process of debate on them.
What then?
I hope that, as an organisation conducting applied research, we will move into the implementation phase of the proposed solutions and the construction of new 'breakwaters'.
Thank you very much for the interview
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