One of our primary survival traits is the ability to anticipate the future to avoid threats and reap higher yields. We seek a vantage point to view the road ahead, or even better a road map to what’s ahead.
Is there a road map to what’s ahead? An enormous amount of research and projections are issued daily, proposing answers to the question: what happens next?
In my view, a good starting point is to recall that there are critical differences between open systems and closed systems. A clock is a closed system, and so its functions are predictable. An ecosystem is an open system, and so predictions are contingent on an unknowably large number of potential changes in inputs, processes and feedback: new invasive species may arrive and displace native species, predators might be decimated by a new disease, etc.
But even open systems operate according to principles we can discern, and so they are not entirely unpredictable or chaotic. For example, when a keystone species is wiped out, the entire ecosystem collapses.
The immense powers of modern technology, engineering, cheap energy and mass media have created an illusory aura of human agency, that we can control our future in the same way we control machinery. This aura has also created a sense that human leaders or elites control our world with god-like powers of precision. This too is an illusion, as the contingencies, forces, feedbacks and second-order effects of open systems are beyond the control of any human leadership.
Consider the collapse of marriage and birthrates globally; leaders recognize the threat this poses and have tried to reverse the tide, with little effect. Some propose that these dynamics are the result of secret agendas to reduce the human populace, but the causal links required by this theory are not persuasive:…
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