Our mass addiction to predicting future

Ranjan Yumnam *

We are born with an addiction. The moment we gasped for air right after birth in the labour room, we let out a loud cry. That instinct is intimately wired into our embryonic brain. We need to anticipate, make gestures, demand, and fulfil our wants. The mother or the nurse holds the newborn in a warm embrace and soothes its nerves.

In that tiny little premature mind, the software for anticipation comes built to predict the response and get attention. This craving to predict and respond to each other’s needs only grows over time. In childhood, the main charter of demand includes milk, hugs and sleep.

The baby screams every time it needs something, expecting to be delivered. Then the demand gets longer when we become adults and develop more brain power. We try to predict many scenarios and protect ourselves from harm, loss and emotional hurt.

The predilection to see the future is an addiction. It is more potent than substance abuse like cocaine addiction or alcoholism. Dependence on drugs can be treated with proper counselling and pharmacological help, but the obsession to peer into the future is incurable. As we try to know more of the future with certainty, it eludes us by its actual unfolding.

The odds are simply too many to bother and counter in the business of prediction. Randomness and chances, not an underlying narrative, drive human existence. One minor event can alter the entire course of an event. The butterfly effect is well known. A sneeze in Kang-pokpi can reshape the weather in Imphal.

Of course, forecasting that the sun will rise tomorrow doesn't count as a pre- diction. We tend to glimpse into the future when it is pregnant with many possibilities, a paradox that lies at the heart of the thrill in punditry in much of the social discourse in media and tea shops. The more complex it is, the more ambi- tious we are to straighten it into a linear narrative. It’s a wishful thinking indeed.

Uncertainty of future

Socrates said that he knew nothing. That's the right approach in most of the cases. Economists also say that we make decisions based on Bounded Rationality without possessing complete facts and data, which are sometimes hidden. To obtain all the relevant facts and minutia and analyse them before making thousands of daily decisions is simply impossible.

So, we make do with limited information and arrive at sweeping conclusions that make sense within the framework of our narrow understanding. These shortcuts benefit us by giving us a temporary sense of security and some gears to fiddle with to prepare for our right reaction if it happens.

And the downside is that our anticipation will never realise itself most of the time, and we end up investing precious effort, time and cognitive load to defend ourselves against imaginary circumstances that never see the light of day.

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists, said Mar-garet Atwood, the novelist. The odds climb so high. It’s not even a Russian Roulette with one live round in six chambers in a revolver gun. Our reality is so complicated and layered up with many psychological, cognitive, social, and political variables–you name it–that anything could happen.

A human error here and there, the flood that washed away your travel plans, the lover who ran away with another man, the house that never got constructed due to Covid, the message that went to a wrong number, the boss who died of a stroke–the possibilities of coincidences, miscommuni-cation and the latent absur- dities of life–will somehow muddy the water of future.

As life has become more interconnected due to globalization and the McDonal-dization of our food, fashion, and culture, the cards that we are dealt with have multiplied manifold and extended over time zones, regions, and space. Technology has also accelerated the contours and churning of the world's events and their cascading effects upon one another.

Ray Kurzweil, the famous futurist known for transhu-manism, posits the Law of Accelerating Returns, which says that the exponential growth of technology will give rise to eccentric future developments.

Past is the best future

Therefore, the best prediction is about the past. We are efficient machine-learning beings with the uncanny capacity to weave tales into events that happened. We accord absolute causes and effects, that X happened due to Y because G failed to do W because of N reasons. This, in fact, is the simplest ABC of prediction. Our best prediction is with history, rewinding episodes, and fitting them in a linear tube with the benefit of hindsight.

We knew it all along, didn’t we ? We make sense of history with our post hoc theories, but we never learn from them. Nassim Taleb calls this phenomenon the denigration of history, which is our tendency to reject the possibility of history repeating itself to us.

History often involves men fighting the regular patterns of nature and living in denial of this fact. By that line of thinking, World War III could be in the offing than we care to acknowledge.

Our discussion on the future is relevant in the context of our situation in Manipur. Very few would dare to foretell the future possibilities of how this crisis will end. It is, therefore, appropriate to touch upon the concept of the ‘Fog of War’—the uncertainty experienced by fighters in the midst of warfare.

The fog of war is often felt by combat groups, which become increasingly perplexed by the uncertainty of their own capability, the adversary’s capability, and the adversary's intent during an en- gagement, operation, or campaign. Mental attempts by combatants to hazard a war's outcome further complicate the direction and intensity of the war, trapping war planners in a vicious circle and feedback loop. This is Uncertainty 101 in war.

If we refer to the philosophical debates, futurism becomes even more maddening. In philosophy, the debate of free will and determinism is heated, at least in books. Proponents of determinism contend that everything we do or every event that ever occurred is a result of definite causes complying with the law of physics. That I am writing this article, and you are reading this, is already caused.

My motivations might have been sown during childhood when I was pondering life’s purpose and reading random literature on this topic by chance. In your case, it may be because you had an excellent breakfast in the morning and were trying to read a quickie in your light mood.

Whatever it is, it is your destiny playing out every second. Freewill rejects this fatalism and sees human beings as active agents who can mould their present and future, in which case there should be no place for God.

All things considered, we are not going to quit our addiction to future-gazing so soon. The future is inconceivable, and so is the number of catches when going out fishing. It is both a boon and a curse. We are the only species with the capacity to contemplate, catastrophise and dream about the future. This ability led to science, innova- tions and civilisation.

The curse part is evident when we are too obsessed about getting the prediction right, a doomed prospect. My bet is to play with the toggle switch between reality and fantasy and let reason ride the elephant of emotions most of the time. Expect the unexpected, and don’t be surprised by non-events.