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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Déjà View| Everything is doomed
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Déjà View| Everything is doomed

Why is the future so hard to predict? To a large extent, perhaps because our predictions are heavily biased by our current lives

One of Back To The Future 2’s missed predictions appears to be the clothing of 2015. Premium
One of Back To The Future 2’s missed predictions appears to be the clothing of 2015.

This week I’d like to start our little tête-à-tête with a bombshell of a revelation: I’ve never actually watched a single Back To The Future film. (I’ve also not seen E.T., Jaws, three out of the six Star Wars films, the original Terminator or that old coming-of-age favourite: Blue Lagoon.)

Shocked? I understand. But I grew up in Abu Dhabi in a traditional Emirati Malayali family. We didn’t see English films. We didn’t subscribe to a video library that had many English films. All we saw were Malayalam and Hindi films, wretched compilations of film songs, wretched tapes of playback singers standing on a stage and singing compilations of film songs, “mimics parades", and anything with Kamal Haasan in it.

But I’ve been making up for a part of this shortcoming by reading a lot of articles about Back To The Future (BTF) this week. That is because this Wednesday, 21 October 2015, was “Back to the Future" Day.

This has all to do with the second BTF film, in which the protagonist has to travel into the future, to Wednesday, to save his children.

Almost everything I have read this week deals with how accurately, or not, the film released in 1989, envisioned the future in 2015.

And to me the consensus appears to be: not very. In fact, most writers seem restrained in their criticism of the film’s predictions. Nobody wants to be censorious about such a childhood classic especially on such a special day.

So then, my question is this: Why are we so bad at predicting the future? Especially in films but also in general?

This is a digression from this column’s usual purview. But play along, please.

Let us take the case of clothing. What will human dress look like in the future? One of BTF2’s missed predictions appears to be the clothing of 2015. No one, for instance, as yet wears two neckties at the same time if they want to be taken seriously.

So how long does it really take for dress codes to change? Let us use the official portraits of the US presidents to figure this out. Click through the slideshow on the White House website and you’ll realize that American presidents have dressed in more or less the exact same fashion since Theodore Roosevelt in 1903. Some details have changed. For instance waistcoats are no longer fashionable and the cuts are different. But otherwise, formalwear in the US has remained unchanged for over a century. And there is little sign that this is going to change any time soon.

In fact, in more recent times, we’ve all but given up on the idea that human beings will dress very differently in the years to come. Look at the visions of the new Star Trek films or Battlestar Galactica. No sign of golden or silver jumpsuits.

BTF2 also had a somewhat odd vision of future consumer technology. So, while drones with video cameras are shown and so are video-calling screens, the future is still bristling with fax machines. And while there is a fleeting glimpse of a tablet computer, there is no sign of a smartphone anywhere in the film. Or the Internet. Both making up, perhaps, the greatest real technological improvements in our lives over the past 30 years.

I could go on and on. But I won’t. Other people who have actually seen the film have compiled great lists.

So why is the future so hard to predict in films or elsewhere? To a large extent, this is perhaps because our predictions are heavily biased by our current lives. We assume the future will, in a sense, have the same order of priorities and vector of change as our present. But things are rarely that... “mechanical".

Just glance at the past 30 years or so of science fiction films. Each generation makes visions of the future that are based on its own fears and hopes at that point.

So, during the Cold War, we had many films that predicted a world ravaged by nuclear war. Then we saw dystopian visions of a future where the environment has been destroyed and humans fight over resources.

And more recently, we’ve had dystopian ideas of a future in which our enemies are man-made machines or artificial intelligence devices or even clones of ourselves that go rogue on us. Also, zombies and viruses.

(This generational motive is by no means an original concept. But I can’t remember where I read it first. Apologies to original thinker.)

But these are all dystopias. What about the utopias? They exist, but they seem to have peculiar qualities. For instance, many seem to depict a multi-planet, mixed race, sometimes gender-neutral, vaguely socialist system where there is little talk of currency.

By and large, our visions of the future seem to be dystopian. So much so that in 2012, sci-fi author Neal Stephenson set up Project Hieroglyph, an initiative to encourage writers to take a more optimistic view of the future instead of predicting doom and gloom.

Maybe that is why we make bad predictions. Because we are all so pessimistic. Cheer up people.

Every week, Déjà View scours historical research and archives to make sense of current news and affairs.

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Published: 24 Oct 2015, 12:08 AM IST
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