The Unknowable Future
#predictions #prophecy
In 1894, physicist Albert Michelson made a confident prophecy: "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote."
Within years, his prediction was shattered by quantum mechanics, relativity, and entire fields he couldn't have conceived. Following Karl Popper, philosopher David Deutsch distinguishes between ==prediction—conclusions drawn from good explanations—and prophecy, which claims to know what cannot yet be known.== "No good explanation," Deutsch writes, "can predict the outcome, or the probability of an outcome, of a phenomenon whose course is going to be significantly affected by the creation of new knowledge."
People in 1900 didn't consider nuclear power or the internet unlikely—they didn't conceive of them at all.
The future will be shaped by knowledge we don't yet have, problems we haven't encountered, and solutions we can't imagine. Trying to know the unknowable, Deutsch argues, "leads inexorably to error and self-deception. Among other things, it creates a bias towards pessimism." The vital task is coming to terms with this fundamental limitation.