Some futures-thinkers called it early on the pandemic. What’s their take now - short, mid and long-term?

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The future’s not ours to see… But we should pay some attention to those big thinkers and framers who had tried to flag up contagion and pandemic, as a “known unknown” in their future scenarios.

Many didn’t. The graphic to the right, circulating around social media, is someone’s random threat scenario plan… you can see the little red dot of “infectious diseases" somewhere at the top-left, far on the outer rim of possibilities…

Certainly if you consult enough futurists, they’ll tell you they were on it - see this post, which reports simulations of a Covid-like scenario running as late as 2019. We shouldn’t also forget that the World Health Organisation had tried to upgrade international capacities for coping with a potential pandemic, through their Disease X initiative - which was very poorly responded to by the relevant powers.

Here’s two prognosticators who got near to predicting the event: our friend David Wood from London Futurists, interviewed by Sifted. And below that, the veteran radical Mike Davis, whose book The Monster At The Door ten years ago was hitting the klaxon on precisely this danger, and who is here interviewed on YouTube by his publisher Haymarket.

London Futurists’ David Wood: ”The pandemic provides a crash course in the nature of exponential change”

From Sifted:

1) Was a pandemic in the future scenarios you constructed before? Does one actually happening rewrite a futurist’s playbook?

Futurists have often highlighted the risks of pandemics. For example, the Global Catastrophic Risks Conference in Oxford in 2008, which I vividly remember attending, contained a talk Social, Scientific and Medical Lessons from the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918. The 2013 book Divided Nations by Ian Goldin (whose launch event I reviewed at the time) devoted significant space to the international problems posed by pandemics.

And the Millennium Project has included as a top-level issue in every State of the Future report since 1997 phrasing such as the following (from the 1997 edition): “The threat of new and re-emerging diseases and immune micro-organisms is growing…”

However, futurists cannot take any pride in these forecasts. The point of forecasts of major risks is to trigger changes in course in order that the risks are avoided. Clearly, the message has not been heard. Society did not take sufficient steps of preparation.

Accordingly, futurists now need to reconsider how to communicate more effectively. To that extent, the crisis is causing us a re-think.

The key point is that, bad though the Covid-19 crisis is, there are other scenarios for the next few decades in which much worse crises are credibly predicted. Again, our challenge is to find the best way to attract serious attention to these scenarios, before catastrophic tipping points occur.

2) What do you think will be the main changes we will see to business and society as a result of the pandemic (and economic downturn)?

There will be many knock-on economic effects, in which failures in some industry sectors lead on to failures in neighbouring sectors.

Governments will need to step up, not only in the role of “lender of last resort”, but as “supplier of last resort”, potentially taking over the running of airlines as well as railways.

Huge numbers of people who formerly believed that anyone with gusto and talent could obtain a well-paid job, will have the wind knocked out of their sails. They’ll become greater enthusiasts for a universal welfare system, including elements of a universal basic income.

In parallel, it will become much more widely understood that there are bad side-effects of systems that incentivise profits and efficiency over broader aspects of human wellbeing.

It will be similar to how the travails of the Second World War led a majority of the electorate to favour initiatives such as the National Health Service in the UK, which previously had seemed like a utopian fantasy.

Other changes in attitude are possible too. There may be a revulsion against the callous way in which some pro-market enthusiasts implied it didn’t really matter if many older people die from allowing the virus to spread; instead, there may be a reaffirmation in the rights to life for older people as much as for younger people.

There may also be a new interest in taking wise preparations for other potential “existential risks” that could arise in the not-too-distant future. Accordingly, the excellent new book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord is particularly timely.

3) The Covid-19 crisis is pushing us to quickly adopt digital technologies, remote working and e-commerce. But what non-obvious changes might we see?

Companies will feel much greater pressure to accelerate the adoption of automation, to enable production without relying on fragile humans who are reluctant to be in close proximity to each other.

We’ll see faster progress towards drones for delivery, online retail, remote medical consultations. Companies and organisations will realise they have less need for expensive real-estate.

Physical cash will decline in use. Remote education will flourish — the schools and universities that can adapt will survive; the others will perish.

A temperature check at the Debrecen airport, Hungary,

A temperature check at the Debrecen airport, Hungary,

AI may prove its worth in accelerating treatments for Covid-19. Examples to watch include Insilico Medicine and DeepMind. Companies focusing on enabling decentralised networks of AI modules are also cooperating as never before.

For example, see New AI Technology Partnership To Fight COVID-19, which involves SingularityNET, Ocean Protocol and Nth Opinion “joining efforts to utilise the latest technologies to outpace the spread of the virus” and sponsoring a “COVIDathon hackathon to develop and launch open-source code using AI and/or blockchain to combat COVID-19”.

4) How should businesses be thinking about the future when it is still so unclear how we come out of the pandemic?

The pandemic provides a crash course in the nature of exponential change. Small trends can tip over into large trends. Slow change can burst into fast change — and then into even faster change. Businesses need to prioritise deepening their tracking and management of potential exponential trends that could turn their circumstances upside down.

And they need to realise that disruption can come in waves; we should beware of just focusing on the next wave of any disruption (such as a pandemic) when a subsequent wave could be even larger.

However, there are limits to what can be accomplished by developing better powers of foresight. The nature of complex interdependent systems means that planning uncertainty quickly multiplies. For this reason, companies urgently need to improve their agility — their ability to learn quickly and to change course quickly.

Time-honoured methods that tended to deliver large projects reliably, by carefully controlling all variation, need to be supplemented by methods featuring iterative experimentation and smart failures.

Finally, businesses should recognise that they will face a huge social backlash, sooner rather than later, if they are perceived to be exploiting the crisis by price gouging or by forcing their employees to work in dangerous conditions.

The crisis teaches all of us that there are more important things than quarterly profit figures. The companies that fail to learn that lesson will find that they lose their profits as well as their souls.

Mike Davis: The Monster is Now At Our Door. What better world can we build out of it?

Interview proper begins from 13.06

Mike Davis’s 2010 book The Monster At Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu has been rightly quoted, and the historian sought out, in the last few weeks of Coronavirus. Davis’s charge is a powerful one against the vested interests - Big Pharma, weak national and International regulators, rapacious agro-business - whose collective greed and incompetence have left us (and the poor of the world more than the affluent) so vulnerable to this disease. More interventions from Mike Davis worth reading are:

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