In this thought-provoking panel discussion, esteemed experts in science and futurism explore the significance of predicting the future and why it's important to look ahead. Led by Nobel laureates and distinguished scholars, they delve into the evolving nature of scientific forecasts and the need for societies to grapple with uncertainties inherent in these predictions. The discussion provides insights into how scientific predictions, when applied judiciously, can guide humanity in making informed decisions that shape the future positively.

The dialogue highlights the necessity of bridging the gap between science and societal action, urging leaders and citizens alike to adopt a risk management mindset that acknowledges probabilities instead of seeking absolute certainty. The panelists advocate for acknowledging the complexities that science presents and encourage society to elect policymakers who can understand and manage these risks effectively, using predictions to inform decision-relevant actions.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. divination [ˌdɪvɪˈneɪʃən] - (noun) - The practice of seeking knowledge of the future or unknown by supernatural means. - Synonyms: (fortune-telling, soothsaying, prophecy)

This is why you have divination practices.

2. probabilities [ˌprɒbəˈbɪlɪtiz] - (noun) - The extent to which something is probable; the likelihood of something happening or being the case. - Synonyms: (likelihood, chance, odds)

Scientists know that predictions are based on probabilities.

3. risk management [rɪsk ˈmænɪdʒmənt] - (noun) - The forecasting and evaluation of financial risks together with the identification of procedures to avoid or minimize their impact. - Synonyms: (risk control, risk assessment, safety management)

It's prudent risk management.

4. anomaly [əˈnɒməli] - (noun) - Something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected. - Synonyms: (abnormality, irregularity, deviation)

Scientists are excited if there's an anomaly because something does not conform to what you expect.

5. utopian [juːˈtoʊpiən] - (adjective) - Modeled on or aiming for a state in which everything is perfect; idealistic. - Synonyms: (idealistic, visionary, fanciful)

Between a utopian vision and a dystopian vision.

6. dystopian [dɪsˈtoʊpiən] - (adjective) - Relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice. - Synonyms: (nightmarish, bleak, apocalyptic)

Between a utopian vision and a dystopian vision.

7. techno-optimism [ˌteknoʊ-ˈɒptɪmɪzəm] - (noun) - The belief that technology will continue to advance indefinitely and solve many of humanity's problems. - Synonyms: (techno-enthusiasm, technological optimism, future optimism)

The utopian vision very often is fed by kind of techno hype or techno optimism.

8. resilient [rɪˈzɪliənt] - (adjective) - Able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions. - Synonyms: (strong, tough, hardy)

We have to have a resilient system in order to move forward.

9. miscommunication [ˌmɪskəˌmjunɪˈkeɪʃən] - (noun) - Failure to communicate adequately. - Synonyms: (misunderstanding, confusion, error)

Some of the fault for this miscommunication that you're alluding to does come from scientists.

10. horizon [həˈraɪzən] - (noun) - The line at which the earth's surface and the sky appear to meet; metaphorically, the limit of a person's knowledge, experience, or interest. - Synonyms: (boundary, limit, frontier)

But humanity discovered the future is an open horizon.

Why look forward? The future of life - Nobel Week Dialogue 2022

Thank you all for giving us that wonderfully stimulating start to the dialogue. So now we come into a new section where we look at the question of the future and looking forward. It's fun to speculate about the future, but what's the point and how best should we do it? We thought it would be interesting to bring together some people to talk about that and answer the question, why look forward? And we have four people very well qualified to do that in the next panel. Frances Arnold is 2018 Nobel laureate in chemistry, and she's currently serving as co chair of President Biden's council of advisors on science and technology. Stephen Chu, in 1997, laureate in physics, was served as energy secretary in President Obama's administration. And Anders Sandberg, who is a senior fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, comes from an institute which concerns itself uniquely with questions that influence humanity and its prospects. Bringing them together in discussion is Helga Novotny, professor emerita at Etiha in Zurich. And Helga is a social scientist looking at science and technology, and she is very concerned with the questions of prediction, as exemplified, for instance, by her 2015 book, beautifully entitled the cunning of uncertainty.

So, thank you. Over to you. So, to respond to the challenge that Adam posed to us, why prediction? I think the answer has been given by humanity from its very beginning, because all of our ancestors wanted to know, what does the future hold for them? This is why you have divination practices. In every culture we know of, people looked at the bones of sheep that they hold over fires to interpret from the cracks what the future held for them. Now, we no longer do divinations. We have science. We have scientific predictions as we heard. And with modern science, we found a way of testing the predictions we made and the outcome of experiments. And since then, we have scientific predictions that have expanded way beyond the scientific experiment into all kinds of societal issues that preoccupy us. But there's one crucial difference. Scientists know that predictions are based on probabilities, while divination practices. You got an answer, it was yes or no, you believed it, and that was it.

And so the first question we want to discuss here, and I will turn to Stephen to give us the first spark for an answer, is we are using and we are in need, in desperate need of scientific predictions to deal with the crucial issues we face today. It's climate change, pandemic. It's a lot of other issues, but we also experience. There is this gap between what we know, what science tells us, and how our leaders, but also all of us, act in daily life. Now, Stephen, you have been, in your past experience, at the forefront of grappling with this gap. What is your answer to this? How can we bridge this gap? How can we use scientific predictions to lead us to action? So this is a very, very important question. But we're in a very different stage in the history of humanity. Science has never gotten out so far in front and said, things we're doing today, the things we've done in the past couple hundred years, will not only affect us in the immediate future, or children or grandchildren, but going forward hundreds of years. So science has never said that we're going to affect things hundreds of years from today.

And it's not good news. It's not all good news. And so there's a natural human reaction. That might be true, but it may. You're not really sure, just like a doctor tells you you're smoking, this is not good for your health. Do you say to your doctor, well, I've heard about that, but I'm not really believing it. Can you guarantee if I continue to smoke, I will get heart disease or lung cancer? If not, I'll continue smoking because I like smoking. Now, that's a personal choice, but science is telling us no, it's the collective humanity that's going to be doing something. And can science predict exactly what's going to happen? No big uncertainties, but it's risk management. You may smoke for the rest of your life and never get heart disease or lung cancer, but then now you're playing with all of humanity. And do you have to be sure, or do you say, well, there are probabilities, as you say, and there are huge uncertainties, but it's prudent risk management.

As prudent, responsible people for the great, great, great grandchildren of the future, what should we do? So society has never faced this before. Let me ask my other two panelists here. So if we say scientific predictions, they should help us to cope better with uncertainty. What are the ways how we can better cope? Because in my experience, I find that scientists cope well with uncertainty. But politicians and most of us in society, we want certainty. We want answers, yes or no? A politician asks a scientist, is this substance cancerous? Yes or no? But the only answer scientists can give honestly is, under certain conditions, yes. Under certain conditions, no. So how do we manage this risk? How do we manage uncertainty, which is much more than risk?

One of the fundamental differences between divination practices and science, and also good forms of future studies, is that you can be wrong about the later, the oracle is telling a good story, and we are feeling that this is a good story. And we don't actually care too much about whether it turns out to be right or wrong. But when we want to make predictions, they can be better or worse and they can be more or less uncertain. But again, knowing things about the future, even if it's uncertain, is not important. It's doing something about it. You want to have predictions that are decision relevant. And this is tricky because most of the time we tend to talk about it as if it was getting a crystal ball and getting a vision of the future. But what you actually want is to have that vision drive the right kind of actions, which might sometimes be wrong. And we need to accept that. This knowledge about uncertainty and decision relevance is what we need to get decision makers to understand. And I think in order to get them to understand it, we probably need to get the public to understand it, because we're living in a world where risk management thinking is really essential and it needs to be part of many of our calculations as a society. And that means that we probably need to elect politicians who are good at it. As the pandemic has demonstrated, the wrong kind of risk management produced tremendously bad effects. And we need to hold people accountable. And if they don't know how to do that, well, well, then we need to tell them that, okay, better get an education about this or get out of the way for somebody who can do better, more careful in the riskier management. Francis Anders mentioned said it's tricky, and I think we agree. What is your take on it?

Well, I think that we underestimate people's ability to understand uncertainty because we all understand that with our investments, we have to have a portfolio approach. Right. Because you cannot predict the details of the future, and that we have to hedge our bets in ways that spread across the scientific enterprise and across society. And that means we do have to work together to do that and let a thousand flowers bloom, but then promote the growth of the ones that will really solve the problems. But would you say the expectations that society has from science are somewhat, you know, misled in the sense that we have too high expectations? Science holds all the answers, which clearly, as we heard also from the previous panel, as we know, is not the case. Scientists are excited if there's an anomaly because something does not conform to what you expect. It's exciting because you can find out more that you did not know. So what is it about the expectations that we as scientists have to convey better to society? What we can tell them with what kind of probability or degrees of certainty? Whatever. Are we doing something wrong? Could we do it better? I don't know.

I think conveying uncertainty is a tricky thing, because we are built to be avoiding uncertainty. Our brains are acting in a world of uncertainty. We're getting noisy sensory information. We need to act. But evolution has given us this drive to reduce uncertainty. And the problem is, of course, that with our enormous frontal lobes, we can imagine things. We can come up with clever ways of managing our environment. But it has also led to us to deny uncertainty. The best way of paralyzing a decision maker is to say, this is an uncertain decision. Yet entrepreneurs every day are making decisions under uncertainty. We make decisions under uncertainty every day when we get out of bed and figure out how to get to our job. And the thing is, we need to become more aware on how to teach this, and maybe even express it as managing uncertainty. Normally, we think of it as normal education, but normal education pretends to give you certain answers and tell you, this is the way the world is, or if it's a really good one, this is how you create a better world. And I think that might be the way forward, because when we think about our own actions, then we might be recognizing that I need to try different things. I need to look around and see, among the thousands of flowers, which ones are actually working. Which ideas am I going to copy? I think we need to turn it into a practice.

Well, I think some of the fault for this miscommunication that you're alluding to does come from scientists who make pronouncements. We've seen that all through the pandemic. And then we get more information and we change our minds and we make other pronouncements without conveying the degree of uncertainty. And also that it's fine to change one's mind. So we have to do, clearly a far better job in the way that we convey information to nonscientists. Stephen, I would change a little bit and bring up something. We also deal with predictions and things like that. And then we think, well, what happened in the past? So, very famous expression, those who don't know the past are condemned to repeat it. And so I'm going to link that with the need of humans to have certainty, to go to a politician or a fortune teller and say, this is what's going to happen.

So I reminded a favorite cartoon of mine. There's a soothsayer with a crystal ball, and there's an anxious woman looking, and then the soothsayer says you will make the same mistakes you've made in the past, not just once, but over and over and over again. And we're good at that because we forgot about the past. And also, though, the future becomes more uncertainty, because the problems that we're dealing with are such high complexity that our ability to predict. Right, what do they say? If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up somewhere else, right? And we don't know where we're going because the problems are so complex, we don't know how to predict them, even a year out, much less ten years out. And we use models that themselves bring in even more uncertainty than our experience. But on the other hand, there is also a probability, for example, climate change. If you don't change direction, you may end up where you're heading.

And so there's both of these things. But that's the beauty talking about uncertainty. The future is uncertainty, uncertain. We have to deal with uncertain. But let me move on in our discussion here to the way how very often the public now is being bombarded with all kinds of speculation what the future future will bring, some of it based on certain models, there are other models and so on, and we know the complexity of it all. But very often we end up with a kind of, I call it a trap between a utopian vision and a dystopian vision, and nothing in between. And the utopian vision very often is fed by kind of techno hype or techno optimism. You know, we invent the next technological fix, all our problems would be solved. I simplify. And the other one is the apocalyptic vision. You know, the world is falling apart tomorrow, if not yesterday, already, and that's it.

And as you have been, you know, somewhat near in what you do to both the utopian and the dystopian vision, which is widespread, how do you deal with it? Yes, in my normal work, I literally deal with end of the world, at least scenarios for how the world might end or humanity end up in a state so bad that we wish the world had ended. But I'm also writing this enormous thick book about if we survive and get Iraq together, how good could it become? And the answer is literally astronomical. By most measures of goodness, we have seen nothing yet. We're really at the start of history. So if we don't flap it right now, the future looks very bright, except that it can go really terribly wrong. And that is the interesting thing, because how does this play out? Well, in the 1950s, Fred Pollak, a futurist in the Netherlands wrote a very influential book that nobody remembers because it became so influential that we all think it's common sense, but we use images of a future to think about it. We have a picture of what an ecological devastated world is. We have an image of what the utopia, social or environmental future. Or like, all cultures have these images, and they use them to think about it.

It's almost like the trading cards you bring up. When I talk about risks from artificial intelligence in the heads of the audience, immediately the terminator shows up, or more recently, the lady robot from ex machina. And this is sometimes great because you can easily describe things by us invoking a particular picture. It's also kind of dangerous because sometimes the pictures are not what we're talking about. And I think this issue is that we have only a finite set of pictures. There's only so many really good or important movies or pictures and stories in any culture. So we don't have that many choices. So when people start talking about the future, they grab the standard utopia or the standard dystopia. But if we look at how the world actually is, it's, of course, this absurd mixture. We're living in a world that is simultaneous and massively utopian and dystopian at the same time. And it mixes, it's not like oil and water.

It actually emulsifies in this complex world we're living in. And this is a real challenge, of course, if we want to think well about the future, because getting a mixed future, that is much more uncertainty. And I think that gets back to the original part of this discussion. We reduce uncertainty by assuming everything is bad or everything is good, but that is not very likely to lead. It's a very dangerous reduction, and we don't want to end up up there. You know, the future. Talking about the future, to me, seems like a big projection screen. And depending on the mood that people are in, we have a cultural repertoire. You call it the images or pictures. I would say we have a cultural repertoire, and then we project it. But what we project very much depends on the state in which we find ourselves.

And there are more optimistic and more pessimistic phases we go through. And right now, it seems we are in a pessimistic downturn. You know, we see the economy, we are in inflation, recession is coming. We have geopolitical tensions, which are really frightening and so on. So how can. Can we manage this? Or, you know, do we have to wait to be able to come out of this again? Well, I come from Los Angeles. The film industry always wants to talk to scientists, storytellers, and it's very easy to tell a story of everything that goes wrong, of experiments. Scientists run amok, experiments gone wrong, too much power, too little wisdom. But it's so much harder to tell a story of tragedy averted. But that's the scientists possibility, right? That's the story that we have to learn how to tell by doing, by creating the future.

And I. All scientists are optimists, except for maybe you, because how else would you go into the laboratory and work away trying to discover something that you're not even sure is there? We have to be optimist. But we can create the future, right? You might not have anticipated the Internet, but the creators did. And I might not have anticipated vaccines in a few months, but the creators of those things did see that future and then worked together to make that future happen. So I like the idea that we can write the future as a team. Yeah. Which brings me to the last question I want to pose to you. What does it take to change our idea of the future? The view of the future? And as I just said, we seem to be in this very pessimistic mood. Also, you mentioned the fifties. When you go back just 20 years ago and you ask people, what are your ideas about the future? It was very optimistic. And people had ideas about the future. If you ask them now, what you get, on average, people are not so much interested in exciting things that might happen in the future because we have too many problems in the present. So this sort of dims your view of what the future might hold. And so this is somehow, as Francis just said, what can we do to open up the future again?

And I just want to remind everyone in the audience, it's only a couple of hundred years ago that for the first time, humanity understood that the future was not set in stone. It was not the gods or God or fate that determined what the future would be. But humanity discovered the future is an open horizon. And how can we convey this and change it for the better? Stephen so again, I want to go back to history. The reason the mood is different today is because we look at ourselves and we look at our children and we feel, my children's life is not going to be better than mine, it might be worse. And so it's a very different feeling from 30, 40, 50 years ago. And when this happens, some people will come in and say, you're right, you're being left behind. And I'll tell you who to blame, and I'll tell you what's wrong. You have to make internal enemies within your country. In the United States, it would be immigrants and things like that. You have to make external enemies. In the United States, it would be China. And then you look and think, well, has this happened in the past?

And the answer is yes, over and over and over again in the twenties, right? Start with Germany. Germany was collapsing. Someone comes along and says, I'll tell you who to blame. Believe me, your lives are going to get better. So Italy says the same, and it goes on, and they say, fine. And then they say, well, maybe I don't agree with everything, but in the end, what's going to make my life better? And so this. But that's just the recent past. You just go further and further back, and it happens over and over and over again. And so what's happening now? And then scientists are saying, we are bimodal, we are manic depressive. We do think that science will provide even better solutions. The answers to de risk climate change, that's one thing.

And the other thing is that policymakers and the general public don't think it's as important an issue. And so, of course you're gonna be manic depressive. I'm not sure that your children would agree, you know, that going back in history holds the solution. But, Francis, I would give the last word to you, because I know you have been thinking about what does it take to create the framework, to create the conditions for people who have good ideas to let them thrive. So I don't think that we have the right, or there's no way that we should be paralyzed by the future. Fear is not going to move anything forward, and there's no reason to be fearful. I mean, there's plenty of reason to be fearful, but there's no good future in that. And I believe that we need to create the structures that enable this powerful, creative minds that humans have been gifted with and misuse all too often to create the future. Ecologist Sandra Diaz made a wonderful analogy for ecosystems and biodiversity, and she called it a fabric, a tapestry, where there's both a weft and a warp.

And the weft is the beautiful intricacies of our, say, our science systems and our ideas and our institutions, very diverse, many contributions there. But without the weft to make it strong, we don't have a resilient system. And we have to have a resilient system in order to move forward in a constantly changing and adapting world. So what is that weft? It's a very small number of fundamental principles that guide science, openness, collaborations, ethics, communication to the public, and equality and diversity that we have to have in order to move forward. And if we build those institutions properly, then all the good ideas can come up and innovation can be supported. It's a wonderful way to end. Let's take this beautiful metaphor of the warp and the web, and let's take it with us and try to implement it in whatever way we can. Thank you very, very much.

Science, Technology, Innovation, Future Predictions, Risk Management, Panel Discussion, Nobel Prize