Robots, human clones, superbugs? Ignore all forecasts, advises Ziauddin Sardar

The world is awash with predictions. Images of the future are being hurled at us from every direction. We are constantly asked to imagine the wonders of the future, dream about the things tomorrow will bring. Forecasting has become big business.

But predictions and forecasts are not the only way of exploring the future. The future based on forecasts is nothing more than the continuation of the present, with all its inequalities and injustices, but with faster, more sophisticated, more awesome technologies. So, we are told, the future will either be a technological utopia, as favoured by academics, management gurus, corporate types and advertising people, or a nightmare, favoured by science fiction writers or film-makers. What neither version seems to consider is that we can make our own futures, modelling future societies or developing alternative visions.

Business and corporate books, with titles like Megatrends (Warner Books, 1984; reprinted countless times) and Managing for the Future (Butterworth, 1992), available globally at any airport, tell us how we will all be Internetted, tuned in to hundreds of channels, working from home, and generally living in technological bliss in the decades to come. For example, in Rethinking the Future (Nicholas Brealey, 1996), leading management experts inform us that advances in science and technology will enable us to manage uncertainty, generate new strategies for growth and reinvent the basis for competition. In other words, corporations will continue to dominate and they will have new theories and tools to maintain their domination.

The folk at the Open University's "Futures Observatory" tell us that people will routinely have microchips inserted into their brains to store data and communicate directly with computers. Space exploration will put human colonies on the Moon and other planets. In her book Next (HarperCollins, 1998), Marian Salzman, a director of brand futures at the global advertising agency Young & Rubicam, predicts the imminent arrival of sleeping machines for insomniacs, robotic lawn mowers for obsessive gardeners, intelligent kitchens for food nuts and mail-order baby catalogues for childless couples.

According to the five-part "Chronicle of the Future" in the Sunday Times (concluded last weekend) evil will shortly be cured by electronically controlled implants into the "left orbito-frontal cortex"; superbugs will be trained to mine precious metals; and little girls will be able to play with "living Barbies". We shall live on the Moon, colonise Mars and stay for ever young thanks to anti- ageing drugs. Writers such as Michio Kaku and Nicholas Negroponte envisage a future where the net (and not some foolish notion of truth) will set us free and technology will liberate us from our own biology. We are, if we believe these and other technophiles, already on our way to a new digital Jerusalem.

This message is translated into visual metaphors by television programmes such as CNN's Future Watch and the BBC's Tomorrow's World. Advertisements for cars, mobile phones, digital and satellite consumer goods all ask us to reflect on how new technologies will transform not just our social and cultural environments but the very idea of what it is to be human.

We have all seen the advertisement for Vectra from Vauxhall - "designed for the next millennium" - which shows a futuristic landscape, with spherical steel balls floating in space, a sort of post-Concorde plane with a novel-looking propulsion unit, a glowing clock-face on very fast forward, all mixed up as a drug-crazed dream sequence. The message is simple: in the future we will all live in a fast-moving, hi-tech world of pure luxury. According to one mobile phone company, "the future is Orange". And British Telecom would have us believe that "in the future" we will all communicate instantaneously, be permanently logged on and constantly in touch. So why not, concludes the advertisement, "change the way we work"?

Then there are the dystopian projections: books predicting the collapse of the nation state and economic chaos that will have us all fighting for survival, television series such as The X-Files and Millennium, films like Armageddon and Comet. In Andrew Niccol's literary film Gattaca, the future is divided between "invalids", a new sub-class of genetically inferior beings, and the genetically perfect who have higher privileges. Technology thus becomes an instrument for perpetuating racism and injustice. But the classic nightmarish image of the future is the Terminator: a futuristic cyborg gone irredeemably mad.

An advertisement for the city of Ontario, featuring intelligent buildings and the like, sums up the point of all this. "Ontario. The future is right here." Precisely. The future has arrived even before we have had a chance to experience it as the present. It is all happening very fast; and in some cases it has already happened. The future is an autonomous being that will happen whether we like it or not. There is nothing we can do about it. The sheer repetition, and the intellectual and visual power with which the message is hammered home, has profound consequences: the vast majority of humanity thinks of the future only in terms of advertising cliches, corporate strategies and gee-whizz technological gadgets.

Forecasting plays on this notion of an autonomous future where people have no role and technology determines all. The only actors in this game are those who can turn the predictions into profits. Forecasting increases the sense of helplessness among ordinary people. By its very nature, it is incapable of incorporating the democratic aspirations of all members of society. It has to concern itself with things that can be easily and safely extrapolated from the present on to a linear future.

Forecasting thus turns the future into a commodity that can be consumed here and now. Forecasts enable us not just to know the future but also to hold it, touch it, feel it, examine it as a gadget in the comfort of our living-rooms. The future comes ready-made, packaged, gift-wrapped. The ad for "Futuroscope" tells us that the future is a theme park that you can visit "as a part of your holiday in France". Hell, you can even wash your dirty linen in a washing powder called "Ariel Futur".

While the future has been turned into a commodity, forecasting has become an ideology. Marxism, the most predictive of ideologies, has lost its power; so have some religions that have too often set a date for the end of the world and been proved wrong. Even liberal secularism is losing its appeal. Forecasts fill the gap, bringing a degree of certainty to rapidly changing times. They imagine the future as a mighty river with fixed boundaries and contours, moving in an established direction. All we have to do to "manage" the future is to navigate the rapids; and the forecasts tell us what rapids lie ahead.

The ideology of forecasting is based on two assumptions. First, that things are not just changing, but doing so at an ever accelerating rate. This idea has become so much a part of our mental furniture that we accept it uncritically. Yet, if it is true, why are we actually going backwards? World economic growth has been considerably lower in the period 1973-92 compared to 1950-73. The gap between rich and poor is widening not just between North and South but within western societies themselves. According to the UN's annual Human Development Report, poverty in Britain and the US has increased, despite a six-fold increase in global consumption, while in Africa, absolute poverty has increased almost continuously for the past decade.

The second assumption behind the forecasters' ideology is that, as things get faster, smaller and more connected, they become better. This, too, is open to question. Faster and faster cars take us straight to gridlock. Fast, intelligent and "perfect" computers create as many problems as they solve: think, on the global scale, of the millennium bug and, on the microcosmic level, of the Central Line on the London Tube, where the computerised signalling system leads to constant breakdowns and the computerised destination indicators can advise passengers only to "check front of train". The computerisation of the market, with software programmed automatically to buy or sell according to market conditions, has brought us, on several occasions, to the brink of economic collapse. The computerisation of official "red boxes", which used a minister's fingerprints to access government documents, had to be abandoned recently because the whole thing was just too complicated. It was not very reliable and, even with all that high technology, not very safe.

The truth is that we have reached a plateau in terms of the benefits that we can get from technology. New technologies may appear to be better, faster and more promising, but in reality they do not improve our lives, or deliver greater material benefits to most of humanity or make us happier. The trends that are being projected into the future have not, in our own time, led to a world of peace, prosperity and plenty. They have produced a world that is devastated and diminished in nearly every respect.

We have no reason to believe that it will be otherwise in the future. Yet a prediction easily becomes a prescription. Human cloning is increasingly presented as a technological challenge, as press and television faithfully report each new advance. So the fallacy gains ground that cloning is inevitable. Then it is justified in social terms: step forward the infertile heterosexual couple desperate for a child, the child suffering from a genetic disorder, the consumers queuing for designer babies. The moral debate is put aside and the future arrives in the very shape that it was predicted.

Thus in a very subtle way, predictions and forecasts silence debate and discussion. They present technology as an autonomous and desirable force and project the future as unavoidable. The desirable products of technology generate more desire; its undesirable side-effects require more technology to solve them. We are locked in a linear, one-dimensional trajectory that has actually foreclosed the future. Forecasts, utopian or otherwise, are inherently undemocratic.

The future need not be a continuation of the present. There is no logic that says we have to see the future only in terms of technology and then only in utopian or dystopian perspectives. The future need not be like a mighty river; it can just as easily be like an ocean, in which we can sail almost anywhere, in any direction. There is no such thing as the future; there are many, many futures. And our concern should be with what the future ought to be, what we want it to be.

People, not technology, should be the focus of the future. Thinking about the future then becomes an enterprise of social involvement: in debating and discussing policy, in articulating the future hopes and desires of communities, in helping citizens to shape their own futures. This is not a matter of forecasts, of a passive acceptance that "things change" but of alternative possibilities, of visions, of scenarios, of plausible and pertinent stories.

In America, inner-city communities, faced with chronic unemployment, homelessness and forecasts of doom, have used such visions to dig themselves out of the quagmire. One of the most successful is the "time dollars" initiative, which generates social capital by bartering time: you spend an hour digging my garden, I spend an hour tutoring X's child, X spends an hour fixing your central heating. In Suffolk County, New York, unskilled mothers on public assistance made themselves employable by buying computers and mastering advanced computing skills. They paid for it all in monthly instalments, providing services in response to classified ads on a computerised time dollar bulletin board.

A number of cities around the world, such as Toronto, Istanbul and Madrid, have developed visions of their futures - with the help of the World Health Organisation's "healthy cities" initiative. Citizens are involved both in developing the visions and fighting for plans and policies that would lead to their realisation. In Hawaii, the citizens have "reinvented" the judicial system, in Denver, Colorado, the health system, in Washington, DC, the public transport system. They have all used visions or scenarios about what they wanted for the future. These can be just as self-fulfilling as forecasts. A vision is a community's shared commitment to the future it will create.

And real change seldom emerges from the mainstream; it almost always comes from the periphery, from the kind of wise and unconventional people who used to be called prophets. Today's equivalent of the prophets are the communities whose voices have been silenced - the non-western societies and cultures, the inner-city poor, women - and those regarded as outsiders, such as immigrants, poets, artists and philosophers. These are people unimpressed by the great white technological future but concerned with preserving our humanity and with such mundane things as social justice and equity.

Visions and scenarios are not ends in themselves. But they do emphasise that we need not accept the future passively as a given. They stress that ordinary citizens have a major role to play in shaping the future. The future, or rather futures, become an arena of action: a place where we can create new alternatives and options; attempt to widen human choices; rethink political, social and cultural ends; and contain and transcend the social pathologies that have divided humanity. The next time you see a forecast or prediction, ignore it. Instead, go out and change the future.

Ziauddin Sardar's most recent book is "Rescuing All Our Futures" (Adamantine Press/Praeger, £14.50)

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