🎱 Can you predict the future?

PLUS: Your last chance to get a discount on Untangled for the year.

Welcome back to Untangled, a newsletter and podcast about technology, people, and power. I synthesize conceptual frameworks and social science research to help you — as product managers, technologists, grant-makers, civil society leaders, and concerned citizens alike — analyze the big sociotechnical problems of the day, make better decisions at work, and take daily actions that align with your values.

As a reminder, starting February 1, only paid subscribers will have access to the archive, the primer, and issues like this one. If you value Untangled and you’re financially able to support me and my work, upgrade to paid today.

🙌 Before we get into it, let’s start with a lil’ bit of unadulterated self-promotion.

• Tech Policy Press re-published my latest essay, “Getting beyond ‘minimizing harms’ of algorithmic systems.” If Tech Policy Press isn’t your go-to site for rich analysis on topics at the intersection of technology and democracy, well, it should be!

• All Tech is Human listed Untangled as one of its favorite 20 ‘Responsible Tech Podcasts.’

• Unfinished recently highlighted my essay on the sociology of DAOs in their newsletter. I’ve always hoped that folks would see my essays as evergreen, so I was just tickled that they referenced a piece from one year ago.

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🔮Let’s Untangle the future, shall we?

The past month has been all about future tech predictions. That’s not my thing. I mean, ten years ago I wrote a letter to my nephew about how a focus on the future is an escape from the present. Turns out I’m not so dissimilar from German historian Reinhart Koselleck who wrote, “What the future offers is compensation for the misery of the present.” I kid — mostly. Here’s 28-year-old me, writing to my then two-year-old nephew:

The propensity to get lost in what should have been or what might be one day is an escape from what is. Yours is an even greater challenge, hate to say it. Being present, being mindful, being intentional about what matters to you is a daunting task even without technology grabbing your attention like it is entitled. It's bad now -- moments of reflection zapped by status updates and Tweets. In writing the last paragraph I checked my email twice and Facebook once. I can only imagine what you will face when these questions cross your mind. Whatever the case, it is a fight worth fighting because you can only ensure the future you want for yourself by confronting the present with courage.

The point is, I’ve always been less interested in predicting the future than I am in questions like, what role do predictions play in society? Who and what are they even for?

Predictions became more common in the 19th century. In Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America, Jamie Pietruska shows that amidst significant societal change, “prediction became a ubiquitous scientific, economic, and cultural practice.” As communications and media scholar Devon Powers writes, “These shifts coincided with the rise of modernity, the onslaught of social and technological changes that continues to steep developed societies in newness, progress, and creative ruination.” In other words, the rise of prediction was in part a response to change and uncertainty. I get it - predicting the future can make the confusion, doubt, and precarity of the present moment feel a lil’ more (dare I say) predictable.

But more recently, argues Powers, prediction and forecasting have come to thrive off of selling uncertainty and risk. In On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future, Powers writes, “the trend forecasting industry plays an active role in creating the perception of a world overrun with change.” The same is true of many offering tech predictions — they sell uncertainty and change so that they become an authoritative voice in the face of transformation. In short, they create the conditions for their own relevance.

Whether offering a sense of control or change, predictions have always been an exercise in, and a reflection of, power. As I wrote in the primer, “Who we select to help us understand the future is ultimately about power in the present — it’s about whose experience, expertise, and epistemology gets to decide what problems matter and how we understand them.” Thankfully, Amanda Rees, a historian of science, agrees. She writes:

Whatever the approach of the forecaster, and however sophisticated their tools, the trouble with predictions is their proximity to power. Throughout history, futures have tended to be made by white, well-connected, cis-male people. This homogeneity has had the result of limiting the framing of the future, and, as a result, the actions then taken to shape it.

This homogeneity Rees writes of, and the resulting limitations, show up in the assumptions of the person making the prediction. As Powers writes, “the incapacity on the part of many trend forecasters to seriously question mainstream economic assumptions underscores the positionality of their futurism and highlights a central premise that is seemingly too big to question.” Powers goes on to write that forecasting “frequently operates in the service of a future in which all but the most privileged among us are incapable of doing anything but comply.” In other words, for technology predictions to pass even the sniff test, they require that we look beyond who might win and lose in this purported future — they require a theory of how power operates in the present.

Over here at Untangled HQ, I want to help you (and me!) understand how power interacts with emerging technologies. For example, in ‘Crypto is not decentralized,’ I argued that technical decentralization doesn’t do anything to decentralize power. I drew on the work of Angela Walch to illustrate that power concentrates in intermediaries, voting and governance, token ownership, coordinated decision-making, computing power, and in informal authority. I wrote that piece over a year ago amidst peak crypto hysteria, and not to toot my own horn, but it got a lot right. (Toot, toot!)

So, as you come across tech predictions for 2023 and beyond, ask yourself this: how does this prediction relate to power? Perhaps then you’ll be able to see just a little bit farther into the future.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 I predict the Untangled community will do great things. Cuz you already are!

• Listen to the Good Robot podcast episode with Su Lin Blodgett on “Creating Just Language Technologies.” Blodgett skillfully explains the ways in which language technologies like ChatGPT interact with discrimination, bias, and categories like race and gender.

• Check out the newsletter,

  The AI Ethics Brief
  , by Abhishek Gupta of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute. It’s great! I especially enjoyed a recent edition that digs into the EU AI regulations, watermarking machine-generated text, and how to think about the safety of AI systems.

• Pop on over to

  The Gradient
  to listen to their recent interview with Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian on his time in government, and the “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” which he co-authored. It’s a fascinating and fun chat!

• Alex Kantrowitz
  founder of the podcast and newsletter
  Big Technology
  , recently wrote a piece that was plagiarized by a pseudonymous Substack account using generative AI tools. He wrote about the experience here, which is a thoughtful piece that implicitly underscores Abhishek’s call to watermark machine-generated text.

📝 Future reading

For an upcoming essay on democratizing the governance of technology, I’ve been reading a few great articles and research papers:

• Facebook let the legal scholar

  Kate Klonick
  (sign up for her newsletter,
  The Klonickles
  ) report on the creation of the Oversight Board, which she wrote about in The New Yorker. And which I thoroughly enjoyed!

• Aviv Ovadya
  , a technologist and researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, draws on lessons from citizen assemblies to outline a vision for what he calls ‘platform democracy.’ After you read the piece, don’t forget to sign up for
  Reimagining Social Technologies
  !

• Want to dive into the science of deliberation alongside me? I found this paper incredibly helpful in poking holes in the assumption that ordinary citizens aren’t up to the task of participating in a more deliberative democracy.

Okay, that’s it for now.

Charley