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Alex Lo

Is humanity entering a down cycle of calamity? Some prominent futurists think so. Certainly the news headlines are not encouraging.
The Middle East is going up in flames. The European continent is caught in the most consequential military conflict since the end of World War II.
The Doomsday Clock, set up during the height of the Cold War to gauge the danger of nuclear war, has never been so close to midnight. The COP29 climate summit, billed by some as our last chance to save the planet, has been a big disappointment.
Most of the G7 economically advanced democracies are mired in economic troubles and political instability. South Korea, a close ally, is reeling from the worst political crisis since the end of the country’s dictatorship in the 1980s.
The United States, meanwhile, is torn by extreme political divisions and domestic terrorism. All the while in the background is the power struggle between the two superpowers. Their Cold War 2.0 could well turn into a hot war, most likely over Taiwan.
In times like this, alarmist futurism has come in fashion. The more credible are not Nostradamus-wannabes, or historians and philosophers who claim to discern cyclical patterns in the long spans of human history. Rather, a new breed of futurists, applying the physical sciences and working with computer modelling, try to crunch massive amounts of data to try to predict where not only this or that country but the whole human society may be heading in the coming years and decades. Their prognoses are not good.
A new provocative paper arguing that humanity may have “arrived at an evolutionary turning point that is… the precursor for collapse” has attracted media attention. “‘Planetary phase shift’ as a new systems framework to navigate the evolutionary transformation of human civilisation”, is published in Foresight: The Journal of Futures Studies.
“My framework aims to integrate the natural and social sciences [while] maintaining a strong network of sources and experts across multiple sectors and issues,” said Nafeez Ahmed, who is a fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, in Bristol, England.
“This enabled me to recognise major trends… with interconnections across systems,” he said in an interview with the Post.
The paper’s title could be taken from the sci-fi novels of Isaac Asimov. Indeed, Asimov fans will recall “psychohistory” in his famous Foundation series, a fictitious science which combined history, sociology and statistics to make general predictions about the future behaviour of very large groups of people.
But it may no longer be just sci-fi. More recently, Peter Turchin, a zoologist turned complexity theorist, gained international fame when he predicted back in 2010, for an article in Nature, the science journal, that widespread civil unrest would sweep through the US from around 2020 after tracking long historical cycles of instability. He even has a fancy name for his interdisciplinary study, which he calls cliodynamics, a reference to the ancient Greek muse of history.
The methods used by Ahmed, a complex systems social scientist, sounds quite a bit like Asimov’s imagined and Turchin’s very real science.
More specifically, Ahmed applies Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling’s theory of the adaptive cycle for ecological systems such as the fauna and flora in a forest, to human society at large.
He argues human civilisation goes through phase transitions, and we may be at one of those inflection points.
In Holling’s model, a dynamic system goes through the four stages: growth/exploration (r), equilibrium/conservation (k), release/collapse (Ω), and if it is lucky, reorientation/renewal (α).
At (r), a society’s complexity rapidly increases because resources are abundant, followed by (k) in which the system settles down and can last for a long time. However, the longer the system remains there, the greater the trade off between energy efficiency and resilience to disturbances.
Rising instability leads to (Ω). Two future scenarios then open up to such a civilisation. A breakdown may mean the end of the road during which the system may rapidly disintegrate back to low complexity and stay there.
Or as Albert Einstein famously put it, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
However, society may also be open to renewal and reconfiguration.
If “complexity” sounds too abstract, you may look up online “The Atlas of Economic Complexity” run by Harvard researchers, who maintain the massive database on the economies of most countries. It enables you to visualise different economic sectors and their organisational complexities in nifty, easy-to-understand graphics and charts.
It is Ahmed’s contention that we are entering the Omega stage.
“We are experiencing this heightened instability across our social, political and cultural systems,” he told me. “What’s happening is that the incumbent material infrastructure - the dominant technologies by which we produce the things we need - are experiencing a slow-motion breakdown that is, however, rapidly accelerating.
“At the centre of this breakdown is the energy system. Energy of course is the basis of everything we do. But there’s now a consensus among experts showing that the Energy Return On Investment - the amount of energy we are able to extract relative to the amount of energy we use to get it out - is diminishing dramatically for global fossil fuels. This process, unfolding since around the 1960s, explains a number of long-range trends: rising inflation, declining rate of economic growth.”
Individually, a problem in one domain may be just that. But combined, they could have catastrophic consequences, the proverbial perfect storm.
“This infrastructure is destabilising planetary life-support systems. These are the systems by which we manage and understand the world, and the tools we use to produce what we need. As the material systems we depend on - with the decline of fossil fuels at their heart - are going into decline, our social and political models offer few solutions as they are built for business-as-usual. Culturally, we are seeing… a growing disillusionment with the prevailing liberal paradigm. Dominant norms and values, previously taken for granted, are now rejected because the prevailing system is seen increasingly as unable to address how systemic crises continue to impact people’s lives. One side-effect of this is a risk of shifting to political extremes.”
Renewal is possible, according to Ahmed, but it will “require a fundamental reorganisation of the governance, economy, politics, culture, worldview and value-system of our societies, guiding the design and acceleration of key technologies.” That seems unlikely, given our tendency to fight rather than cooperate.
While I find Ahmed highly persuasive, I am hoping for a third likely scenario, that is, humanity will muddle through, as we have always done.


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Opinion

New sciences purporting to predict the future offer some unsettling forecasts


New sciences purporting to predict the future offer some unsettling forecasts.


Ukraine war: Opinion

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


A blip on our way to a better 21st century or the end of the road for humanity?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}New sciences purporting to predict the future offer some unsettling forecasts

New sciences purporting to predict the future offer some unsettling forecasts