Seeing into the Future: A Short History of Prediction by Martin van Creveld (review)

"The best way to predict your future is to create it" is one of Abraham Lincoln's famous dictums. Futures are unpredictable, unless you make them happen. Martin Creveld's new book, Seeing into the Future, examines the principal methods that have been used for looking into the future throughout history. The nature and philosophy of prediction have regularly been the object of historical scholarship, most famously Nicolas Rescher's Predicting the Future (SUNY Press, 1997) and Elke Seefried's Zukunfte (De Gruyter, 2015). The need for forward looking has always been triggered by innovative technological aids and inspired by new scientific insights. Recent technological advancements, in particular the emergence of big data and algorithmic modelling, indeed warrant a renewed interest in prediction as a profound social activity.

Creveld's original emphasis on the historical methods of prediction enriches previous scholarship. The book explores a number of predictive methods prevailing over time: speculation, deduction, extrapolation, polling, and modelling. Shamans, prophets, and oracles populated the age of speculative prediction; astrologists and fortune-tellers used newly found scientific insights, such as ornithoscopy (observing the flight of birds), and haruspicy (examining the internal organs of animals) as a source of prediction. Not surprisingly, the preferred modes of forecasting changed with the shift towards Enlightenment. Between 1650 and 1780, "prediction shed the sacred-magic-otherworldly quality that had characterized it for so long … to become subject to the ordinary rules of reason" (p. 226).

Upon entering the age of modernity, new methods of prediction characterized the culture of rationality: extrapolation, polling, surveying, and modelling. Knowing the future from knowing the past inspired modern fortunetellers to deploy novel instruments that enabled them to gather economic information in order to detect patterns and apply cyclical logic. Empirical methods, including statistics and surveys, came of age in the early twentieth century as institutions were established to systematically collect social, demographic, and financial data facilitated by new technologies. After 1945, public opinion polls, for instance, were enabled by the emergence of telephones; several decades later, computers helped speeding up mathematical calculations, allowing for actuarial models to predict the statistical chances of an individual to get involved in a traffic accident.

Technologies substantially affect scientifically grounded methods of prediction, and both are in turn intricately intertwined with the political need to not only predict, but also manage and control society's futures. In this regard, historians of technology would have appreciated a bit more detail in the book: how were technologies deployed, by which actors to perform what kinds of predictive activities?

The role of predictive technology in shaping social change is huge and finds its bearings in the public acceptance of each new predictive method. An interesting historical development sketched in Creveld's study is the shift from predicting a person's individual fate to predicting societal or economic futures. Whereas ancient fortunetellers and oracles were famous for their personalized predictions, for instance of a warrior's chances to survive a fight, modern warfare technologies allow strategists to model victory on the battlefield and thereby determine a nation's future. By the same token, advanced surveillance techniques are now put to use to not simply follow an individual's online movement, but to also steer his or her consumer needs and—in some countries—manage social behavior. The 'black boxes' of digital platform technologies have unleashed unprecedented powers to predict someone's future actions from tracking individual and collective online behavior.

The last chapters of the book could have addressed more deeply the convergence of the historical modes of prediction—speculation, deduction, extrapolation, polling, and modelling—in contemporary digital systems. Data-based and algorithmically driven methods of prediction reflect many of the historical motives for 'seeing into the future.' Their deployment goes well beyond the motives of prophets to sell wishful thinking as a technique for personal empowerment; predictive technologies may be weaponized to reshape the geo-political world order. Creveld's historical overview...