Riding The Wave!

Cover of The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner, 1975

I sometimes hear references to one “futurist” or another, making pronouncements regarding current trends and where they may lead, and I must confess that I have been unimpressed.

My impression is that this area of study is still in its infancy, so the level of scientific rigour applied to the work ranges wildly. Sometimes, I see the incremental analysis of trends and cautious suggestions of possible hypotheses for future research which are the hallmarks of true science, but more often I’ll see confident predictions of the singularity in the next X years, or warnings that Y will lead to catastrophe in the next Z years.

I find the scientific work very intriguing and hope that it will develop into a robust discipline over time, but only when the people making wild predictions either stop, provide some compelling evidence, or go somewhere else.

Like writing.

While there are organizations working to develop clear definitions and guidelines for what a “futurist” is, these are also in their infancy, so anyone can call themselves (or others) whatever they want, and the term seems to be – currently, at least – nearly worthless. I think this is why so many authors are referred to as futurists by one group or another, and praised or condemned for their work.

I won’t name the source, but I found one article praising author William Gibson as a futurist, claiming as evidence his description of wireheads in the 1988 novel Mona Lisa Overdrive as a feature of a dystopian future that he “predicted”. The idea is that, by running an electrical current directly to the pleasure-centre of the brain, a person can achieve a high beyond that of any drug.

It’s a fascinating and terrifying idea, but it’s not new, and Gibson’s work isn’t even mentioned in the Wikipedia article – I mean, why would it be? The idea was used by Spider Robinson a few years earlier, in his book Mindkiller, and also broadly by Larry Niven in his “Known Space” stories, including Death by Ecstasy, in 1969.

Does that mean that every speculative fiction author who writes about the future is a futurist? Or is it only the ones who become famous, or who accurately predict something? Are Orwell and Atwood “futurists” because we have people using their dystopian novels as blueprints rather than warnings? And is Gibson a “futurist” and Niven not because some columnist wasn’t aware of Niven’s work (assuming other authors didn’t use the idea prior to Niven, which is by no means certain)?

Incidentally, for my current purpose, whether or not any of these people are “futurists” is irrelevant.

Or maybe, just maybe, speculative fiction authors write about concepts which are floating around in society, or investigate possible futures and consider how new technology, or societal trends, or other situations might affect humanity? Very interesting and useful, and sometimes informed by science, but not scientific.

At any rate, that’s how I got to John Brunner’s 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider.

While he got a lot “wrong”, his description of “Delphi boards” could certainly be considered suggestive of current prediction markets, particularly from the perspective of fifty years ago.

HOW TO GROW DELPHINIUMS

It works, approximately, like this.

First you corner a large - if possible, a very large - number of people who, while they’ve never formally studied the subject you’re going to ask them about and hence are unlikely to recall the correct answer, are nonetheless plugged into the culture to which the question relates.

Then you ask them, as it might be, to estimate how many people died in the great influenza epidemic which followed World War I, or how many loaves were condemned by EEC food inspectors as unfit for human consumption during June 1970.

Curiously, when you consolidate their replies they tend to cluster around the actual figure as recorded in almanacs, yearbooks and statistical returns.

It’s rather as though this paradox has proved true: that while nobody knows what’s going on around here, everybody knows what’s going on around here.

Well, if it works for the past, why can’t it work for the future? Three hundred million people with access to the integrated North American data-net is a nice big number of potential consultees.

Unfortunately most of them are running scared from the awful specter of tomorrow. How best to corner people who just do not want to know?

Greed works for some, and for others hope. And most of the remainder will never have any impact on the world to speak of.

Good enough, as they say, for folk music...

John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider, p16

An interesting concept, but not exactly new. It may have been based on the Delphi method, which is a technique for communicating and forecasting where a facilitator guides a group of experts through a process aimed at reaching a consensus.

But the prediction markets we see today are somewhat different from what Brunner suggested. Today’s prediction markets appear to be simply people placing bets on a wide variety of topics. So, not experts, like the Delphi method, but apparently not like Brunner’s Delphi boards either, as there is not much confidence that the prediction markets are “fair”, at least as currently established.

Consider the people who won a bet that the temperature at Charles de Gaulle airport would exceed 18C for two days... where it was discovered that a temperature sensor may have been tampered with.

Or the Google engineer who is accused of using non-public information to win $1.2 million USD, by betting on the top trending searches for Google.

Or the US soldier charged with using classified information to bet on the timing of the recent US attack on Venezuela.

And that’s without asking about whether the markets are run fairly to begin with, or affected by disinformation campaigns, or could potentially be used to launder cryptocurrency, or a dozen other things which we are just starting to dig into. While several countries have outlawed prediction markets, it is interesting to note what is currently happening in the US.

Current US regulation does not seem to be equipped to address prediction markets, resulting in questions regarding whether they should be treated as financial exchanges, gambling operations, or something else, and leaving a number of ambiguities and loopholes, which people and companies appear to be actively attempting to exploit.

As a result of this confusion, and a recognition of the need for more regulation, several states have enacted laws addressing prediction markets, such as a Minnesota law which bans them. What I find most interesting, though, is the fact that the federal CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) immediately filed a lawsuit to block the new state law.

I find it fascinating that the US federal government is such a strong supporter of prediction markets. I mean... it can’t have anything to do with the fact that they are closely tied to cryptocurrency, or the fact that gambling is immensely profitable and prediction markets can be described as gambling without the same level of regulation, or the fact that Trump Media & Technology Group is getting into prediction markets, or the fact that Donald Trump Jr is an “advisor” to Kalshi and an investor in Polymarket.

It couldn’t be any of that, could it? That would be illegal and unethical, and Trump said he’s not involved, so...

Right. I just heard it. Of COURSE Trump wants to profit from prediction markets, and block attempts to regulate them. That’s illegal and corrupt, but so on-brand that it almost doesn’t warrant comment.

Strangely, the government in Shockwave Rider is essentially controlled by organized crime, but I think Brunner may well have underestimated the level of corruption the future might hold.

For me, that’s the really shocking part!

Cheers!