Is There a Road Map for What's Ahead?

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One of our primary survival traits is the ability to anticipate the future to avoid threats and reap higher yields. We seek a vantage point to view the road ahead, or even better a road map to what's ahead.

Is there a road map to what's ahead?  An enormous amount of research and projections are issued daily, proposing answers to the question: what happens next?

In my view, a good starting point is to recall that there are critical differences between open systems and closed systems. A clock is a closed system, and so its functions are predictable.  An ecosystem is an open system, and so predictions are contingent on an unknowably large number of potential changes in inputs, processes and feedback: new invasive species may arrive and displace native species, predators might be decimated by a new disease, etc.

But even open systems operate according to principles we can discern, and so they are not entirely unpredictable or chaotic. For example, when a keystone species is wiped out, the entire ecosystem collapses.

The immense powers of modern technology, engineering, cheap energy and mass media have created an illusory aura of human agency, that we can control our future in the same way we control machinery. This aura has also created a sense that human leaders or elites control our world with god-like powers of precision. This too is an illusion, as the contingencies, forces, feedbacks and second-order effects of open systems are beyond the control of any human leadership. 

Consider the collapse of marriage and birthrates globally; leaders recognize the threat this poses and have tried to reverse the tide, with little effect.  Some propose that these dynamics are the result of secret agendas to reduce the human populace, but the causal links required by this theory are not persuasive: people don't abandon marriage and raising a family lightly, and there are many factors at work: mating, marriage and having children is an open system, and demographics can't be dialed up or down at will.

So what road maps do we have for inherently unpredictable and not entirely controllable open systems?

One is the cycles of human history, which reflect that our Wetware 1.0 instantiated around 200,000 years ago leads us to respond in a very limited number of ways to threats and windfalls. I've often recommended the book Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century as evidence that the present has many similarities to the 1600s, which was beset by climate change, scarcities, wars and political conflicts.

Another is how leaders and populaces respond economically to scarcities and threats.

Yet another is human psychology, which maps how we respond to scarcities and threats via denial, magical thinking, cognitive biases, etc.

A fourth map is based on cultural and sociological dynamics embedded in communities, tribes and nation-states.

Let's take a brief look at each of the three, all of which are worthy of entire volumes.