Professor Anthony Giddens recently gave a lecture previewing his current work in progress, Off the Edge of History:the world in the 21st century, to a packed house at the London School of Economics, where he was director between 1997 and 2003. He received a rapturous reception, and not just because this was a sort of homecoming. His analysis of human development pathways into the 21st Century was both exhilarating and alarming at the same time.
The Anthropocene
Gidden’s thesis is that the epoch we are living through is fundamentally distinct to any previous era in both geological and human history. Invoking the famous work of atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, we have moved from the Holocene Age to the Anthropocene Age – named so because human activity has by now influenced the world to such a degree that ‘nature is no longer nature’. The extent of human encroachment on ecosystems is unprecedented . As a consequence, Giddens argues, there are profound implications for how we think about our future and how we view our past.
Singularity
Yet the dawn of the Anthropocene Age is only half the story. While nature is no longer nature, humans are also no longer human; or at least the essence of being human is changing rapidly because of the convergent disciplines of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and biotechnology. On this point Giddens draws heavily on the singularity literature. Technological singularity first emerged as a concept in the 1950s and can be loosely defined as ‘the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue’ (1).
The singularity movement has been popularised much more recently by futurist, inventor and Google director Ray Kurzweil, and in particular by his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near. While advocates of singularity are not without their vociferous critics, Giddens suggests that attempting to assess the accuracy of Kurzweil’s predictions should not be the focus of our inquiry. Instead we must simply recognise that the 21st century is characterised simultaneously by both high opportunity and high risk.
Furthermore, at the extremes of this opportunity-risk spectrum are potential, and plausible, existential opposites: apocalypse on the one hand, through nuclear warfare or climate change; and immortality on the other, if we could pause the ageing process. These existential extremes are reflected in the dichotomy of perspectives in the literature about humanity’s future, which fall into either the optimist (e.g. Matt Ridley) or doomsdayer (e.g. Martin Rees) category. However, rather than adopting an optimistic or doomsdayer stance himself, Giddens is keen to emphasise that in the high opportunity/high risk society, opportunities and risks are always deeply entwined.
Where are our limits?
One critical implication of living in an age ‘off the edge of history’ is the serious epistemic challenge to the notion of sustainability. If sustainability is understood in terms of living within clear limits, Giddens asks how do we know what those limits really are, when they appear to be continuously shifting, pushed ever outwards by interventionist technologies? He doesn’t give examples but there are many, with perhaps one of the most apparent being how improved extraction technologies have delayed predictions of peak oil production.
But surprisingly Giddens doesn’t acknowledge that the problem of knowing (or not knowing) where limits exist, manifests in both directions. In other words sometimes our sustainable planetary limits turn out to be much closer than previously reckoned, as with Arctic ice melt for example. In fact the drive for consensus among the several hundred contributing authors to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely steers projections towards more conservative ranges. Certainly though, defining sustainable limits appears considerably more complex and elastic than it once might have done, given an accelerating rate of technological advances.
Fuzzy horizons
How then should we proceed? Helpfully Professor Giddens offers a three point framework to help navigate a path through our high opportunity/high risk future:
- Never avoid risk by living in denial (unlike, broadly speaking, current approaches to climate change which are still largely characterised by denial; not necessarily of the reality of climate change per se but there’s a failure to appreciate the seriousness of its full impacts).
- Leave our Enlightenment thinking at the door. We must not expect to ‘march in and conquer the future’. Instead acknowledge the future’s ‘puzzling opacity’, which is brought about by the vast spectrum of opportunity and risk. I have renamed this opacity the ‘fuzzy horizons’ of the future.
- Backcasting will be as important as forecasting, because of the high level of risk now inherent in global society. Backcasting, a technique driven by climate change research, involves starting with a vision of a point in the future and working backwards, thereby facilitating the creation of alternate scenarios that avoid identified undesirable outcomes.
Printing systems
If that framework sounds too theoretical or vague to have much practical use, Giddens assures us of the opposite. Studying the high opportunity/high risk society will be the primary task of the social sciences this century. As an example, he cited research he has been doing on re-industrialisation and the re-shoring (as opposed to offshoring) of jobs in the US. In considering the impact of technological innovation on labour, Giddens has examined 3D printing, a paradigm of a disruptive technology with wide ranging applications and the breakthrough potential to revolutionise manufacturing.
The team at MIT working on 3D printing are now focussed on trying to print whole systems rather than just objects. Printing entire systems enables the potential to print whole devices with myriad components. The lead researcher at MIT has reportedly said he wants to design a plane that will fly directly out of a computer! The professor obviously hoped this anecdote would illustrate the risk/opportunity axis that 3D printing represents to the future of manufacturing although the recent media attention around the 3D printing of guns may have provided a starker case study.
Rational foundations
As our worldview comes to terms with this vast spectrum of risk and opportunity, Giddens returns again to the question of whether this new and altered age should inspire us with optimism or pessimism – but again he places it to the periphery just as quickly. He proposes that as long we have a rational foundation for our beliefs, either perspective can be accommodated justifiably. But doesn’t an appeal to rational foundations sound suspiciously like an Enlightenment ideal of the kind he warned us to be wary of previously?
My own difficulty with Giddens’ portrait of the high risk/high opportunity society is that he conflates rapid technological advancement with broader global megatrends. The opportunities and risks of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and biotechnology are arguably roughly in proportion, though we will still require robust ethics and governance structures to develop and harness their benefits responsibly. In these endeavours, opportunity and risk are indeed tightly knotted. But there’s no upside to climate change – unless you wish to drill for oil in the Arctic, the risks far outweigh the opportunities. On the face of it then, constructing a rational foundation for pessimism is the easier task.
From risk to uncertainty
A more fundamental problem with Giddens’ thesis is the prominence he gives to risk, at the expense of uncertainty. Risks can be analysed, understood and managed. But as the systems thinker Thomas Homer-Dixon has consistently argued, we are moving from a world of risk to a world of uncertainty, which is typically characterised by unknown unknowns. This uncertainty arises from complex systems that have emergent properties, flip from one behaviour to another, and where the relationship between cause and effect is disproportionate. Complex systems, like the climate or the global economy, cannot be easily managed because their behaviour is unpredictable. Clearly Giddens himself implicitly recognises the function of uncertainty, as evidenced by his critique of sustainability discussed above and his reference to the future’s ‘puzzling opacity’.
This distinction between risk and uncertainty isn’t purely theoretical either. Gidden’s basic premise, that our current era is unchartered because of humankind’s novel contemporary relationship with nature and evolution, seems relatively incontrovertible. But an equally unprecedented hallmark of our time is the extent to which globalised systems are tightly coupled and interconnected as never before. Too much interconnection, however, leads to less resilience, allowing contagion to spread more readily through a system – as amply demonstrated by the financial crash.
In a world experiencing frequent and increasingly severe shocks, Homer Dixon argues the balance of investment should move away from efficiency towards increasing resilience, by decoupling elements and increasing buffering. But in my view policy responses designed to increase resilience are more likely to be generated from a position that acknowledges profound uncertainty than through conventional risk management approaches. When I enquired at the end of the lecture, Professor Giddens kindly shared with me the fact that he’s familiar with Homer-Dixon’s work. It’s curious then that Giddens doesn’t explore this ontological shift from risk to uncertainty in more detail.
Nevertheless, when published, Off the Edge of History promises to be a significant and highly engaging contribution to understanding the unparalleled magnitude of human influence over our own and the planet’s destiny. And if the auditorium’s gripped reaction is anything to judge by, there’s an intelligent young audience willing to listen and think very seriously about the repercussions for all of us that such singular exertion may bring in the coming decades. That at the very least is a cause for optimism.
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