Beware the science fiction bias in predictions of the future

Reality is often disappointing

We want to know the future, so we like reading predictions. These predictions can significantly vary in how long their time horizon is:

• Seconds to Minutes: poker players, high-frequency traders

• Minutes to Hours: day traders, in-game sports betting

• Days to Weeks: weather forecasts, outcomes of sports tournaments

• Months to Years: hedge funds, election outcomes, venture capitalists

• Decades to Centuries: technological trends, climate change projections

• Centuries to Millennia: rise and fall of countries and civilizations

• Millennia to Millions: human evolution, trans-humanism

• Millions to Billions of Years: life cycle of stars, ultimate fate of the Solar System and our universe

There’s three elements in how predictions are evaluated by society:

1. Accuracy: easy for short time horizons, hard for long ones. Poker players will quickly lose their money if their judgement is poor. Weather models will go out of favor if they consistently predict sun when it rains. But a VC fund can continue operating for a decade or two despite making glaring mistakes.

2. Political bias: if you like nuclear power you’ll be inclined to believe predictions promising a fusion power revolution. If you dislike Trump you’ll be skeptical of a model projecting him as the winner of the next election.

3. Quality of storytelling: a prediction that follows the patterns of good fiction is more interesting to read and would thus be more popular, just like Star Wars is always going to be more popular than a book on space engineering. I would call this the science fiction bias.

We all like a good story

Imagine the year is 2011 and you’re writing a movie about a future global pandemic. You hire a scientist known for helping eradicate smallpox (Larry Brilliant) as your consultant and overall try to make your story somewhat plausible. You title the movie ‘Contagion’ and release it with the following plot elements:

• The virus has a fatality rate of 25-30% in every age group.

• Infection develops extremely rapidly, with people dying within 48 hours after being infected.

• It infects a large number of people in every country within weeks after the first human infection.

• Society comes close to a full collapse, people are scared to leave their homes.

• The US enforces a very harsh quarantine in every city.

• And, of course, patient zero is Gwyneth Paltrow eating at a fancy restaurant.

Nine years later a global pandemic happens in real life but (fortunately) the plotline is much more mundane:

• The fatality rate ranged from 0.005% to 1% for people under the age of 70.

• It usually took at least 2 weeks for someone to die from the virus after exposure.

• The first person was infected in late November 2019 and it took four months for the virus to spread far enough to trigger lockdowns globally.

• There were some shortages of toilet paper and whatnot, some degree of panic buying and people tried to stay at home but the situation was far less dramatic compared to the movie.

• The US didn’t enforce any lockdowns seriously. You could freely travel around in the lower 48 states and private gatherings were (almost) never prosecuted.

• Patient zero was an anonymous wet market customer (although Gwyneth Paltrow did get infected early on in the pandemic but luckily she survived just fine).

‘Contagion’ made $136.5m in the box office back in the day. How much would it have made if was released with the same plotline as our 2020 pandemic? Probably a lot less. A movie where Paltrow sits at home coughing for a week or two and then goes back to work just doesn’t sound as exciting. Some other examples of this include:

• Star Trek ships having AGI but still needing humans in charge. And even when the AGI does do work (The Doctor), it’s been given human-like emotions. People don’t want to read a story where the machines do all the work and the humans are just lounging around. Katja Grace had a nice post about our intrinsic desire to be useful, which explains why an AGI Captain Kirk would not sit well with viewers.

• In The Matrix, the AI is neither fully aligned (helping humans live in a utopia), nor is it fully misaligned (destroying everyone immediately, including Zion). It's balanced just right to make for a cool story.

• Biden becoming convinced AI is a major risk after watching Mission Impossible.

• The Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Lee Harvey Oswald’s actual story is very much mundane compared to the grand conspiracies invented around him. For a similar reason everyone very quickly forgot about the guy who attempted to shoot Trump: it’s just too boring of a story.

• Almost all ‘Facebook’ stories about Albert Einstein. He wasn’t a poor student, didn’t write witty quips about marriage and didn’t have his driver give a speech on his behalf.

• The boiling frog story is a myth: frogs will jump out no matter how slowly you heat the water. So is the banana, monkeys and a ladder story used in hundreds of business books.

• A German book for young adults about the dangers of nuclear energy was partially credited for convincing the German public to abandon nuclear power.

We want to live in modestly interesting times

Terry Pratchet’s had a funny quote about a phrase (incorrectly) attributed to ancient Chinese writings:

I believe that the phrase is may "you live in interesting times," and is the lowest in a trilogy of Chinese curses that continue "may you come to the attention of those in authority" and finish with "may the gods give you everything you ask for." I have no idea about its authenticity.

Does this mean we want to live in “boring” times? Imagine if an omniscient seer told you at the age of 18 that absolutely nothing “interesting” would happen in the next 100 years. Even if you were born in a highly prosperous city in Switzerland, would such knowledge make you happier? I would argue that most of us are hoping to live in reasonably interesting times, which biases us towards predictions that promise change rather than stagnation.

We want interesting things to happen during our lifetimes

Quite a few of people are interested in working on AI safety. But lets once again imagine we have access to an all-powerful seer who tells us that AGI will not be developed before the year 2150. How many people would still be interested in working on AI safety then? Probably a lot less. The same deal applies to every area of human innovation: Elon Musk wants to personally witness humans landing on Mars, quantum computing researches hope to see a quantum computer built, fusion companies want to start generating power now rather than in 100 years.

And this isn’t restricted to scientists, entrepreneurs and engineers. Ukrainians want their territory liberated now rather than in 50 years. Americans worry about their personal Social Security checks much more than they worry about future fiscal troubles. Climate change advocates sound a lot more convincing if they promise something dramatic to happen now rather than sometime in the next century.

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To summarize, I’d like to propose a three-prong test for judging predictions for how much science fiction bias they could possibly have:

1. Does the prediction sound like it could be the plot of a successful book or movie?

2. If the prediction came true, would you say you’re living in “interesting” times?

3. Does it promise things to happen in the next 3-4 decades or does it talk about a distant future?

If the answer is yes to all of the above, I’d be a little more skeptical. And conversely when writing predictions, I’d try to judge whether I’m trying to write a good story or trying to actually predict the future. Alas, reality is often disappointing.