In much the same way that athletes warm up and stretch before training or competing, I find it helpful to perform exercises that warm up the imagination. We will also find that these exercises illustrate some important points.
Timejumping
Timejumping is extremely simple in principle, but endlessly rich in practice. The general idea is to develop a facility with thinking about the future on different timescales, based on a specific underlying discipline.
Timejumping can be used very effectively for understanding possible rates of change in near-term (3-10 year) settings. However, for really getting yourself ‘unstuck’ from today’s dominant paradigms and intellectual fads and fashions it is particularly useful to apply it on long timescales - 100, 300, 500, even 1000 years.
I’ve used this technique for many years, and it remains one of my favorites. I think I first came across something like it in one of the late, great Robert Anton Wilson’s books. However, I believe that the specifics of the approach I’ve described here (using very specific time periods) is original. If you have any reason to believe otherwise, please let me know.
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Start by picking a timescale on which you want to imagine the future. It could be 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, 300 years, 1000 years. Then pick a range within 10-20% of that timescale.
Then go back that number of years from the present. Obviously there is no need to be precise, which is why we establish the range. The point is to identify the scale and scope of significant changes both between then and now, as well as within the range.
Then go forward the same number of years into the future, and imagine what the same scale and scope of change could produce.
It’s that simple!
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Personally, I like to start with 500 years plus or minus a 100. This puts us back in the Renaissance period in Europe. America has only just been discovered – at least by ‘modern Europeans’. We are at the dawn of the scientific era, first with Copernicus and then Galileo.
In the early side of our range we are still within the Mediaeval period. At the far end of our range, Newton is still a 100 years out. There is no chemistry, no industrial technology. Nevertheless, they had recently rediscovered Ancient Greece and Rome, and started an intellectual revolution from which there was no going back.
We are at the dawn of the age of global exploration and European Imperialism.
We can perhaps think of these people as relatively primitive and ignorant, but if we go back another 500 years, we can see just how much more sophisticated they were than their predecessors.
Now go forward 500 years and assume a similar scale and scope of change. Chances are that people of that era will look back at the 20th and 21st centuries and consider us to be as primitive, ignorant and unsophisticated as we consider the people of the 15th and 16th centuries.
If that isn’t far enough, go forward another 500 years, and compare us with people of the 10th and 11th centuries.
The point is that if you go far enough into the future, the chances that people of that era will still see the world through the lenses that we’ve created becomes increasingly slim.
If we go 300 years into the future, people will still probably admire Einstein in the way we admire Newton – but it is even more likely that his theories will be seen to have been superceded by newer theories that involve as much of a shift in fundamental assumptions as Einstein caused with relativity and quantum mechanics.
In fact, if some of the modern physical theories involving more than four space-time dimensions (such as string theories and their synthesis in M theory) pan out, we will probably get to that point sooner rather than later.
The point here is that knowledge is relative – and our foundations for knowledge engineering and knowledge architectures need to take that into account.
Relative to what, you might ask? I’m going to claim that the answer is perspective – and we’re going to explore that in a bit more depth in our next exercise.
In the meantime, I highly recommend practicing timejumping at different scales and scopes, focusing on different perspectives such as economic, political, artistic, musical, philosophical, scientific, even religious, and certainly societal structures and fashions of all sorts. If you can think of perspectives that aren’t even on this list that’s even better!
I’m not going to give you even a sampling of what you might discover here. There is considerable benefit in developing your own unique perspectives through practice. If you get stuck for ideas, read any good science fiction author – but make sure you go beyond them!