Jim is Professor, and Director of the Hawai’i Research Center for Futures Studies, Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (the Center is also an Affiliate Campus of the International Space University, Strasbourg, France).

Can you tell me a bit about your background?

I have been involved in futures studies almost from the very beginning of the field in the 1960s. I taught the first officially recognised – that is to say recognised by a university academic council – futures course in 1967 in Virginia Tech. When I went to the University of Hawai’i in 1970 the State Legislature eventually created the Hawai’i Research Center for Futures Study and I have been Director of it since that time. I am in the department of Political Science in Hawai’i University and we established a year or two later a two-year Masters programme, where people can learn to be consulting futurists. I was Secretary General and President of the World Futures Studies Federation. I worked in many different countries, especially socialist countries in the 1970s, when they were using the Federation to think safely about a different future from the one they thought might otherwise lie ahead of them. I have taken the opportunity not to work only in one place for a long time but to see what it looks like from many different countries around the world. Futures studies has not grown in academia in the way I had hoped it would. It has grown in application and there is that strange imbalance. It has a very thin academic base for an increasingly robust application. I am not sure that is healthy, but that is the way it is.

I understand you are not too sympathetic towards the classification of wild cards.

That is right. Once upon a time I was, but a number of years ago I wrote that it implies there is a normal future to which the wild cards are deviations. Not only is that not the case, but it is one of the reasons we are in perpetual problems as planners and foresight and futures people. We think there is this normal future that the world should be following and it does not exist any more. Because of this, I avoid trying to talk about the future and insist we need to adopt an alternative futures perspective. I have determined by empirical evidence there are four generic alternatives. 

What would those four basic alternatives be?

The major one, the default one, the official one of our culture and of all developed and developing countries, I call continued economic growth. I often ask students, ‘Have you ever had a class in the future?’ And they say ‘No’, and so I say ‘I am a failure because I have been in the futures business for so long and we have not infiltrated academia in any way’. But the entire purpose of education, especially higher education, is to produce people who have the worldview, values and skills to keep the economy growing.  That is the only future that education knows and the only future the government knows and so we are in serious difficulty. Because of the focus on economic growth and not on the other alternatives, the increased probability of social system collapse or local, national, regional, global issues are arising. That is a category that has always existed in futures literature and it has now become popular, especially in the West, as we see our systems collapsing. Iceland knows all about economic collapse. Partly to prevent collapse and/or as an alternative preference to continued growth is what I call a ‘discipline society’ and all the efforts towards sustainability – not just camouflage for economic growth – this is the third category. The fourth is transformation – the belief that we are transforming humanity into post humans, artificial intelligence – all of that fantastic stuff I call a transformational view of the future. I observe images of the future and test out those four categories into which all images of the future fall and my conclusion is, yes, we usually plan for all four and not just for one of them. That is why I am not too happy with the concept of wild cards. Because one of those so-called wild cards is a constituent element of one of those four alternative futures.

Could you mention any of these wild cards that fall in any of these four, either positive or negative, that you think are going to occur?

Many of the things, for example, were indicating linear changes that might happen in the continued growth model that might change things. So continuing developments in communication technology, globalisation, things about energy, environment that might cause social system collapse. There were some things that might fall into true sustainability, disciplined society, and a few things that I would say are transformational things, that Ray Curtswhile writes about in his book Singularity, which are fundamentally transformative of the human character. You have some things in all of the categories – probably more in continual growth or failure to grow, but some that are clearly collapsed or impose collapsed society, or discipline, or transformation. There were some things you don’t have. I am at the International Space University and I don’t think there was anything about space, even as part of continued growth, business as usual, or speculation that we might be going to Mars and the role that will clearly play in the transformation of humanity because we are simply in a completely different environment and will begin to evolve again. There are so many things in space, for example if we find life elsewhere, much less if we find intelligent life elsewhere.  That is one area I thought was surprisingly missing. I am in political science and governance and I teach new systems design. I don’t think there was anything about new laws or laws that would have a transforming effect. For example, a year ago the United States Supreme Court shocked the world by giving corporations – which as a concept is only 100 years old – First Amendment rights, so it is not possible for Congress to restrict corporations giving money to politicians. The startling thing is, two years earlier I had developed a scenario that had the Supreme Court making a similar decision to the one that they did make, leading to a decision for corporations to run for public office. I see that as an emerging possibility, just following the logic of the Supreme Court. I would put it down as a wild card to be developed.

What would be a dramatic impact of this wild card and how should it be addressed by future research?

When the Supreme Court raised this issue, it caused one of the biggest outcries among people concerned with corporate power generally that I have ever witnessed. Many people went immediately to my wild card and said, ‘Well, the next logical step is that if they are people they have the right to run for public office and carry guns etc.’ From my point of view, and that of most people I discuss it with, it is a horrible situation, where people’s individual rights are swept aside. Corporations have no conscience, no real accountability to the public. They will outlive any of the people who allegedly work in or own the corporation. They are utterly irresponsible in what they do and only focus on the bottom line, making money. It is from my point of view a particularly bad scenario. I guess if you are in the business world you love it. I teach new government design – the most obsolete social institution surviving in the world today. England is immune from it, because you don’t have a written constitution, but you are moving in that direction and surely the EU’s horrible constitution is an example is the dead hand of a great invention. In the USA in 1789, when they conceived the idea of constituting a government out of nothing by writing down fundamental principles, that idea had a death grip on all thinking about the government. In the US the Constitution is worshipped and beyond criticism or any sort of modification, much less starting all over again as churches, corporations, transportation have done. Those are the sorts of things that I noticed were missing when I was casually looking over your information.

Are there any scenarios or wild cards that are similar to corporations running for public office that you have thought of recently?

I noticed that you had the very strong possibility of a nation, the EU or the USA having a truly fascist government. In the US, if the key party succeeds in taking over the Republican Party and they throw out the Democratic Party, which seems increasingly likely, they will not be able to govern the US and they might well react in a fascist way. I see that you have that as a wild card – that is entirely logical. I have also experimented with electronic direct democracy, i.e. the development of electronic communications destroying authority. People are so accustomed to twittering and blogging that they don’t trust other people and they make up and believe stuff themselves. You could have an electronic direct democracy that is more important and powerful than the representative form of government we have now. That will be one possibility.  Then there is this concept of the ubiquitous society. It was a hot topic of conversation two or three years ago, especially in Finland and Korea. That same technology, the global positioning satellites and the ability to see down to one metre or a couple of centimetres can do wonderful things in terms of medicine and disaster, but it can and almost certainly will be used for surveillance and control of human population. Twelve years ago someone wrote an Intelligent Government article in The Futurist. He said that this technology will replace policemen and laws, and that you will design an environment which makes it impossible to do something bad, and restrains you if you try. Again, that looks very likely. In an attempt to deal with disasters, find lost children, etc., the technology will replace existing forms of administration of government. I think there is a lot there.

Can you see around you any weak signals that hint that this is taking place?

I spend a lot of time working in Korea. Democracy is not native to the culture and character and they still have one of the last effective civil services. It is a great privilege to be a bureaucrat and they come from the very best universities and are devoted to doing what is best for the country. So they are much less concerned about the negative impacts of using these technologies for social control and are talking more and more about how these can be incorporated into legislation. One of the scans that I recall was that there is an eco oppression. Environmental matters might get so bad that they severely limited people’s ability to behave the way they want to, especially in areas of consumption. As I read that, and thinking about ubiquitous society, I can imagine a hi tech North Korea, in which you have this value structure called juche,1 which are major goals which drive everything. If you had this advanced technology which will ensure everyone behaves in that way and enjoys it, then you would have something pretty powerful. 

Can you see any causal relationships between these wild cards that you have mentioned so far? Are they linked in any way?

Yes I think they are all linked. North Korea is a truly counterintuitive society still in existence. In the 1980s when I was visiting communist countries, people did not want Kim Jong-il to succeed his father. There was a period of power struggle and the people who invited me along either fled the country or were killed. If I think about these existing examples and listen to people talking about the satellite application and the wonderful things they can do for climate or driving automobiles, etc., I naturally put these two things together. So all of these things are interconnected. So far we have been talking about high tech stuff. More recently I have been becoming hysterical on the growing probability of collapse, because I take the end of oil extremely seriously. There are millions of things that could solve the problem of the loss of oil, but we have wasted 30 or 40 years to resolve the problem. I don’t think it is possible to discuss the future without taking into account that factor, and the environmental issues and global warming. In Hawai’i I have been working with the School of Architecture to persuade them not to build dykes to prevent the rise of sea levels, but to welcome and embrace the water. These changes are not to be looked at as catastrophes, but as tremendous opportunities for innovation and new ways of doing things. 
The third thing the economic crisis. I don’t think that is going to go away – I don’t think we are experiencing real recovery now. If we do see a recovery, we will start to use oil faster and the price will go up and environmental issues will get bad. Ultimately, whatever we do the economy will continue to weaken and collapse, and for the most part democratic governments are not able to do anything about it. Japan was not able to get hold of its debt. The ruling party proposed a set of measures which were modest and the voters voted against it, so it is just not possible to rule democratically any more. I could get pessimistic, except my view is that if it is going to be that way, especially for young people, they should embrace it and design the best possible world they can.

Which of these issues we have talked though should be given top priority in research?

I think it is too late for energy. I don’t think it is possible to avoid what they call a gap – it will affect everything, including the ability to do research to find new energy sources. The number one issue is to look at these things positively and begin to design for them. I don’t talk about mitigating anything. It is way to late for mitigating climate change and mitigating energy. All you can do is anticipate it, design for it, embrace it and find out what the best possible future is, for you individually and your community and the world, through that transforming process.

Do you think the concepts of wild cards and weak signals are ambiguous in any way? Would you use other words or other definitions?

The concept of a wild card implies a normal future. Each one that somebody thinks is a wild card is a wild card in relation to what they think a normal future is. All these wild cards are a constituent element or trends or foundations of someone’s alternative future. So if I was going to analyse them usefully for policy makers, it would be to put them in the four future perspectives and see what scenarios result from them. They are interrelated, but based upon different logics of what is going to happen, what is most important. 

So you would loosen the boundaries around each one to see the bigger context and the links. What are the best methods to identify wild cards?

I am familiar with attempts to systemize it, like the RAHS2 system in Singapore. Singapore is one of the most futures-oriented nations in the world, because its only resource is intelligence. They look around and constantly try to see what is new. They will abandon what has worked before but is no longer working, and try something new. They have been very serious about trying to find a method. I have worked with their judiciary for about 10 years, but it is way too complicated and too positive; it still represents the social science paradigm.
The method I use I call is emerging issue analysis and is a very simple context. Graham Moliter pointed out that everything that exists now as a problem or opportunity that everybody knows about was totally unknown and non-existent. Everything goes through an S-curve of growth, from emergence to slow growth to take off period through maturity as a problem or opportunity perhaps to death, or cycles up and down again. Most futurists are concerned about things in the trend area, while most decision makers are only concerned with things at the top. Futurist/foresight people say you have to study these things earlier and the decision makers say ‘No, we have enough problems to deal with now’, and so there is that conflict. The concept of wild card lies in that very earliest growth, when something is just beginning to be identified. So I try to teach my students how to define, scan for emerging issues which could become trends and problems, and how the emerging issues merge together with trends and other emerging issues to create different scenarios of their development. To be a good scanner, you need to be able to pick up the new bits, the new signals in a mass of otherwise ordinary stuff and make connections. You need to read widely.