Dr Linstone earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Mathematics from Columbia University and the University of Southern California, respectively. He now holds the rank of University Professor Emeritus of Systems Science at Portland State University, where he has served as director of its Systems Science Ph.D. Program and Futures Research Institute. His twentytwo years of industrial experience include positions at Hughes Aircraft company and Lockheed Corporation, where he was Associate Director of Corporate Planning - Systems Analysis. He has served as visiting Professor at the University of Rome, the University of Washington, and Kiel University, West Germany. He has been a consultant to many organizations, including the US House of Representatives, State of Alaska oil Spill Commission, Alberta Economic Development Commission, and UN Asian-Pacific center for Technology Transfer, as well as corporations such as IBM and United Airlines. In 1993-94 he served as president of the International Society for the Systems Sciences.

We are looking at global weak signals and wild cards. Are you working on any research projects at the moment?
 
There is interrelation between many of these items, so it is hard to isolate them. But I will begin with your first question about wild cards.
 
Wild cards that might occur in the next 20 years?
 
Many people have made lists of these. One is greenhouse warming due to carbon dioxide and methane, and the associated impact uncertainty, such as the level of rise of oceans and the degree of warming of the Northern hemisphere. For example, it has an effect on agriculture: warming means some areas near the equator will become unusable for farming and others throughout the North will become more friendly for farming (e.g. Canada may have much more agricultural land available). The melting of the Antarctic ice cap and the Arctic ice cap will raise the ocean level. The uncertainty is how much. There will be precursor events like a small level of temperature change in the ocean and in the currents that will affect land areas in Europe. They will presage much larger change after 20 years. Super volcanos could also have a very negative effect on agriculture and on all kinds of life forms. Super earthquakes of magnitude 9 or 10 would be devastating to huge populations. Then there are pandemics. The black plague that killed about 30 percent of the European population in 1347 seemed to originate in China. With today’s ease of transportation, it is even more likely that a pandemic would spread everywhere across the globe, even to Australia. Massive nuclear war could cause a nuclear winter and a global famine as a result of that. Cyber warfare is attracting a lot of attention right now: the ability to damage or wreck an industrial facility or communication system or global financial system and global electricity grids, and so on. That is a serious technological concern. Then you have other forms of warfare, such as biological and robotic. These could be carried out by terrorists and provide very little warning, thus placing a tremendous burden on the intelligence gathering systems. We already have cyber spying today and it has been discussed recently. Stuxnet has possibly been used already to damage computer systems and networks. So those are some of the negative wild cards. On the positive side, (and I have written about this in a keynote speech I gave in 2007 at the PICMET conference in Portland), we have already moved from the industrial age and are now in the information technology age. Next comes the bio/nano technology age. This has a very interesting aspect to it, which is convergence – for example, biology becoming a kind of computer science and computers taking on some biological characteristics. You can already see this in some of the labelling, e.g. ‘computer viruses’. Convergence is particularly due to the fact that we are going into the molecular age, let’s say by 2025. This means we will be working at molecular levels, with very small molecular and atomic units, which means using very basic building blocks which underlie all of the sciences, biology, chemistry etc. So there will be a convergence of biology, engineering and other areas. Biology, chemistry, physics and computer science all use genetic algorithms, neuron networks and molecular programming. You have bio informatics and combinatorial chemistry – all these break down the old traditional boundaries between sciences, between biology, chemistry and so on, and you have nano technology, bio technology, cognitive science, and information technology. For example, neuropsychiatric research mainly into nanoparticles that course through the brain may provide new insight on how the brain processes information, identifying possible blockages. Bio computers may be implanted to serve as molecular doctors, locating problems, so that in medicine and psychiatry you have a whole new domain of activity. So, hopefully, these are positive wild cards. We may even create living organisms in this molecular age. Some optimists like Ray Kurzweil talk about robotic intelligence surpassing human intelligence. You will certainly confront problems, and this concerns your impact question. For example, information technology accelerates globalization (it has already done that).This leads to systemic complexity and in today’s newspapers there are weak signals that we are not able to handle very well. Economists are unsure whether they want to increase taxes or cut deficits and increase the debt of nations, etc. This is made more complex than ever by the fact that the economy in every country is related to almost every other economy. This mushrooming systemic complexity is a major concern. It is increasing constantly now, galvanized by telecommunications, and it accelerates the pace of change, which is beginning to overwhelm our institutional capability to manage governance. National leaders do not know what actions would alleviate the growing problems. Respected economists are at sea as to what policies we should be following. One concern is that rich nations face economic collapse. That is a possibility and it is certainly a wild card, but that possibility has several contributing factors. One is that, increasingly because of globalization, business can exploit a young, low-cost work force, wherever it exists. Due to high labour costs in California, my son’s company has shifted its manufacturing to China. As China will become more expensive, business may move to Vietnam or Africa. Long life expectancy is creating an ageing population, which means an ageing workforce that becomes technologically obsolete. We used to say that an engineer out of school for ten years is obsolete.That means this workforce will have a hard time finding jobs, even if they have a good education: the new technology will pass them by. All these factors contribute to a potential economic crisis. We are seeing signs of that already. In turn, this connects to the problem of the dysfunctional political system. We see in the USA a ‘demosclerosis’, leading to a paralysis. It is becoming harder and harder to get anything done. If you take all of that into account and you consider history, there is another possibility. It has happened before in the fifth century AD, when Christianity became the state religion in Rome, which created whole new constraints and led to a Dark Age. A forecaster in Rome in the year 200 or 250 would never have forecast that the superpower of that period would be replaced by a Dark Age. This is certainly a wild card. What could this mean? Much of science would be discredited. We already see that much of the US population does not believe in evolution or global warming. So, under a new religious domination of governance, which could be the beginning of a new Dark Age, there would be no effort to mitigate global warming. The idea would be that God would help, just as he helped with Noah’s flood. That is hard for many people to visualize. But weak signals are already there. There would be a serious reduction in support for research and development, particularly for the biological and molecular technologies. This would not be merely discouraged, but forbidden. Most cannot conceive of a serious setback like that, but it is possible, particularly with the rising discontent with the way things are going. It makes me think back to the early 1930s, when many people in Germany thought it ridiculous to consider the Nazis a serious threat. After all, Germany was a very educated and cultured country where such things could not happen. The extremely detrimental effect on German science persisted for at least a generation after the defeat of the regime. One has to be very watchful of these kinds of wild cards. One thing that concerns me is: what can you do about weak signals and wild cards? I looked at this problem three decades ago. Basically, the vast majority of the public is concerned with the here and now, not with distant events or distant space or time. The effect is what I call discounting. Economists view discounting in terms of the value of money. Future dollars are not considered as valuable to economists as dollars you get this year, because you can work with the dollars you get now to make more money. You can also talk about the discounting of problems, and I have written about this. But the point is the next question after you recognise that there is almost a universal tendency to discount distant time and space and only worry about things that are close in time and space. What can you do about that? You can amplify the weak signals in two ways. We already have technology which has been very helpful in compressing space. Think about the manned landing on the moon, a distant event in space that you could see in your living room. That is what I am talking about: transforming a near time and distant space event to a near time and near space event. We are talking about two dimensions and through telecommunications you could bring that distant event into near space and near time, instead of distant space and near time. The more difficult problem is distant time – a near space event but in distant time. Something close to your community but in the far future; 20 years from now or longer. How do you bring that nearer, that is, to take a distant time and near space event and make it near time and near space event. You can do that by video and game simulations. A good example is the movie “The China Syndrome”. It took a future possibility and made it very dramatic to get people to see it. Games like SimCity, where you play the game to develop an urban centre, are also a way to do it. Yet little has been done to use these tools to amplify the wild cards/weak signals to make them stronger signals, by bringing a distant event into your time-space horizon or, to put it another way, to extend individuals’ planning horizons, whether space or time… That is one area that I think you should address. I want to mention one more step that would also help to amplify weak signals. This dates back to 1984, when the Santa Fe Institute was formed, a centre for the study of Complex Adaptive Systems. Its work has provided much understanding that is very important for forecasting. For example, we discover that such systems are nonlinear and can have phases that can be stable, have oscillations, be chaotic or be unstable. We know that when a system becomes chaotic it is impossible to forecast its behaviour. Let me take a social system as an example, e.g. the Russian Revolution. In the early 1900s, the Russian system with the Tsars was deteriorating, but you could not forecast what would be a later stable system. You could possibly consider that there might be a chaotic phase, going from the Tsars to revolution, and that from revolution a new stable state would arise. But you could not forecast what the stable state following the Russian Revolution would be, that you would have Lenin and develop a stable communist system. This is characteristic of these complex adaptive systems. You find such behaviour in technology. Much forecasting technology involves the logistic curve or S-shaped curve. In the S-shaped curve you have the beginning when you have a new technology that is going, say, from the development of a typewriter or bicycle. There were dozens of forms of bicycle or typewriters before the successful version. You could not predict which of these dozens of possible versions would be the successful one. That is what usually happens at the beginning of the S-shaped curve. It is chaotic and hard to predict anything.Then comes stable growth, when your bicycle or typewriter technology grows in steps from about 10% of the market to 90% of the market in a fairly smooth transition, so that you can forecast it. Once you get up to the 90%, you approach system obsolescence. What is the next technology? When the S-shaped curve flattens out, you again have a chaotic phase. In other words, the S-shaped curve at the beginning and end has a kind of chaotic behaviour and in between is stable. This behaviour is found in many different areas in both technology and social systems. It was evident in 1989 when Gorbachev had perestroika and there was suddenly a collapse of the Soviet system and the end of the Soviet Union. A chaotic period followed until Putin took up the reins. That new stable outcome was again not really predictable. I was at the Berlin Wall in 1989 just a couple of weeks after the Wall fell. I visited a social studies institute about a mile or two from the Wall and nobody there had developed any scenario which considered this kind of breakdown of the Wall. This is an example of the chaotic situation, how it can appear suddenly. So there is a need and it would be very helpful to study Complex Adaptive Systems. There is a way to do it using agent base modelling to determine phase transitions to obtain better insight of complex economies and facilitate precautionary actions. You can try to identify phase boundaries in stability and chaos. This is very helpful for decoupling complex systems connections. For example, when a system is so complex you can’t handle it, to make it more tractable you cut some of the feedback loops to delay the onset of chaos. Another thing that you need to consider is that systems can become too centralized or too decentralized. In other words, a balance is crucial between centralization and decentralization, or between globalization and localization. This need is of particular relevance with today’s globalization made possible by information technology and communications technology. There is a threat of global cartels and so balancing centralization and decentralization can be very important. With these complex systems we are still in a learning phase. Another thing you can do is delaying the onset of chaos by cutting feedback loops. You can also go in the other direction and enhance feedback loops in order to accelerate research and development to counter wild cards. So you have these options, all of which require deeper insight into how complex adaptive systems work. There is still a lot to learn about this. Finally, when you have concern about wild cards and you want to have long-term policy, and it is difficult because there is so much uncertainty over the long term, there are now ways to look for nearterm actions that permit flexibility for shaping long-term sustainable strategies. I specifically refer to Long-Term Policy Analysis, an approach by Rand Corporation described in a book by Lempert, Popper and Bankes in 2003. This book is about using the computer to develop a vast array of scenarios and then coming up with reasonable actions in the near term that provide a better flexibility over the long term. As you get more information, you can refine and change your actions. That is a fairly sophisticated approach developed in the last seven years.
 
Which one of these negative wildcards do you think is more likely to happen in 2020?
Or which one do you think deserves further research because, even if it is unlikely in the horizon of 2020, you think the current knowledge in the community would not be sufficient to take precautionary actions?
 
I mentioned the movement from the age of information technology to the age of molecular technology, which is also a positive wild card. It creates many issues, ethical, religious and all kinds of issues, because the ability, for example, to create living organisms is a very sensitive subject. I think it needs clarification and a lot of attention, because otherwise it has the potential to create a lot of conflict in the society, just like the anti-abortion conflict. Things that can be done with molecular technology are so significant and basic to life that it can create all kinds of bad effects. A good technology can create bad effects because the reaction to this technology can be very negative. In other words, it can be so anti-science that it can damage other areas that have nothing to do with it, because it can set back all of science and technology. I would also focus on the economic potential, economic collapse, particularly of the wealthy countries. I should add to that the ongoing population growth to over 9 billion from 6.5 billion and the resulting migration problems affecting Europe, America. They can also be part of the economic mess that we seem to be edging towards.
 
This adds another bullet to my negative list, which is the convergence we have in the positive list. But there is also a negative side to convergence, which is unexpected use of convergent technologies that might raise these ethical issues – is that right?
 
Yes it can raise very serious ethical issues. Throughout history there has been a power struggle between religion and the state. This can reignite the struggle; the molecular age could reignite this because of the concern with human life factors. We see it already in the USA. In Texas, for example, the school boards are forcing schools to use texts that include intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. If the molecular age can bring this kind of conflict to the forefront, it can threaten the separation of church and state. I am often puzzled when I read what some of these people are convinced of, as it seems so unbelievable to me; but this situation exists and it could get much more disturbing. I mentioned going back to another Dark Age, because that would be the worst kind of situation. But when you get these technological factors and these population growth factors and the inability to deal with the workforce to find enough jobs for people, this is all interrelated. So this economic/political/ religious interaction is one of the most negative things that I would see as a major threat.
 
If you have to chose between the three negative categories, the natural events, the human cost driven by a political agenda and the unexpected impacts of current trends or developments, would you choose the last one – the most unexpected impacts of existing trends – as the most important?
 
Yes that is the most obvious one to me, the one with the strongest weak signals, because I see already how much more significant it is becoming. People in the political campaign are throwing around slogans but nobody has solutions.
 
Which of the six in this category would be the wild card that you think deserves some attention for research?

The first I have is the unexpected impacts of globalisation and ICT’s penetration; the second you mentioned is the overexpectation of the manufacturing workforce in some parts of the world and unexpected impacts of that. Or would you still not include that in your top six?
 
It is part of a natural phenomenon of population growth between now and 20 years from now, after 2050 it is going to stabilize. Therefore the growing workforce and the questionable ability to manage that workforce and the older population – all of these kinds of things coming together – this is what creates that economic threat.
 
I have that category as number 2. The third is ageing population, which might be related to this previous one, so we can put these two together. The next would be the unexpected consequences of a global economic crisis.
 
HL: Again, that is connected.
 
OK lets put this together. The next I have is what you call demosclerosis: the democracy paralysis in the USA.
 
 The possibility of demosclerosis, mentioned earlier, implying an inability of governments to manage the complex economic/political/ religious impacts effectively is exacerbated by the deepening interrelationships resulting from globalization. It may presage a period of instability that can have vast unintended consequences, such as new dictatorships and conflicts.
 
The next is the religion crisis problems, and the last one is the negative side of convergence.
 
Except for the convergence, which is a technological issue, the others were all related to each other. No single one is more important, because they all are linked. If you did not have the global workforce you would not have such a problem with the ageing population, so it is very hard to separate these. It really does not matter where you start, you move inexorably from one to the other. I list them as separate causes, but the impact of an economic or governance disaster is the result of all of these put together.
 
 Was it was easier for you to think about unexpected impacts of convergence rather than unexpected impacts of workforce issues?
 
Both are the consequence of technology. I think convergence has been less discussed because it is more subtle. The reason for convergence is that we are working increasingly at the basic building blocks like molecules, which are part of everything. So, since atoms and molecules are part of everything you deal with, convergence is a fairly natural phenomenon, which is evident, for example, when we talk about computer viruses. There is a blurring of boundaries in many areas and that will have unexpected effects, some positive and some negative. I mentioned some positive effects; the prefix ‘nano’ refers to a billionth of a metre. Particles that small can be inserted into the body and you can measure things at that level – potentially a very positive impact. You create a molecular doctor when you can sense what is happening in cells in the human body in a way you could never do before. It could provide a very effective tool for diagnosis and possibly treatment of diseases. Almost any technology will have both positive and negative impacts. The automobile is a wonderful way to move around, but also gives rise to traffic jams, pollution and fatal accidents.
 
Which of the positive impacts of convergence do you think deserves more attention?
 
The medical impact I think would be of great value. The potential is that we may be able to change the whole way we look at cancer, for example.
 
What do you think are the most important issues that the European research space should be actually focusing on? What are the top priority grand challenges the Commission talks about?
 
To me the most important is better understanding of complex adaptive systems. Our limited knowledge of that is evident every day when you open the newspaper and see the discussions and hand wringing about economic difficulties and another recession and depression and deflation and inflation. Our knowledge of how to handle complexities, whether for example one should decouple systems so that they might be easier to manage, cut the feedback loops, etc., is a very subtle issue, but also a fundamental gap in our knowledge. When I see the top economists in disagreement about areas that they once were assumed to be expert on, I realize the complexity of our systems is getting beyond what we can know how to handle well. Is decentralization the answer? If so, how much?
 
Which particular subsystem of all the systems that are already interconnected would you consider to be the main focus of attention in the next 20 years?
 
The global financial system is a top priority and that of course is part of the economic system. That is where I would focus, to prevent a collapse. The Nazi movement in Germany would not have gotten anywhere without the economic hyperinflation, depression and resulting high unemployment in the 1920s. These were the key factors that led to the election of Hitler, which in turn led to World War II. That to me is the number one threat.
 
Do you have any particular preference for a definition for wild cards or weak signals or are you happy with the working definitions we have been using so far? 
 
I don’t have a problem. I am not very concerned with definitions. In my field, some people talk about forecasting, others talk about foresight, and the question is how do you define one versus the other. I tend not to focus on terminology as much as some people do, but rather on substance. You can easily get into a kind of Talmudic debate on how you should define the subject. I edit the Technological Forecasting and Social Change journal and we recently received an interesting contribution on wild cards by Oliver Markley,1 of the Futures Program at the University of Houston- Clear Lake. The title of the paper he is working on is “Type 2 wild cards and wild card scanning: methodology for improved intelligence on the emergence of intelligence on highly disruptive phenomena”. 1 http://www.owmarkley.org/ He talks not only about high probability/low probability and high impact/low impact. He adds a credibility dimension – high and low credibility or disputed credibility – and considers disbelief or ignorance, active disbelief, disinformation, taboo, censorship and disrepute, with examples of each of these. He also talks not just about wild cards but mild cards.
 
With your background in mathematics, have you somehow considered the use of catastrophe theory and the four key elements, the strata control borders, you talk about boundaries in your papers and the links?
 
My emphasis has been on multiple perspectives as applied to complex systems. I arrived at this from my own experience in both the aerospace industry, where I was involved in systems analysis and operations research, and then at the university’s systems science programme. I found that the way technologists or engineers look at a system does not give a very complete picture for decision making. They look at the trade-offs and the cost-benefit and so on; it is basically what I call the technical perspective. The way you look at the system is like looking through a lens, the technological lens; you look at the quantitative aspects and seek optimization. That is one important viewpoint, but it is not adequate for the decision maker who has to worry about the organization, for example. Say his analysts tell him the company should go into a new line of business like undersea systems. He has to worry about who will do the work in the organization, who will be opposed to it and who will support it. That is what I call the organizational perspective. We then have the individual perspective, as decision makers have their personal agenda, their own ambitions and biases. Looking at all three of these perspectives gives a much sounder basis for decision making than looking at only the technical perspective. Each perspective elicits insights that the others do not. This has been my own focus and there are two books, the latest one in 1999 is Decision Making for Technology Executives: Using Multiple Perspectives to Improve Performance. It discusses the discounting effect that I mentioned earlier and also discusses all of these perspectives that turn out to be extremely useful. That focus is based on the fact that I realized traditional technical analysis was quite inadequate for corporate decision makers, as it looks at the system only through one lens.
 
Have you explored catastrophe theory in forecasting?  The potentials?
 
Not really from that point of view. That has been surpassed somewhat by complexity science.
 
 What in your view are the methods that are useful to gather knowledge about wild cards and weak signals?  How would you go about finding out issues?
 
I don’t think there is one way to look at this. Again, your perspective makes a big difference in what you are looking at and how you come up with ideas. You have to be interdisciplinary or nondisciplinary. That is already a problem with most academics, as they are most comfortable disciplinary approaches. I can’t tell you that there is one way. You are probably familiar with J. F. Coates’ paper on “Risk and threats to civilization, human kind, and the earth”, Futures, December 2009. He has interesting tables on the levels of seriousness of what you call wild cards and the potential casualties of each type. He considers what kind of catastrophe could wipe out humankind, greenhouse warming and a planetoid hit being two such wild cards. A final point: developing a listing of wild cards and particularly their impacts is bound to be frustrating, as it forces you to separate items that are strongly interrelated. The lesson I learned from systems thinker C. West Churchman, that “everything interacts with everything”, may not be a bad guideline for your work