Ian Pearson has been a full time futurologist since 1991, with a proven track record of around 85% accuracy at the 10 year horizon. He has delivered keynote presentations at over 1000 conferences, company away-days, PR events, dinners and workshops. He previously worked for BT, where he invented text messaging in 1991 and later established their futurology presence. He gets his inputs from conferences, reading and talking to engineers and uses this to feed his thinking about all aspects of the future. Ian’s brief now covers technology impacts in almost every major field over the 5-20 year timeframe.

Can you envisage any major wild cards, positive or negative, that may occur in the next 20 years?
 
Choose perhaps your top five. In the next 20 years we will have machines that are smarter than people. Another is that we will be able to build processors using bacteria. For example, we will be able to make ‘smart’ yoghurt, where every bacterium in the yoghurt will have electronic devices which it assembles in its own cells linked together to create skilled intelligence. So a pot of ‘smart’ yoghurt would have a higher IQ than the whole of Europe. That is a very big one and I predict it will be possible within the timeframe and by 2025. Another is a major disaster caused by an R&D accident. I think it is more likely in the biotech field. For example a virus or bacteria created in a laboratory is released by terrorists, and causes chaos. A collapse of the networks caused by terrorism or foreign powers, cyber warfare. There are a lot of efforts in that area and our networks are vulnerable. That could cause social destruction, deaths and complete business chaos for the banks. An interesting one would be a major breakthrough in solar power that brings the cost of making efficient solar cells down by, say, 20%, 50% or even 100%. There are quite a lot of positive ones. With the environmental issues, people coming together to look after the environment and people happy to work together for the common good. If that could spread throughout the world that could make for a nicer society.
 
 What would be the most dramatic impact of these wild cards and how do you think it should be addressed by future research or policy?
 
 I think the essential nature of wild cards is that the best way to deal with them is to ignore them as far as planning goes, as there are so many of them and they might not happen. You cannot make economic allowances for all the different wild cards. So ignore them and make your best plans and ensure your plans are at least a little more adaptable. Don’t plan solely on the basis that everything will always work and stay the same. So as long as you build in some adaptability to allow for unforeseen events, there is no need to plan for every individual wild card. It would be extremely expensive, because there are thousands of them. Most of them won’t happen and the ones that do you don’t know when they will happen, so it is impossible to have things in your toolkit in terms of being able to deal with them. I don’t think it is worth planning for them. We need to recognize that they might come and that the future won’t stay the same and nothing will ever go wrong. To be adaptable and to be agile – that is what I am telling every business. You make your plans and then something else comes along, so you have to be adaptable and be able to adapt quickly.
 
 What are the weak signals that could hint at the likelihood of these wild cards happening?
 
One of the weak signals is the bacteria; it is actually a strong one. We have people trying to make synthetic bacteria for energy conversion technology, such as converting coal into methane. That kind of technology, linked with other technology in IT, such as multi core processors – if you follow those down the line far enough it becomes a weak signal of how computing might go. We might have millions or billions of cores and the best way to produce those is by using synthetic biology. So there is a very weak signal at the moment, but you can see how these could work together in the future to bring a radical change in how we do computer processing and realize artificial intelligence. It also has scope for new kinds of weapons systems, which are potentially a big threat, so we should be wary of that. There are solar power weak signals. Every week there is a new development and a lot of people are putting a lot of new money into it. It is inevitable that we will have a lot of developments, but a major breakthrough is not inevitable. At the moment there are some big barriers in solar power, there is a lack of ingenuity. But I think there is a weak signal there: if enough people are looking at it, someone will stumble across a way of doing it cheaply. At the moment we are doing small incremental changes leading to a slow development path and it needs a rapid change. Weak signals of that are just the numbers of people looking at the field. Another area for weak signals is in social change. I think we are looking at very substantial reorganization of society. Many traditional techniques are clearly failing and many techniques used by politicians over the last few decades have made things much worse. There is a lot of frustration building up, people are wary of politicians and I think that is a weak signal pointing towards a major change in how we do politics. It is the same in many European countries – confidence in politics is dropping and pressure is building up for change.This is based on a lot of factors: pressures from immigration; conflicts in the religious world between East and West; conflicts on environmentalism; conflicts due to the increasing gap between generations in the population, as we have an increasingly large older population and the costs for these are going to be borne by the younger generation. We should expect major change, even revolution, in 2012 to 2013 when pressures hit critical point and people hit the streets. That is an important weak signal. In terms of science and technology, one of the weak signals comes from the environmental fiasco caused by scientists changing their results to get their message across in a continent such as Europe, where there was quite a lot of scepticism towards science and technology. There is now a complete disregard for science and technology at the grassroots level and that will produce a negativity towards it and will damage Europe in the long term. In Europe we are still digging holes and throwing science away and using guess work to form policy. That is not going to work and will put Europe at a huge economic disadvantage, especially compared to China, Brazil, Russia and the USA. That is a weak signal at the moment heading us in the wrong direction and it is bad news.
 
Can you identify any causal or other relationships between the wild cards and weak signals that you have mentioned?
 
There are many weak signals for different trends, which are coming. The weak signal might point to an environment out of which a wild card might materialize; it cannot actually lead to the wild card itself, because a wild card by its definition is something that comes out of the blue. Wild cards at best can only be loosely connected. So, for example, the multicore processing biotechnology can be loosely connected with the ‘smart’ yoghurt , but there is no direct connection there. No logical technique of looking at the processor development would lead you to smart bacteria. It requires you to link together things from different regimes. If you saw all the developments in biology and IT, you can see a lot of potential and you could spend a great deal of time analysing scenarios which are essentially worthless. I don’t think there is a formal technique which would help find the linkages.
 
 Looking ahead to the future of European research, which of the wild cards and weak signals you have mentioned should be given top priority as a research topic?
 
We ought to look at how we can recover a strong scientific reputation. The damage done by the environmentalists recently is enormous. I do not think they understand the damage they have done. There has been an enormous amount of money spent on policies which will not work and are making the environment worse. The reaction from that is already causing damage to the rest of the scientific world. Europe needs to recover that, because without good scientific method and respect in the community, the chances of dealing with any other problems are greatly reduced. In the absence of proper science, policy is made on guesswork and old wives’ tales.
 
 So a firmer scientific ground for our solution to environmental problems?
 
Yes, I think so. When the European Commission is funding the programmes, it will have to get much stricter. It must ensure they are done in strict scientific ways and the prejudices are removed and the results are not just produced to get the answers that politicians want to hear, which is how a lot of the environmental research was done. The politicians wanted to hear a particular answer and they would cherry pick the results until they got what they wanted and throw away the rest. That is not how we do science. Without credibility we cannot succeed. Europe will be damaged greatly by that, because we will be wandering around randomly, whereas China is based on scientific method and logical reasoning and will be racing ahead with double-digit growth. Scientists have to be paid to find the correct answer, not the answer the politicians have asked them to find. That is at the centre of European prosperity. We are in an age driven by technology breakthroughs and we cannot survive on the world stage unless we have sound techniques for developing technology.
 
In the iKNOW project we define wild card as a low likelihood but high impact surprising event. Would you agree with this definition?
 
Yes, that is how most futurists would define it. It is unlikely to happen at any particular time, it comes out of the blue and it has a great impact.
 
 Weak signals are observable changes in current trends or state of affairs. Some particularly important weak signals could be precursor events or indicators that might make a wild card more probable or even inevitable. Would you agree with this definition?
 
No, I do not agree with linking them to the wild cards. Weak signals are measurable or noticeable changes in an existing trend which will cause a much bigger event to happen in the future, but it is not necessarily a wild card. They are a weak indicator of a larger trend coming down the road. Part of that bigger trend might be the creation of an environment in which a wild card is more likely – that is the only way in which it is linked to wild cards.
 
 Have you used wild cards and weak signals in your work?
 
I do a lot of work on future threats and opportunities and so on. Sometimes wild cards are very appropriate, things that might happen. Weak signals is the source of revenue for almost all futurists. By thinking through the implications of weak signals that people are not noticing, you can gain insights about the future that others would not have bothered with. What gives individual futurists their edge is picking up on weak signals.
 
 Are there any interesting lessons from your previous foresight work when you used the wild cards and weak signals approach that you can share with us?
 
I was picking up the signals of virtual reality very early on. The missile industry was using virtual reality for R&D several years earlier and I overestimated the impact it would have through my own prejudices. I came to the conclusion it would be much more important in the world than it actually has become. Essentially I took a weak signal of this technology and built a future scenario based on it which was greatly exaggerated compared with what the future delivered. That was an example of how not to do it: essentially to look at a weak signal and assume it will become a bigger trend than it indicates. When looking at a weak signal, the error margin is very large. Therefore you must not make too much policy based on weak signals. All you should do is maybe increase the amount of research in that area and check and monitor the area. You should not be basing lots of new technologies and policies on weak signals, because they are unreliable. That is an important lesson.
 
 What in your view are the best methods to identify weak signals and wild cards?
 
It would be a good idea to let people’s minds wander and collect the results. There is no proper methodology for this. We all have our own little collection, based on individual expertise and what we encounter. When you go into a new field you acquire new knowledge and then you create the idea of a new thing that could happen. There is no formal methodology, just experiences and knowledge and ensuring you think about it. I do not use the formal techniques I used when I first entered futurology. Now use common sense, logical reasoning and imagination.