But all of it came together when I thought about prediction markets. The problem was that participants kept squelching their answers for reasons like conformity, timidity, or fear of being judged immoral for betting on a dark possibility. Was there a way to get past all that, and learn what the participant really thought, deep down?
The tell. I had been using it all my adult life, from poker games to mentalist shows, to helping skeptics solve hoaxes. My art form was reading human faces. And now, all my tricks and tools were going online, available to any Tom, Ahmed, and Sally. And to Sophia or any competitor who wanted to set up a predictions market. So long as the wagering participants did so over a video link, revealing their faces.
Let them make one bet consciously…but also take note when their unconscious clearly disagrees! Let both sides of the participant play and make wagers. Including the side that doesn’t care about social niceties, or tact, or conformity. The side that some autistics tap into so easily. A side of you that knows when you’re lying to yourself.
Of course, I was absolutely determined that this could only be voluntary. Participants have to know, top to bottom. But then—after some initial, reflexive outrage, why would they refuse? It’s just another modern tool. Another means of self-expression. Only this time for another, inner you.
Another way, possibly, to win your wagers.
Oh, this won’t solve the prediction problem. In fact, nothing ever will. Not sheep entrails nor the flights of birds. Nor quantum computers, chewing on ginormously Big Data. Not finely meshed cellular automata models. Nor improved systems to find folks who are right more often, giving them more cred than charlatans. Nor science fiction extrapolations, nor finely crafted scenarios. And not even vastly improved prediction markets. Some or most of those methods will help us navigate, as individuals and societies, anticipating a bit better, evading a higher fraction of mistakes. But the fantasy goal of real prophecy will always elude us, slipping just ahead, like an alluring wraith.
The future will always leap out to bite us, no matter how compulsively hard we try to penetrate its shadows with those prefrontal lamps on our brows. How much wiser, then, also to invest in resilience, not just anticipation.
Still, we are what we are. Children of Prometheus, whose name meant “foresight.” It’s how we’re built.
Magic men. Magic women. We shuffle the cards, then spread them out, like a fan. Like the many branches of a dimly lit road.
Pick one.
Dr. David Brin is a New York Times best-selling author, a physicist, a futurist, and an inventor. His background in astrophysics and space science has given him a high degree of prescience: His books have predicted global warming, cyberwarfare, and the World Wide Web. Many of Brin’s works take place within his Uplift universe and have won some of science fiction’s top awards, including 1983’s Hugo and Nebula winner Startide Rising and The Uplift War, which won the Hugo and Locus Awards for Best Novel in 1987. Brin’s postapocalyptic novel The Postman was adapted as a 1997 feature film of the same name, and his nonfiction book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? won the American Library Association’s Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award for the best published work in the area of intellectual freedom in 2000. He appears on numerous popular-science shows and consults widely for corporations, universities, and government agencies. Since 2010, Brin has served as an external advisor for NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group, and he helped establish the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California at San Diego in 2013.
Ann Leckie
Another Word for World
Ashiban Xidyla had a headache. A particularly vicious one, centered somewhere on the top of her head. She sat curled over her lap, in her seat on the flier, eyes closed. Oddly, she had no memory of leaning forward, and—now she thought of it—no idea when the headache had begun.
The Gidanta had been very respectful so far, very solicitous of Ashiban’s age, but that was, she was sure, little more than the entirely natural respect for one’s elders. This was not a time when she could afford any kind of weakness. Ashiban was here to prevent a war that would quite possibly end with the Gidanta slaughtering every one of Ashiban’s fellow Raksamat on the planet. The Sovereign of Iss, hereditary high priestess of the Gidanta, sat across the aisle, silent and veiled, her interpreter beside her. What must they be thinking?
Ashiban took three careful breaths. Straightened cautiously, wary of the pain flaring. Opened her eyes.
Ought to have seen blue sky through the flier’s front window past the pilot’s seat, ought to have heard the buzz of the engine. Instead she saw shards of brown and green and blue. Heard nothing. She closed her eyes, opened them again. Tried to make some sense of things. They weren’t falling, she was sure. Had the flier landed, and she hadn’t noticed?
A high, quavering voice said something, syllables that made no sense to Ashiban. “We have to get out of here,” said a calm, muffled voice somewhere at Ashiban’s feet. “Speaker is in some distress.” Damn. She’d forgotten to turn off the translating function on her handheld. Maybe the Sovereign’s interpreter hadn’t heard it. She turned her head to look across the flier’s narrow aisle, wincing at the headache.
The Sovereign’s interpreter lay in the aisle, his head jammed up against the back of the pilot’s seat at an odd, awkward angle. The high voice spoke again, and in the small bag at Ashiban’s feet her handheld said, “Disregard the dead. We have to get out of here or we will also die. The speaker is in some distress.”
In her own seat, the pink- and orange- and blue-veiled Sovereign fumbled at the safety restraints. The straps parted with a click, and the Sovereign stood. Stepped into the aisle, hiking her long blue skirt. Spoke—it must have been the Sovereign speaking all along. “Stupid cow,” said Ashiban’s handheld, in her bag. “Speaker’s distress has increased.”
The flier lurched. The Sovereign cried out. “No translation available,” remarked Ashiban’s handheld, as the Sovereign reached forward to tug at Ashiban’s own safety restraints and, once those had come undone, grab Ashiban’s arm and pull.
The flier had crashed. The flier had crashed, and the Sovereign’s interpreter must have gotten out of his seat for some reason, at just the wrong time. Ashiban herself must have hit her head. That would explain the memory gap, and the headache. She blinked again, and the colored shards where the window should have been resolved into cracked glass, and behind it sky, and flat ground covered in brown and green plants, here and there some white or pink. “We should stay here and wait for help,” Ashiban said. In her bag, her handheld said something incomprehensible.
The Sovereign pulled harder on Ashiban’s arm. “You stupid expletive cow,” said the handheld, as the Sovereign picked Ashiban’s bag up from her feet. “Someone shot us down, and we crashed in the expletive High Mires. The expletive expletive is expletive sinking into the expletive bog. If we stay here we’ll drown. The speaker is highly agitated.” The flier lurched again.
It all seemed so unreal. Concussion, Ashiban thought. I have a concussion, and I’m not thinking straight. She took her bag from the Sovereign, rose, and followed the Sovereign of Iss to the emergency exit.