Jack Stilgoe introduces sciencehorizons

Julia is feeling run down. She’s also in a hurry.

She doesn’t have time to see a doctor, so she heads for a clinic to pay for a remote diagnostic. It’s expensive, but time is money. In the waiting room, Katie is waiting with her child, who has had trouble with her back since a car crash in 2018. Katie doesn’t see why all the new therapies cost so much. She can’t afford to make her daughter well, or ‘better than well’, as the adverts promise. On the chair opposite, George is waiting to see a real doctor. It takes longer, but he needs to talk. He’s in good shape for a man his age, but he’s worried that his Alzheimer’s drugs aren’t doing their job.

Predicting the future

Science and technology point forwards. Their currency is the future. And as they play a bigger role in our everyday lives, society has become more forward-looking. However, as sociologist Anthony Giddens reminds us, it is also worrying: ‘The world in which we live, rather than being a world of increasing certainty, is much more one of increasing uncertainty.’1

Governments and businesses direct more and more energy and money towards foresight, scenarios, horizon-scanning, call it what you will. They invest more and more in prediction so they can prepare better for what’s coming.

At the same time, it has become recognised that debates about science, technology and the future need to include a wider range of voices.

Over the last five years, the UK has seen a move towards ‘upstream’ public engagement in science.2 Scientists and members of the public are coming together to ask new questions about the role of science, the future and the sort of world we would like to live in. The time is now right to think about how we can bring these conversations together into a programme of democratic deliberation about the future.

Need for democracy

Until now, the future has not been very democratic. It has been the preserve of experts and companies.

This ‘great man’ view of the future is driven by technology. It is an extrapolation from what technology does for us today to what future technologies will do for us tomorrow. And though it advertises itself by its predictions, its track record is not great.

We have all heard the stories in which technologists have been let down by their foresight (I think there is a world market for maybe five computers – Thomas Watson, founder of IBM; Some day, every town in America will have one of these – Alexander Graham Bell talking about the telephone; and many more).

As well as being unreliable, visions of the future that are driven by technologists and technologies normally exclude any sort of discussion of what people might want.3 It is no coincidence that many pictures of the future leave out people. Monorails and hovercars fly facelessly beneath cloudless skies. When people are included in utopias, they tend to be homogenised. The slogan of the 1933 World Fair, Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms, makes sense only in the realm of sci-fi.

The question is: how can we put people back into the future?

sciencehorizons project

The sciencehorizons project looks to do just this.

Working with the government’s Horizon-Scanning Centre and science centres throughout the UK, the project is asking people what their hopes and fears are for the future of science, with the aim of feeding it back directly into government policy. The Centre needs not only foresight (an ability to see what might be coming) but also insight – an ability to make sense of what might be coming. These are not tasks that can be achieved by a group of experts sitting in a smoke-filled room. They require new perspectives and new approaches.

Scenarios such as the one above will prompt the public discussions. But instead of saying to people, ‘This is the future, what do you think?’, we will be asking ‘This is one future, what do you want?’ Rather than starting with technologies, we will be starting with people.

One of project’s aims is to reach as many people as possible. If you’re interested, and would like to get involved – as a participant or in running a discussion event – visit the sciencehorizons website or send an email.

References

1. Anthony Giddens’s 1999 Reith Summary lecture
2. See Wilsdon J, Wynne, B and Stilgoe, J (2005). The Public Value of Science, Demos
3. For example, see Alan Cox's article Where did texting come from?, Science & Public Affairs, June 2006

Jack Stilgoe is Senior Researcher at Demos