The imperative of exploring future consequences

This is honestly pretty remarkable. As described in this recent article in The Guardian, the US government wants to explore the impacts and implications of electricity usage in cryptocurrency mining. And the industry is pushing back hard that that is outrageous, and can’t be allowed.

To be clear, this is not a proposed constraint of any kind on the mining or on its energy use. It’s just a proposed analysis of what the impacts and implications might be.

But, the industry says, “it would suffer “irreparable injury” if it was made to comply” … comply not with restrictions on what it does, but with merely a look into what it does.

I imagine the fossil fuel industry, the tobacco industry, any number of industries, risked “irreparable injury” if the implications of what they did had been queried back in the day … and in some cases maybe that wouldn’t have been all that bad a thing, in the grand scheme of the planet.

There’s a method widely used in the strategic foresight field that methodically thinks through second- and third-order implications of emerging trends and phenomena – like cryptocurrency, or anything else that might merit some “foresight-ful” consideration. Done right, it’s rooted in facts and data about whatever it is that’s being explored.

We need to do that work as the next new trends emerge, and the ones after that and the ones after those. Artificial intelligence … geoengineering … anti-aging interventions … the things we haven’t even imagined yet. We need to do it while they’re nascent, not after they’ve scaled.

And not just technologies – the future we’re creating will emerge from social and cultural innovations, developments emerging in nature that aren’t manmade, and much more than just technology. Some of those will matter much more than any technology we might invent.

Some of the changes over the horizon will be brilliant and regenerative. Some will be fantastically harmful. Most will have a mix of positive and negative implications, and thoughtful tradeoffs among them will be essential. We can’t make wise choices as societies if we don’t do the work to consider all of that. “Futurists” like me and others in the field are essential to that.

And we certainly can’t make wise choices if governments and scientists and others are precluded from looking into what industries and other innovators are doing because, heaven forbid, we might “irreparably injure” their business plans.