The future is inherently unpredictable. Not all of it is: depending on the time scale of your prediction, some aspects of the future won’t change very much. The sun will still be rising in 100 years, for instance. The eventual fate of the sun, in several million years, is also quite predictable, because stars turn out not to be that complex: they’re mostly just big balls of plasma undergoing constant nuclear fusion.

The sun, and many other phenomena, belong to the lowest rung of the pace layering model of change: nature. Nature moves very slowly, so you can usually predict no change and you’ll be about right.

As we move up the ladder, things become less predictable. For instance, unexpected discoveries in science can change our culture, governance, or infrastructure layers quite a lot. Physics was once thought to be almost solved; late 19th century scientists expected all future improvement to be incremental. And then Planck, Einstein and others changed physics completely, and a hundred years later we have nuclear-powered energy infrastructure and a world order partially based on weapons of mass destruction among other completely unforeseen developments.

Still, technology isn’t that hard to predict. If something is in principle allowed by the laws of physics, then a prediction that it will be invented someday is likely to be true, given enough time. People have forever known that human flight was a theoretical possibility; it was a staple of science fiction at least since Greek myth. It took centuries, and there were many skeptics, but heavier-than-air flight did eventually come to pass. So will many technologies that feel futuristic today.

Thus the future isn’t wholly unpredictable. But there is a part of it that is utterly impossible to forecast. I am referring to that wiggly, chaotic line in the top layer: fashion, also known as aesthetics.

The future is aesthetically unpredictable, but we still want to depict it — to tell cool stories, and to have visions to dream about.^[1] So how do we do that?

Most people today have a linear conception of time. The past seems to be constantly receding, while the future is getting closer: they are opposites on the temporal dimension. So if you want to imagine future aesthetics, you will intuitively try to steer away from past aesthetics. Unless you’re trying to make a point about the cyclical nature of time — or predicti...

Futurism