A lot of people that work in technology are familiar with some variation of the quote, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Ask them who said it, and they’ll say: Alan Kay. Certainly I did—until yesterday. Turns out, it comes from Dennis Gabor, a physicist that won the Nobel Prize in 1971 for his work on holography. In fact, Gabor wrote a book with the title Inventing the Future.

From the book:

We are still the masters of our fate. Rational thinking, even assisted by any conceivable electronic computors, cannot predict the future. All it can do is to map out the probability space as it appears at the present and which will be different tomorrow when one of the infinity of possible states will have materialized. Technological and social inventions are broadening this probability space all the time; it is now incomparably larger than it was before the industrial revolution—for good or for evil.

The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man’s ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive.

I was particularly struck by Gabor’s observation that the probability space of possible futures is increasing, with an increased range of outcomes that range between good and evil.

On the evil side, I think about carbon emission and the climate emergency, gene editing and its potential impact on the humanity, facial recognition and its potential for oppression, social media’s impact on democratic process and mental wellbeing, etc.

On the good side, I think about the continuing miracles of modern medicine, the remarkable improvement in global wellbeing (not least, lifting billions out of poverty), the miracle of computing power and access to global knowledge in a device the size and weight of a deck of a cards, and so forth.

Gabor’s vision ultimately is optimistic and empowering. We can invent the future we want with technology, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to tilt that future towards good rather than evil.