Introducing The Prediction Machine
A project investigating the history of science, technology, and futurology in the UK.
Long-term thinking seems to be in vogue in politics. The slogan for the latest Conservative party conference was “Long-term decisions for a brighter future”, while ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s ex-Chief Adviser, Dominic Cummings, gave a glowing review in 2015 to Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, a book that apparently influenced him so profoundly that he hired a eugenicist to Downing Street based on its insights.
The popularity of futures thinking is not limited to the British Conservative party. When Ursula von der Leyen became President-Elect of the European Commission in 2019, she announced a new European Vice-President of Foresight, the Slovakian Maroš Šefčovič. Foresight, Šefčovič explained, would give Europe “world-class anticipatory governance”, helping to identify “key transformative megatrends”, especially in future areas of innovation.
What is Foresight? A return to the UK offers answers. There, Foresight has been a feature of science and technology policy-making since 1993, when the British government’s Office of Science and Technology launched a Foresight Programme. The now-renamed Government Office for Science’s Foresight Unit published in 2017 “The Futures Toolkit”, which describes “tools for futures thinking and foresight” in UK government, such as horizon scanning, scenario planning, Delphi surveys, and backcasting.
Foresight is thus not just any prediction tool, but one that has focussed especially on science, technology, and innovation. And while its point of origin might seem like the UK in the early 1990s, Foresight and other forms of futures research have a longer history of influencing science and technology policy, both in the UK and beyond. In order to understand how Foresight has developed such a grip on policy-makers - and how it might have thereby opened up some futures while closing off others - this longer history is essential.
This newsletter, the first from my new project, The Prediction Machine: Science, Technology, and Futurology in British Government, gives an overview of how I’m approaching this history. I’ll start by exploring the wider history of futurology. I’ll then move on to explain why I think a history of futurology that focusses on national policy-making is important. Finally, I’ll go into more detail about how I plan on approaching that history, exploring the cases that I already know of and my next steps for the project.
Futures of the World
In 1972, a group of scientists predicted the end of the world. Using a computer simulation called “world dynamics”, these scientists argued in their report, The Limits to Growth, that overpopulation would lead to extreme resource scarcity and global environmental collapse in the 21st century.
The British government did not agree. The government’s Cabinet Office set up an interdepartmental Committee on Future World Trends, composed of scientists from various government departments, and chaired by the government’s Chief Scientist, the metallurgist Alan Cottrell.1 The formation of this Committee on Future World Trends provided Peter Walker, the government’s Secretary of State for the Environment, with the necessary ammunition to tell reporters at the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 that Britain was starting its own “limits-to-growth unit”. This was necessary, Walker explained, because the British government was “not persuaded by everything that has been said about these matters lately”.2
The Limits to Growth and Britain’s Committee on Future World Trends arrived during an international vogue for futures research, sometimes also called “futurology”. Futurology took diverse shapes, many of which reflected the Cold War in which they were born.3 Some forms offered alternative futures for liberal capitalism, in opposition to the singular, fixed futures of Soviet communism. Other forms sought to reject the Cold War, and drew on peace research, ecology, and systems analysis to exit the dichotomies of capitalism and communism, rather than uphold them.
This politicisation of futures research also held true for the UK’s Committee on Future World Trends. The Committee soon produced a report that defended Britain’s mixed economy.4 These government scientists argued that market forces would help resolve resource scarcity issues – that the high prices for scarce resources would allow excess profits to be invested in discovering new resource deposits, or in innovations that would allow more efficient resource use. They also wrote that these market forces should be matched by strong state-supported science funding to further drive innovation.
Britain’s Committee on Future World Trends and its Foresight Programme both show that futures research had an influential role within national government. But histories of futurology tend to focus on its international, intellectual history, on scholars and networks. These histories show that futurology fell out of favour in the 1980s, as it failed to earn scholarly credibility, and so “futures” became a realm of consultancy and outsourcing, of “strategic planning” and “horizon scanning”.
This is evident even today – for example, the UK Government Office for Science’s Futures Toolkit was not written in-house, but rather out-sourced to an external consultancy, Waverley Consultants, which specialises in “horizon scanning, scenario planning, and strategy development”. This narrative of outsourcing and commercialization often gets wrapped into broader narratives about the rise of neoliberalism, in which futures research turned from humanity’s world futures into an entrepreneurial endeavour, oriented towards commercial clients and market choice.
But this focus on the private-sector commercialization of the future overlooks the influential role of the nation-state in these changes. These broad narratives, such as neoliberalization and marketization, are all processes that involved transforming the state and its boundaries with wider transnational processes and organisations, such as international commerce and European integration. As the creation of the Foresight Programme in the UK in 1993 shows, the nation-state had by no means disengaged from futures research. So, to really understand the role of futurology in these transitions, looking at its influence on national policy-making is crucial.
Futures and the Nation-State
Many nations have interesting histories with futures research in national policy-making, from Bertrand de Jouvenel’s futuribles in France, to the West German hearings on technology assessment in the mid-1970s, to Daniel Bell’s Commission on the Year 2000 in the USA. But, for a couple reasons, the UK has a particularly relevant and useful history for understanding the role of futures research in national policy-making.
The first, and most obvious, is that one of Foresight’s main origin points is the UK. Studying the history of futures research in the UK thus offers insight into the origins and politics of a popular futures technique. But this reasoning also extends to before Foresight’s origins. The British government was already playing a prominent role in futures debates in the early 1970s, setting up a Committee on Future World Trends to counteract influential futures studies, like The Limits to Growth, that threatened the political-economic assumptions of the day.
A history of British futures research thus shows how and why the British government turned to the future in times of need, and how this influenced the uses of futurology in policy-making, at home and abroad. In short, this history could help understand how and why policy-makers have come to value some ways of researching the future, and not others.
The second reason is that futures research, such as Foresight, seems to have been involved in significant political-economic transitions. The UK played an early and exemplary role in the major transitions of the 1980s and 1990s. The UK denationalised its economy harder, faster, and earlier than its European neighbours, exemplifying a “British paradigm” of privatising and liberalising science, technology, and industry to the EEC.
Futurology was a part of these changes. I’ve already shown how futurology became important in the run-up to the privatisation of British Telecom, and I think it played a similarly influential role in the British government’s changing policies for science, technology, and innovation through this period. A history of British futures research thus offers insight into how futurology supported the development of new marketized and denationalized approaches to science, technology, and industry.
Just because this project will focus on the UK, however, does not mean that it is a mono-national history. The transnational circulation of futures expertise did not only happen at the level of intellectual networks and foundations, but also between government experts. As the next section on futurology in the UK will show, this is not a history of Britain alone, but of Britain and Europe, of Britain and the world.
Futurology in the UK
This history of futurology-for-policy in the UK begins with the first encounters that figures in British policy circles had with futurology in the mid-1960s. These included Jeremy Bray, Labour MP and member of the Club of Rome, which commissioned The Limits to Growth; Michael Young, sociologist and Labour party grandee, who chaired the Social Science Research Council and its Next Thirty Years Committee; and the economist Andrew Shonfield, author of Modern Capitalism, defender of state planning, and earmarked as first director of a pan-European forecasting institute, which never came to fruition.
From around 1970, futures research seems to have become more institutionalised, both in government and in arms-length advisory units. As mentioned above, the Cabinet Office set up an interdepartmental Committee on Future World Trends, which also included a world modelling unit based in the Department of the Environment. The Ministry of Technology, in partnership with the Atomic Energy Authority, set up a Programmes Analysis Unit, which conducted technological forecasting studies for clients both inside and outside government.
The University of Sussex’s Science Policy Research Unit, founded in 1966, received a major grant from the UK Research Councils in 1971 for a futures research programme, ‘Social and Technological Alternatives for the Future’. Through this programme, state funding supported SPRU’s own critiques of Limits to Growth and many SPRU researchers, including Marie Jahoda, Keith Pavitt, and its director, Christopher Freeman, consulted government bodies on various futures exercises. SPRU remained influential throughout this history, with two later members, Ben Martin and John Irvine, developing Foresight for the British and Dutch governments.
The 1970s also saw exchanges between British and international futures research. At the start of the decade, the UK was involved in discussions to set up the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in London. The IIASA was intended to bridge the Cold War divide by providing a site for scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain to work on systems analysis, a field that had substantial overlaps with futures research.5 Solly Zuckerman, the UK government’s Chief Scientist before Alan Cottrell, took a prominent role in these deliberations, which collapsed in 1971 after Operation FOOT expelled Soviet officials from the United Kingdom. The IIASA instead opened in Laxenburg, Austria, where it remains to this day.
These exchanges between the British government and the international futures research community continued throughout the decade. After the Committee on Future World Trends produced its official response to The Limits to Growth, it persisted mostly to contribute to the OECD’s Interfutures project, particularly through its world modelling unit, which conducted modelling for the OECD on contract. Wayland Young, Lord Kennet, the Labour peer, chaired the Council of the European Communities’ ‘Europe Plus 30’ project, which led to the creation of the European Communities’ ‘Forecasting and Assessment in Science and Technology’ programme in 1978. Forecasters from the Programmes Analysis Unit also helped institutionalise technology assessment, notably advising the West German government hearings on technology assessment in the mid-1970s.
The 1980s saw a reorganisation of British futures research. Some governmental futures research ended or was outsourced. For example, the Committee on Future World Trends was disbanded, partly displaced by a new Interdepartmental Committee on Climatology, and its world modelling simulation seems to have been franchised out to the Technical Change Centre, an independent research unit in West London.6 The Programmes Analysis Unit also disbanded, with some of its staff joining the Cabinet Office’s Advisory Council on Applied Research and Development, ACARD.7
In 1983, ACARD commissioned the first report on Foresight from SPRU’s Ben Martin and John Irvine. This report allegedly fell on deaf ears because it was too interventionist for Thatcher’s government.8 After Martin and Irvine developed Foresight further for the Dutch government in the late 1980s, Foresight then returned to the UK to receive a warmer reception under John Major in 1993, when the Government Office for Science and Technology began the UK Foresight Programme. The history of the UK Foresight Programme’s early years is likely the closing point for this project.
The Future of the Project
The examples above are the various points of contact I’ve found so far between futures research, science and technology policy, and British government from the 1960s to the 1990s. The goal of this project is first, to find any more points of contact, and second, to join the dots together.
In doing so, I want to understand how and why futurology became important for the UK government, especially for science and technology policy, at these moments in time – and, hopefully, to find out what that meant for the underlying political economy of science, technology, and the future, in the UK and beyond.
This project is funded by a VENI grant from NWO, the Dutch Research Council, until 2026. My ultimate goal is to write a book based on this research, and hopefully a couple journal articles along the way. I started this newsletter to share updates on this research as it progresses for a couple reasons. First, I find that I need to write in order to think, but I’d prefer to write faster and sketchier with the end goal of a book in mind, rather than already fixate on journal articles before I’ve had time to fully think through this research. Second, this project, between now and the eventual book, is always a work-in-progress, and I hope that by sharing that work, readers might have ideas, feedback, and critiques that they’d like to share with me in return.
My plan is to publish a newsletter article at least once a month. My next step is to revisit the historiography of UK science policy. It’s been quite some time since I last systematically read through it, and I’d like to see how the cases of British futurology mentioned above fit into that historiography, as well as perhaps discover instances of futures research that I didn’t know of. That’s what I’ll be working on for the next few weeks at least, and I’m planning for my next newsletter to be a bibliography of UK science policy histories – maybe it’ll help future historians, and hopefully readers can point out any gaps in my knowledge.
In the same vein, if there are any perspectives or subjects you think are missing from the project overview in today’s newsletter, please let me know in the comments below or email me on jacob dot ward at maastrichtuniversity dot nl. Thanks for reading, and if you haven’t already, please consider subscribing using the button below.
For more on this committee, see Jon Agar, “‘Future Forecast--Changeable and Probably Getting Worse’: The UK Government’s Early Response to Anthropogenic Climate Change,” Twentieth Century British History 26, no. 4 (December 2015): 602–28; Thomas Turnbull, “Simulating the Global Environment: The British Government’s Response to the Limits to Growth,” in Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain, ed. Jon Agar and Jacob Ward (London: UCL Press, 2018), 271–99.
Jon Tinker, “Britain to Start a Limits-to-Growth Unit,” New Scientist, June 15, 1972.
Jenny Andersson, The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post Cold War Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Elke Seefried, Zukünfte: Aufstieg Und Krise Der Zukunftsforschung 1945-1980 (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015).
‘WT(73) 20: The Influence of Market Forces on Resource use and Technological Change’, CAB 134-3704, The National Archives, Kew, UK.
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened up the Cold War World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).
‘WT(81) 2: Future of the Committee’, 26 November 1981, CAB 134/4578, The National Archives, Kew, UK
Mihaela Y. Smith, “The Experience of the U.K. Programmes Analysis Unit,” Impact Assessment 1, no. 3 (September 1982): 40–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/07349165.1982.9725468.
Ben R. Martin, “The Origins of the Concept of ‘Foresight’ in Science and Technology: An Insider’s Perspective,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Strategic Foresight, 77, no. 9 (November 1, 2010): 1438–47, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2010.06.009.