Invented and predicted futures: A response exploring potential and pitfalls

In his paper ‘Invented and Predicted Futures: Britain and the Challenge of Air Defence’ David Jordan illustrates the difficulties inherent in predicting the future, in a Defence context, and contrasts that approach with the desirable concept of ‘Inventing the Future’ which has been popularised by Alan Kay. This is a potentially powerful approach that aims to break free from the entanglements of the present (e.g. constantly trying to design a faster horse) by imagining what the future might hold (e.g. a tank). It was applied with great success at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in the 1970s and early 1980s, where a raft of computing innovations, including laser printers, personal computers and Ethernet, were developed and so its track record makes it worth considering in a Defence context.

Alan Kay has articulated a seven step process, which may be divided into two phases:

Imagining and sanity checking novel concepts:

1. ‘Cosmic Goodness’ intuition – describe a (very) useful product that might exist in the future.
2. Identify favourable exponentials – consider what technology trends are apparent that would enable the product.
3. Extrapolate the technology trends over the next 30 years, to see what the product could look like at that point.
4. Test whether you can say ‘it would be ridiculous if we didn’t have this after 30 years’.

Making the concept real and investigating what it allows:

5. Wind the concept and the technology back to 10 – 15 years in the future and consider ‘can something like this be done?’
6. Pay what is necessary to deliver this future product now.
7. Manufacture sufficient items to gain experience of using them and see what happens.

Using this process PARC produced the Alto Computer in 1973, which had most of the features and functionality of the mass market personal computers that appeared about a decade later. The use of significant numbers of this computer (2,000 were built) led to other computing developments, but the computers were relatively bulky and cost $32,000 each in 1979 (equivalent to some $125,000 today). Despite this, if Xerox had exploited this product as effectively as they did the laser printer, also invented at PARC, it could have given them a significant lead in the new personal computer industry. The potential to generate a similar collection of innovations in Defence would be hugely attractive and so, to balance against this potential pay-off, we shall consider some of the challenges that might arise.

Whilst imagining future products that could be very useful should not be too taxing, identifying what favourable exponentials exist that could enable them is altogether more difficult. The classic example of this type is Moore’s Law where, if one assumes that computing power doubles every two years, we find that 30 years into the future one would expect a machine to have somewhere around 32,000 times the power of a current machine. Moore’s Law actually reports the observed doubling of transistors in an Integrated Circuit every two years, but this process has the effect of delivering exponential growth in computing power.

It is not clear whether any specifically aviation-related technologies show this pattern. If we consider aircraft speed, we observe that the increase in the maximum speed of an air breathing aircraft has only increased linearly, although the introduction of axial flow gas turbines in the early 1950s did change the slope of the graph.

From a scientist’s viewpoint investment is therefore required to investigate a wide range of potential ‘exponentials’ to see which of them might support an ‘invented future’ for military aviation.

It was in this spirit of investigation that the UK government issued contracts for heavy jet bombers in the late 1940s, resulting in the Short Sperrin (which was not put into full scale production) and the Vickers Valiant, Avro Vulcan and Handley Page Victor (all of which were). Although it is questionable whether all three of the V Bomber types needed to be produced, the development and test flying of the four competing designs allowed informed judgements to be made about the risks and potential benefits of each of the candidate platforms.

Such a grand approach is unlikely to be affordable today, nor would Industry have the capacity to deliver four different prototype aircraft in a short period. However, even if such an approach were feasible today, it is unclear whether politicians and project managers would find it acceptable to invest resources in technology demonstration that may not be progressed. From a scientific viewpoint a technology demonstration that fails, because fundamental limitations in the technology are discovered, is a complete success as knowledge about that technology has been materially increased and better informed decisions can be made about it in the future. However, from a project management viewpoint where the aim is to ‘achieve specific project objectives according to the project acceptance criteria’ such an outcome would appear to be a disaster.

The expectation that every project should successfully deliver the project outcomes tends to drive managers to expect that research should behave like a game of golf, where each shot can be expected to travel straight down the fairway, with the measure of success being how far the ball travels. In fact research projects are more like cricket or baseball, where it is accepted that the majority of balls or pitches will not result in any score, but where one hopes that it will not result in dismissal either. The ‘dot’ balls must be regarded not as failure but as part of the overhead involved in building a winning score.

Perhaps the most pithy expression of why a broad range of research activities is required is attributed to Ice Hockey legend Wayne Gretsky who (reportedly) said ‘you miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take’.

Whilst ‘Inventing the Future’ offers scientists and technologists the opportunity to invent the next big thing (or even the one after that) this can be hazardous in a military context. David Jordan, in his conclusion, recognises that there is danger in ‘placing too great an emphasis on these areas at the expense of the items necessary to provide the suite of capabilities to deliver effective air power’. The impact of the enemy having a vote is explored in Arthur C Clark’s short story Superiority and other historical examples exist, where becoming obsessed with a future super weapon may distract from more immediate concerns.

The story concerns a war in a space faring future, where one side has a distinct technological advantage. The Chief of the Research Staff is convinced that new technology will offer a speedy end to the conflict opining What we want are new weapons – weapons totally different from any that have been employed before.

New weapons are developed and show great promise, so all effort is placed on producing them and all offensive action is suspended until they can be made available. However there are considerable delays in fielding the weapons What we did not appreciate was the magnitude of the task we were attempting, and the length of time it would take to get the revolutionary super-weapon into battle.

There are several iterations of new weapons, each more obviously war winning than the last, but each with its own difficulties, during which time the enemy has been busy constructing a multitude of low-tech space ships, with which they attack and win the war as the new weapons never quite work as expected.

Therefore, whilst ‘inventing the future’ gives a great opportunity for technological superiority to be established, there are risks involved and one must be careful not to lose today’s battle whilst preparing for one in a decade’s time.

Mr Tim Jefferis is a Senior Principal Engineer at Defence Science and Technology Laboratory

This piece was responding to the paper 'Invented and Predicted Futures: Britain and the Challenge of Air Defence, written by Dr David Jordan and published by the Freeman Air and Space Institute, King's College London.

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