The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - What Will Our World Look Like After This Is All Over?

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

A lot of people are trying to predict the future these days convinced that what we are witnessing now will change everything about the way we live. Tonight a special discussion about that with someone who studies forecasting, journalist and author Dan Gardner.

and hello there peter man switch here once again with the latest episode of the bridge daily daily. So how often during this story do you say, man, show me some good news. Show me something that I can be, you know, feeling a little better about what's going on. Because you know, there is good news out there. You just have to look for it. Sometimes you don't have to look very far. You know, you may, I know in our case, I just have to look at our neighbors and the things they're doing every day. You know, they're helping friends, they're helping elderly people.

They're helping each other. They're helping each other. And every night, most of us at 7.30 in the evening go out the front door and we, you know, bang pots or try to play the harmonica or one of my neighbors plays the trumpet a little bit. And people yell and scream and they sing. And we're doing all this in support of the frontline workers. We're doing it in support of that whole list that I've mentioned many times. It can be health care workers, nurses, doctors, staff at the hospitals.

It could be firefighters, police officers, paramedics. Could be grocery store clerks. Could be truckers, farmers. You know the list. And we're just going, thank you. You know, thank you. You're such a part of the good in this story. And so are my neighbors who are helping celebrate.

The other day, some of us, you know, got ahold of the churches in town and said, you know, you should ring the bells. You should ring the bells at 7.30 with the rest of us. And that's tricky sometimes for churches because the bells can be, some are automated, they need somebody who actually knows what they're doing, there's not always somebody at the church at that time of day. But they joined in, especially over the Easter weekend.

And that was nice. They're part of the community, and they can be part of this effort as well. So that's all good news. But amidst the stark news that does exist out there, and there's a lot of it, you hear it every day in the numbers. Certainly the whole story that we focused on last night of long-term care facilities and the horrific death rate that's existing in some of those both in Ontario and in Quebec and the fact that half the deaths in Canada so far are at long-term care facilities.

It's a terrible story. And something has to be done, and governments indicated today will be done to try and fix that situation. I imagine there will be many inquiries once we get past all this as to what happened and how to ensure it never happens again. But also buried in the stats today was this one, which is nice to hear, very nice to hear. And that's how fast the increase in new cases each day is occurring. It wasn't that long ago, it's only about a week ago, that that number,

the increase in cases each day, that that number was doubling. The daily increase was doubling within two to three days. Well, today they announced that it's now doubling every nine to ten days. That's good news. That's yet another indication that we're succeeding in going, or we are succeeding in flattening the curve, which is the goal of all this quarantining and isolation and staying at home and physical distancing. That is the goal.

Flatten the curve. It's working. It is working. Now, we can't get fooled by this. I could turn on a dime if we, according to the experts, stop any of these things we're doing or relax them too quickly. We have to stay with the game flying here. But we should find that easier knowing that it's working.

It's good. So let's stick with it. Now, as a result of that, there's a lot of talk now about once we get past all this, what's life going to be like? So as I've mentioned for the last couple of nights I wanted to focus on that today and we are going to and I've got the perfect guest to do it because when you're talking about the future you probably want to talk to somebody who

spends a lot of time thinking about the future and how we determine or at least how we think, things will turn out in the future, and studies how we've done on that front in the past. So who did I find? I found Dan Gardner.

Dan's a New York Times bestselling author. He wrote Risk, the Science of Fear in the U.S. He wrote Future Babble. And he's the co-author of Super Forecasting. Well, that's what we want to talk about, forecasting, right? So I reached Dan. He lives in Ottawa. I reached Dan today, and we had a great conversation,

which I'm going to air for you right now. And you can, you might be surprised at some of the things he has to say. I won't say anything more than that. So why don't you listen to Dan Gardner, and we'll talk again on the other side. So, Dan, watching some of the morning shows today, there's already this kind of sense on the part of a lot of the interviewers that we've reached the flattening of

the curve moment, and it's already time to start talking about when this is all over, what's, you know, what's life going to be like? Now, you've written extensively books and articles on the perils of forecasting, so give us the cautions that we should have when we get into that kind of discussion. Sure. Well, let me start with the gold standard of forecasting, which is meteorology. Weather forecasts, we like to make jokes about weather forecasts, but the fact is weather forecasts are actually very good. And we know a lot about them, and they're very well defined.

So if you look 24 hours out, weather forecasts, very accurate, very trustworthy under most circumstances. But if you look 48 hours out, the weather forecast becomes a little less reliable. 72 hours out, it becomes a little less reliable. And if you get out much past one week, the weather forecast, well, you might as well flip a coin. We should probably approach other forms of forecasting in the same spirit, in the same light. So it is possible for us to forecast with some accuracy under some conditions a certain distance out. But the further out we want to go and under more difficult circumstances, more uncertain circumstances, the harder the forecast gets.

Now, the problem is we don't have political forecasts, sociological forecasting. We don't have that as well specified as meteorology. So we don't know exactly what the horizon is beyond which we cannot reasonably forecast. But I can say, both from research and from theory, and also from historical experience, that our ability to forecast under the current circumstances, the kinds of things that people want to know, which is, you know, grand scale forecasts over the long term, what's society going to be like after the crisis is over, we're terrible at that. There's very little reason to think that we can actually accurately forecast those very big-picture, very important questions under the sorts of conditions that we now exist, which is extreme uncertainty.

So it's totally understandable that people want to be able to forecast and say, here's what society is going to look like in five years. There's very little reason to think that we can do that. But is it safe to at least assume that five years from now it it won't look like it did you know five months ago or five weeks ago well you know this is one of the interesting questions um when there's a big crisis like this uh when we're in a state of uh extreme uncertainty the natural instinct is to say this changes everything um and to assume that five years out, things are going to be radically different. But we know from experience that that feeling, that intuition that things must change radically

is not a good guide. It is just not reliable. There are countless examples. You can go back to the financial crash 2008-2009. You can go back to the resource crisis. People have forgotten that one, the resource crisis of 2008-2007. You can go back to 9-11 and many more earlier circumstances where there was great uncertainty. People said, the one thing we can be sure of is that this will change everything. And in many, many cases, it changed surprisingly little. So I don't think we can even be confident that there will be radical change. There may be. But can we be confident that there

will be radical fundamental change? No. I think, in fact, what experience and theory tells us is that, and this is a very unsatisfying answer, I know it, the range of possible outcomes, which is to say the range of possible futures we face, is absolutely enormous. It goes all the way from there will be radical change of various types to, no, the status quo is completely restored. And then there's a vast range of possibilities between those extremes. And I think the more productive way to think about the future is try and identify that whole range, that spectrum of possible futures, and then ask ourselves, all right, which of these futures do we not want and which of these futures do we want? And then how can we steer ourselves away from the futures

that we don't want and steer ourselves at least a little bit more towards the futures that we do want? That's not a satisfying answer. No one's particularly thrilled with that, but that is something that we can actually do as opposed to forecasting what the future will be. You know, when you talk about some of the ones of the last 20 years, I must say I can remember being behind a microphone or in front of the cameras in all those situations using that actual real phrase of, well, this will never be the same again. Life is going to change, all of those phrases. And you're right. In almost all of those examples, if not all of them, radical change did not occur. I think the way people look at things here right now is that in the short term,

and this in a way goes with your weather analogy, in the short term, and this in a way goes with your weather analogy, in the short term, people are assuming that when we come out of this, whenever that may be, that initially things are going to be very cautious. You know, the restaurants are already talking about, you know, tables not close together, people wearing masks going into restaurants, waiters wearing masks at restaurants, people shying away from big crowd events, whether they be sporting events or theater or concerts, whatever.

Those kind of things seem in the short term to be almost predictable. It's when you get into that sort of five years from now, are we going to be still cautious about where we go, how we act, what we do, and in some cases, you know, how businesses operate. You know, I've heard an anecdote just the other day from a car dealer, a big one in Western Canada saying, you know, I've discovered through this, because they were still open for most of this before they were deemed not to be an essential service, but they told their accountants to stay home. They told their marketing people to stay home. And this guy's decided, you know, they don't need to be here. They can work from home and I can give them incentives to work from home. And I can save a heck of a lot of money

by not having that, you know, extra office space for those things. So, so, you know, he's kind of like thinking ahead about what he may have learned from this experience about how his business operates. And I'm sure a lot of other businesses are thinking along, you know, similar lines. But I, you know, I digress here. But basically, the argument between short-term and long-term. Short-term things are kind of predictable, like tomorrow's weather. Longer term, that's where we get into trouble. That's exactly right. And, you know, let's use the example of working from home. I can tell you long-term a good story that will feel plausible to you about how this experience is going to lead a lot of

folks, just like you just described, to people realizing, hey, actually, we can work in different ways using telecommuting. And therefore, that will lead to a long-term change in the nature of work. I think that's a possibility. I think that's definitely in our range of possible futures. But I can also tell you a story about how people will start to experience that there are limitations to that working from home, that in fact, they will discover after a certain point that when people get together and talk and share ideas, that that is, in fact, creative and fruitful and good and useful in and of itself. And that may, in fact, cause something of a backlash to the movement that I've just described. And then I end up describing a different future. Let me give you

an illustration of this. In fact, speaking of the short term and the long term of what is and isn't predictable. Arthur C. Clarke, way back, the great scientist and science fiction writer, way back in 1961 gave an interview with the BBC in which he did something truly amazing. He said, in the future, computers are going to get more and more powerful, and they're going to get more and more connected, and eventually we're going to all have really powerful computers in every house, and all the computers will be connected all around the world. And won't that be amazing? And what he was describing, we would recognize as the internet. So that's, in 1961, that's a pretty amazing prediction. Well done, Arthur C.

Clarke. But then he went to the next step and said, well, what does this mean for society? In other words, how are people going to use this technology? And he said, well, what does this mean for society? In other words, how are people going to use this technology? And he said, well, it's the end of cities, because, of course, why would anyone want to live in a filthy, crowded city when you could actually live and work in the beautiful countryside? And so I think that that's a wonderful example of how, even when you have a very narrow problem, such as like the technology, basically all he did was he extrapolated. Computers were getting more and more powerful.

They were getting more and more connected. And if I extend that line straight out into the future, I get to very powerful computers everywhere, and they're all connected. But then when you talk about, well, how do people react to the technology? How do they use the technology? How does society change? Well, that's a problem that's an order of magnitude harder. And he went completely off the rail. And I think in microcosm, that forecast that he made in that 1961 interview is the problem

that we face. There are certain things, very practical things typically, that we can say with some reasonable confidence in the short term reasonably, for example, to use the one example, will more of us say, hey, you know, this telecommuting thing does work. I know how to use Zoom now, and maybe I can eliminate some of those stupid meetings and replace them with Zoom meetings, and we can save some time. That's a pretty reasonable forecast over the short term. But what are the implications for that beyond that? How else is society going to use the technology?

What does it mean in the longer term? That's where you have to really radically dial down the confidence. We just have literally a 200-year history of trying to forecast that kind of thing. I have a library full of books of old forecasts, and I read them because, frankly, they're entertaining. They're so wrong. We're just not good at making those sorts of forecasts. The reality is just too complex, too difficult for us to forecast that. We really have to be cautious and not fall into that trap. We really want to do it because this is important and we're facing great uncertainty.

And so we have almost a psychological drive to want to know what's coming next. But we just can't know, and we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that we do know. I've been forecasting for more than 50 years that the Leafs were going to win the Cup, and that's never been right either. Look, I really appreciate this, Dan. It's been great.

As a last question, you're obviously known for your writings, your books and your columns and your articles. And I've seen a couple that you've been writing through this. Should we assume that you've got a book coming through all this as well? Yeah, in fact, I am working on a book. Paradoxically, it's about planning. I'm approaching it with a spirit of humility. Okay. Listen, thanks once again.

I really appreciate this. It's been good to talk to you, and good to take your cautions to heart as we work our way through all this. Thanks. It was a lot of fun. Okay, that was Dan Gardner. And I bet you found that interesting. I know I certainly did.

And, you know, it helps put into perspective this whole issue of discussing what's it going to be like when this thing finally ends. So I'd keep things that Dan had to say in mind. And you can follow Dan. And he's great to follow on Twitter because he's not shy about making his comments on a lot of different things, not just about the future

and not about just forecasting. And if you want to follow Dan, he's at at D Gardner and you spell Gardner G-A-R D-N-E-R at D

as in Dan Gardner. Okay. I should, some of you may want to comment on the things Dan had to say or about anything else. Keep in mind that I go through all your mail, and there's a lot of it, and every week there's more. And I take out what I think are some of the, not just the best ones,

but some of the ones that I can offer some comment on as well and use it for our Friday broadcast, which I will do again this week. But to do it, I've got to have the letters. You've got to send me them. We've had a lot already this week, but there's always room for more. So send them along to themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. All right.

That's it for what was a, I guess, a kind of special podcast for this week or for this day. One quick last note on the good news element that we talked about at the beginning. You want to watch some good news? I don't know whether you've seen John Krasinski's weekly take on some good news. You can find it on YouTube

or link to it from his Twitter account. But it's great. It's, you know, John is, you know, he's an actor. He's been on a number of television shows, both comedies and dramas. And he's great. And he's great in this takeoff on some good news. And it kind of makes all of this a little easier to handle

when you can dial in something different on this story. So try and catch that if you can. All right. That's the Bridge Daily for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge we'll talk to you again in 24 hours Thank you.