“…myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.” — Richard Powers, The Overstory

I acquired a collection of precision lenses from a lab that produces nuclear weapons. Each one is in a clear plastic jewelbox case, with size, thickness, amount and type of mirroring, and other optical properties written carefully on a paper sized to fit just inside the lid. The only information I can decode is a date: they’re from the 1990s, now clearly decommissioned. 

And yet like new. The 30-year-old tape holding the case shut disintegrates as I open one, but inside is a pristine and perfectly machined piece of glass, protected by foam and a thin slice of tissue paper. It’s translucent, and reflects a rich spectrum of colours in the light. Just imagine what it does to a laser beam.

A scientist from the lab assured me there’s no chance of any lingering radiation.

There are a few prisms in the collection, but no spheres. Yet, these objects are like the proverbial crystal ball, used since antiquity to foretell events to come. Thirty years on, these glass jewels link past and future to shed light on how we live now.  As an anthropologist in one of my lives, I study how material culture merges with cultural practices to produce past, present and future realities.

Divination is the practice of seeking knowledge or making predictions about the future by interpreting events or objects. Patterns occur across all levels of time, space and type. Regularities in the movement of celestial bodies in the night sky, for example, led people to predict when they might appear again, and to speculate about others that lay beyond our vision. 

Mathematics helped. And the first computers were constructed specifically to calculate these astronomical positions at any future date. The relation between pattern recognition and prediction can be seen anywhere things are counted, quantified, or otherwise represented as numbers.  

"I don’t need any of that nonsense!" a Haitian Vodou manbo (priestess) tells me. Her expertise is in reading the bones of a snake, which is seen as an intermediary between our world and that of the lwa – the spirits. Along with some sacred shells, she casts these bones onto a dirt floor. In their resulting positions, orientations, and proximity to each other, she sees recurring cycles, situations that require reflection, chaos ahead, energy that needs to be reorganised. 

And I can’t even read the letters and numbers on one of those lens cases.

 .  .  .

We’re constantly doing some sort of prediction, every day. An engineer at Google pointed out to me that human vision works in large part by filling in gaps, through a kind of optical illusion, because we’re always only processing partial information. 

"Once you had data, you could build theories. Once you had theories, you have predictive power," says scientist Albert-lászló Barabási. Possible, probable, preferable futures. Patterns that repeat and recur at different scales and different contexts. Predictive policing uses the same algorithms as earthquake prediction. In financial markets, Fibonacci sequences, Elliott Waves, Ichi Moku clouds, and Newton’s first law of motion can all be observed across all asset classes and timescales. 

.  .  .

The British Museum acquired a piece of polished glass in 1966. The black mirror of John Dee, advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, is obsidian, to be precise – volcanic glass. No volcanos in England, it came from the Aztecs in Mexico, via the Spanish, who acquired it nearly a century earlier. 

Doctor Dee was a scientist – at least in the 16th Century definition, which denotes someone who could predict the planets’ positions as well as the Queen’s future. Angels and apparitions were as real as the stars; you just needed the right knowledge (mathematical or mystical) and the right tools. The mirror was Dee’s AI-powered smartphone, complete with leather case. What he or his assistants saw in it foretold events to come, in what he called a language of the angels. The Aztecs similarly used it for divination, and to communicate with the dead. What do you see in yours? 

We’ve long built tools to see what’s coming. The first known mechanical computer is the Antikythera Mechanism, discovered in a sunken ship dating to Ancient Greece. It calculated those planetary positions; the Greek word for planet means wanderer. 

Google told me that. Its big breakthrough in language translation came in 2005. Given five words, it could predict the next one. A few years later, a computer scientist told me that this pattern, too, works across different scales and contexts: given your last five locations (whether online or in the real world), he could predict – with 100 percent accuracy – your next move. A wanderer is a thing of the past.

What you see reflected in that black mirror in your hand is, of course, yourself.

What you see reflected in that black mirror in your hand is, of course, yourself.

In the face of all the technology and automation around today, you place your faith in the stars. That horoscope fits so perfectly, it’s got to be correct. The Haitian priestess knew things about me, there’s no way she could have known. Just like that psychic or palmist or Tarot reader probably told you things. Trust me – I’m a Scorpio.

At the same time, we, the ‘befuddled many’, trust and fear mathematics in equal measure. The fortunate few, meanwhile, predict the future by inventing it, as the saying goes.

What is divination in capitalism? Artefacts become data points, and predictive analytics becomes performance – even prescription – in which the past constitutes data for remixing, the present is runtime, and the future is programmable through branching simulations. Consequences become ever more computable.

There’s a thought experiment posed by technologist Walter van de Velde. Imagine the world as a computer that computes one thing: the future. We program this computer through the things we design and put into the world. When they engage someone, it can change their individual future, and thereby our collective one. Attention is the oxygen of information. 

"If you can reinterpret the world," writes James Martin, "you don’t have to change it. You already have." He characterises sorcery – the ability to read hidden signs, symbols, meanings – as a threat to the established order. Here comes AI. It’s a medium – a means of distributing content, yes, but it’s also a psychic. Predictions and production become indistinguishable. 

Attention is the oxygen of information.

If the world is like a computer that computes the future, as Van de Velde imagined, this means that we have an ethical responsibility for the things that we design and put into the world. 

Maybe an alternative future lies in pattern mis-recognition. Deep dreaming, hallucinating products, automated apophenia, deliberate misunderstanding. In quantum physics, a system is influenced by events in the future as well as the past. In pataphysics, the anomaly is the norm. If attention is the oxygen of information, producing noise and practicing obfuscation become provocations to pervasive prediction-as-prescription.

That word you mis-heard? That random thing you encountered today? It could lead somewhere. As my friend Federico Campagna writes, the single moment in time, or the single point in space, can lead to infinite dimensions. If you look closely.

In 2000, Techno-guru Raymond Kurzweil accurately predicted the Internet of Things and the rapid proliferation of AI. He guessed we would reach the Singularity (when AI becomes sentient, whatever that means) somewhere between 2025 and 2030. Machines, he says, will claim to be spiritual, and we won't be able to tell if this is true or not. 

They will be so convincing, it won't matter. Yuval Noah Harari writes that now that AI has mastered language – what he calls "the operating system of human culture". It can hack the system. "What would it mean for humans to live in a world where a large percentage of stories, melodies, images, laws, policies and tools are shaped by nonhuman intelligence," Harari writes, "which knows how to exploit with superhuman efficiency the weaknesses, biases and addictions of the human mind — while knowing how to form intimate relationships with human beings?"

That sounds like the definition of a psychic to me. 

.  .  .

Personally, I don’t believe in a completely autonomous, sentient AI. There’s always someone behind the fridge – this point was made by Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, who disrupted Internet of Things narratives by playing the role of an internet-connected smart refrigerator. I’m almost out of mayonnaise? I’ll make my own, thanks.

Moreover, every engineer knows that any moderately complex system is inherently unpredictable. And the most unpredictable element in any system is always a human. (The engineer who designed the system is quick to add that it’s always someone else.) 

The unexpected stimulates reflection. As the designer Kenya Hara says, "What constantly invigorates the mind is the unknown." Chaos and unpredictability are therefore closely related to learning, and transformation. 

No, the future cannot be predicted. But, according to biologist Donella Meadows, "it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned." More imagination, less prediction.

Those lenses I acquired? Turns out they’re used for nuclear fusion, not fission. The lab has gained some notoriety for breakthroughs in fusion energy, a potentially clean, safe and renewable source of power. Those glass objects foretell many potential futures.

All tools – from snake bones to AI – can be used for good or ill. It’s up to us, the befuddled many, to question what and how we see, to mis-recognise the patterns, to look for the future behind the fridge.