CAN A PREDICTED FUTURE STILL BE AN OPEN FUTURE?

ALGORITHMIC FORECASTS AND ACTIONABILITY IN PRECISION MEDICINE

Elena Esposito, Dominik Hofmann, and Costanza Coloni

History and Theory 63, no. 1 (2024)
Iterations: Historical Futures

The openness of the future is rightly considered one of the qualifying aspects of the temporality of modern society. The open future, which does not yet exist in the present, implies radical unpredictability. This article discusses how, in the last few centuries, the resulting uncertainty has been managed with probabilistic tools that compute present information about the future in a controlled way. The probabilistic approach has always been plagued by three fundamental problems: performativity, the need for individualization, and the opacity of predictions. We contrast this approach with recent forms of algorithmic forecasting, which seem to turn these problems into resources and produce an innovative form of prediction. But can a predicted future still be an open future? We explore this specific contemporary modality of historical futures by examining the recent debate about the notion of actionability in precision medicine, which focuses on a form of individualized prediction that enables direct intervention in the future it predicts.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash