Listen to an author-narrated reading from Embracing Uncertainty by Margaret Heffernan. Subscribe to The Beautiful Truth Podcast here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

“The train will arrive in two minutes.” About 20 years ago, as I stood on a train platform hearing that announcement, a thought experiment flashed through my mind. 

On waking, I go to my wardrobe where clothes have already been selected for the damp British day. Everything I want for breakfast is stocked in my fridge. Confident I won’t need a raincoat, I wait just a minute or two for the bus, knowing it will be on time. It takes me to a health check that was scheduled just before I got sick. I know this, with the same confidence that I’m sure to arrive on time, as will the doctor. I understand the nature of the illness and I’m calm, certain my treatment will prove successful. My company has already booked me out for the time required for my recovery. During that time, my fridge will continue to be automatically restocked with healthy foods, and anything else I need will be on tap. The days are frictionless, everything is convenient. The shape of the years to come, the friends I will make and the ones I’ll lose, the books I will read and the places I will go: all of this I know right up to, and including, the day that I will die. All uncertainty in my life has gone. 

When I share this thought experiment, at first people are delighted by the novelty of the bus arriving on time. But as the certainty mounts, their delight turns to horror. Life reveals itself as one giant ‘to do’ list – being alive consists merely of crossing things off. Financial planning might get easier, but being a passenger in the journey of one’s own life doesn’t feel like life at all. 

That initial response to the experiment is always telling: the idea of having all aspects of life under control is alluring, for the simple reason that uncertainty is stressful. 

We make decisions all the time: important and trivial ones – who to marry, whether to have children, what to eat, what to wear – and we want to be sure they are right, or at least the best they can be. But really each is just a hypothesis about a future we don’t know, because it hasn’t happened yet. 

Managers are paid to worry. “Imagine Westminster under water,” Sam Woods, head of the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority, muses. He knows that extreme weather events are happening all over the world. Would there be mortgage defaults, bankruptcies, lawsuits, stranded assets? But merely asking the questions proliferates uncertainty. 

Competing scenarios do battle in our minds – eat earlier, see the film later, cancel the friends and go alone, don’t go at all! – triggering the release of noradrenaline, a hormone that increases attention and alertness. This is the physical reality of stress. 

How far we’d go to achieve certainty became visible in experiments that date from the 1970s, in which volunteers were subjected to electric shocks delivered by a machine. The critical detail is that these were emitted randomly. For many people in the experiments, not knowing what would happen next became so intolerable that they seized control to deliver the shocks to themselves. 

Guaranteed pain was preferable to uncertain suffering. 

So it’s no wonder that allaying our anxiety is big business: not just anxiolytics, but warranties, insurance policies and apps. Ratings and rankings perform a similar service: that school may be a long walk but it’s worth it; that university is bound to land you a great job. 

With more ignorance than knowledge about me, what comfort I derive from such services can only ever be probabilistic: likely, but still not certain. The irony is that they may induce as much stress as they purport to reduce – where once I made social plans, confident my friends would stick to them, now I check my phone over and over again to make sure nothing has gone wrong. 

For technology companies, our allergy to uncertainty has become a goldmine. “For individuals, the attraction is the possibility of a world where everything is arranged for your convenience – your health check-up is magically scheduled just as you begin to get sick, the bus comes just as you get to the bus stop, and there is never a line of waiting people at city hall.” This is Alex Pentland’s thought experiment. 

His premise is apparently simple enough: with enough sensors, robotics and computing power, you can get buses, books and food to arrive on time. Those systems are easily controllable; it’s people who introduce uncertainty.  

B.F. Skinner, the founding father of behaviourism, lamented that while the science of physics had taken us to the moon, human development had severely lagged behind. He felt the solution was nearly within his grasp; with sufficient experimental data and computing power, he felt confident of developing a ‘technology of behaviour’ that would analyse, predict and then be able to adjust how we behave for the greater good. 

Skinner had no time for unmeasurable concepts like agency and autonomy; these, he argued, were just stories we told ourselves to justify choices that were only reactions to, or against, stimuli. There is no such thing as an inner life. 

Pentland’s concept of ‘social physics’ takes behaviourism one step further. From a behaviourist’s perspective, that is the great news: stimuli scale. Because we are subject to social influence, uncertainty can be reduced by designing rewards that masses of people will respond to in unison. The reward: consistency and certainty. 

The mechanistic vision also assumes that machines don’t make mistakes, a faith few software developers endorse. Machines might not tire easily, but just because they aren’t human doesn’t guarantee they are infallible. 

As even artificial intelligence scientists concede, data can often be ambiguous and subject to interpretation, never more so than when assigning causality. Moreover, experimental data on human behaviour has proved notoriously difficult to replicate – perhaps because we humans aren’t such standardised units after all. 

The mechanics of Pentland’s social physics seems overwhelmingly Newtonian. Predictability only exists at scale, which flattens out large variabilities, but that doesn’t work if it’s just you or me.  

In 2020, Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google), pitched and won the opportunity to work with the city of Toronto developing 12 acres along the city’s waterfront. The vision was, in essence, the apotheosis of Pentland’s dream: a dome-covered,frictionless world where everything ran perfectly, thanks to sensors and technology that could ‘unlock’ services for residents. 

The more data you contributed, the greater access you got to robo-taxis, certain stores or preferential interest rates. The digitised ecosystem used your ‘digital reputation data’ to generate rewards for good behaviour. 

That companies and governments serve different masters – public companies their shareholders and governments their citizens – was just one issue. Privacy was another. Slowly and painfully, Torontonians gleaned the morass of ethical and philosophical concerns that lay behind the project’s glitzy marketing. 

As a combination of local activists and legal challenges unpicked the details of exactly what this daydream would mean to civic society and personal freedoms, its allure tarnished, and Sidewalk skulked out of town. 

But what remains is an important legacy: a more-than-thought experiment that beautifully illustrates the high price that has to be paid for certainty. Not just financial cost (which made Google quit), but the human cost – in freedom, imagination, privacy, agency, even identity. At what point does being treated like a robot turn you into one? 

To reject uncertainty would be to accept the end of inquiry. To reject uncertainty would be to turn one’s back on what is true. 

“We are never sure of anything,” the physicist Carlo Rovelli says of his fellow scientists. Not knowing is what drives them to explore. The true nature of science, he says, is its radical awareness of our vast ignorance. 

While politicians may talk about ‘the science’ as if it were a bedrock of certainty, scientists themselves acknowledge that science is only the best we know – so far. 

“Between full ignorance and total certainty,” Rovelli says, “is a vast intermediate space where we conduct” Rovelli takes an intense interest in art. For all the rhetoric that imagines the two disciplines, arts and sciences, to be diametrically opposed, he sees them as sharing the same intermediate space: examining the relations between things. When he looks at an installation by Cornelia Parker, he isn’t looking only at its individual pieces, but considering how they relate to each other, to him, and to his experience in the world. That’s where the action is: in the interaction. 
 
Novels, music and paintings don’t aim to reduce our uncertainty but to provide richer means to discover, explore and challenge our experience of life. It isn’t because we know exactly what the painting means that millions flock to see the Mona Lisa; it is the very ambiguity of the work that has captured human minds for centuries. Looking at it, I might reflect on when it was painted, how it compares to other kinds of portraiture, wonder whether the background is based on a real place, whether the portrait will always remain such a big draw, and why. Art can act as a portal to that liminal space whose pleasure is to see life afresh. 
 
Lacking even the practical rewards of science, we are drawn to art and to artists because it makes us think afresh and to feel alive. No art is an answer to uncertainty, but all art is a response to it.