REVIEW ARTICLE: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future

 

 From The Philosopher CXIIII No. 1 Spring 2026

Isaac Newton, after whome it was said the universe was governed by numbers

Carissa Véliz takes a careful look at the Power of Numbers 

Prophecy starts with a rather bold claim: statements about the future are not factual.
For philosophers, “not factual” in this case really means neither true nor false. “Undecided”. The evergreen counterexample that might come to mind might be: tomorrow, two plus two will still equal four. Is this true? I think so, it is by definition of the terms. This might seem a special case, or trivial even, but saying something like “The word of the current American President can’t be trusted” also seems to have some kind of truth value, to be factual. The concept “the current American President” includes within it the fact that his word cannot be relied on. Just as tomorrow, 2+2=4 and the sun will rise in the East (at least, barring some radical changes to the Solar System…)

But Carissa Véliz insists au contraire, that this is “all an illusion”. And that’s really the big claim at the heart of this book.

She allows that there can be calculable probabilities about some things, but not about human beings (like the American President). Here, predictions are “guesses, not facts”.

“Facts belong to the present and the past. An assertion about the future can be many things—an estimate, a desire, a warning—but never a fact. What makes the future the future is that it’s not yet here, it hasn’t yet happened. What hasn’t come to pass doesn’t exist, and there are no facts about what doesn’t exist.”

Statements about the future are just “predictions”.

It’s a strange thing, but this is a book that is really attacking predictions, calling them “speculative, wishful, powerful, limited and harmful”.

“Predictions were thought to be so dangerous by rulers that they were regulated in ancient Rome. As Christianity gained more power, astrology and other kinds of divination became unofficial and outlawed practices.“

Worse! today, technology has made “surveillance and prediction” partners in crime in the pursuit of power.

It doesn’t help that today, Véliz adds, predictions may be “informed or misled by data”. Computer scientists today “play the same role in power and prophecy as the oracles of the ancient world, the astrologers of the Middle Ages, and the social scientists of the nineteenth century”.

That’s from an opening section rather grandly entitled “overture”, which promises to push the attack further later. But already, I think it is a rather simplistic path being sketched out. The oracles of the ancient world were smart people, typically, the smartest and cleverest of their generation. Likewise, astrology, as Paul Feyerabend has set out in his iconoclastic accounts of science, contains within it many profound psychological insights, even if the claimed correlations to birth dates seem absurd. As for the “social scientists of the nineteenth century…” the attack seems to point at on the debatable status of facts within the social sciences: psychology, politics, economics… the lot. Okay, if you like, but we are well into an extreme philosophical reductionism now. Not to mention that social science is not just about predictions, but also covers claims made about the present and the past.

It doesn’t really help either that the book closes with an invitation to embrace “the unpredictable”, seen as the space in which “creativity, humour and innovation” can flourish. Far less that the same chapter proposes “philosophy as an antidote to prophecy”. In fact, in rather standard Stoic fare, we are advised to not have any desires, to “not be troubled either by fear or desire”, and to live only in the present moment. “The future can wait while you are immersed in a good novel… [or] having a deep conversation with a friend” Véliz advises. Yet neither of these are actually examples of living in the present: a novel is an imaginary journey, perhaps dipping into the past, perhaps looking to the future. Any “deep conversation” would surely touch as much on what might be as on what is. 

It is revealing, perhaps, that Véliz follows up this disdainful point about the future by saying that “Prophets lose their influence in the face of those who are not interested in worldly power”. This perspective, so cheerfully trotted out by philosophers (particularly those ensconced in ivory towers), always jars with me. Take, for example, people seeking to change a future in which civilians are being bombed in their homes by power and money obsessed tyrants – are they wrong to be “interested in worldly power”? Or what about charities working to protect indigenous peoples from extermination – or conservationists struggling with governments on behalf of nature – are such people foolish to be concerned with possible futures and worldly power?  

 

Véliz reminds us that Max Weber once wrote: “To have power is to be able to influence others and exercise force unto them—to make people do, and to do upon them” to which she adds:

“If there is only one lesson you retain from this book, let it be this: Predictions are often power moves disguised as quests for knowledge.”

What, even optimistic predictions, scientific predictions? But yes. “Even when predictions are sincere, they can create currents of political influence that change the world. They become power moves.”

Véliz explains why predictions are dangerous. “The belief that the world is nothing more than a complicated clock and that we can access its mechanisms is reassuring. It suggests that nothing is random, and everything is knowable, at least in principle. It paved the way for determinism.”

Part of the book looks at the way mathematics can be used to analyse - and yes predict - criminal behaviour. Véliz looks at conviction rates for rape, and asserts that the “impunity rate for rape [is] around 99.8 percent” Linked to this is a look at statistics and how it corrals human individuals. After all, she says, “Objectivity lends credibility and authority to officials who have none of their own”.

 

Nonetheless, this is an account that seems generally to be very much in favour of mathematical predictions, with Véliz offering as an example that if you take a random sample of two Americans who jointly earn $10 million per year, then rather than them both earning millions, it’s likely that one of them earns around $9,950,000 and the other one around $50,000. Similarly, a statistical analysis of books finds that most sell almost nothing while a tiny sliver sell a million. All this is helpful information to those who might otherwise be carried away with optimism. At this point Véliz mentions the Harry Potter books which she says broke all the rules, we might say, “defied all predictions” by using the power of “word of mouth”. And yes, they were originally published by Bloomsbury in the UK for a small advance and with only modest support, but they were almost immediately backed by $105,000 paid by Scholastic to publish them in the US, that being then an unprecedented figure for a children’s author. Bloomsbury is hardly the shabby end of the book world either. As marketing experts later noted, the Harry Potter books were backed by a “tight-lipped publicity build-up to each new book launch”, described as “denial marketing”, all of which turned out to be a powerful strategy. 

 

All of this number-crunching is what Véliz dubs “quantification”. What’s that then? Curiously, the term is not actually explained. Even though it seems very important. Indeed, we are told: “Quantification gave us the nation-state and the Industrial Revolution”.

Against all this, all Véliz has to offer is an introverted opting out of the world. She says so overtly: live well and opt out from society, or as she puts it “take pleasure in the joy of missing out from the trickeries of the prophets”. Put more plainly, do not obey other people’s predictions, but instead write the best life for yourself that you can. Véliz adds that by this she has in mind “the kindest, the most authentic [sic], the most beautiful”. But that’s a kind of contradiction in itself - for is she not imposing her own kind of ‘prediction’? No, for all the grand theories explored here, it seems that the world is much more like the mechanical universe described both by physics and social science than it is the idealised one of the philosophical elites, whether in Ancient Athens or Oxford today. 

 

This is a book that gently and playfully explores a number of key logical and mathematical concepts, which in itself is no small achievement. Whether its philosophical arguments hold water though, well, ‘only time will tell’. And woe betide anyone who seeks to anticipate time’s verdict.

Reviewed by Martin Cohen

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Prophecy: 
Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI 

By Carissa Véliz

Swift Press (2026)
ISBN: 9781800757240