Posts Tagged ‘futurist’

Seeing the Future Dimly

Wednesday, August 8th, 2012

By David L. Brown

One of the news websites, Fox News (here), today featured excerpts from a number of predictions made 25 years ago by “science thinkers,” predicting conditions in our time of 2012. I recognize the names of most of these “science thinkers” and they are actually “science fiction writers,” but that’s okay because they’re in the business of imagining the future as much as anyone. I’ve always had a passing interest in futurism, the attempt to predict how things will be in future times. In general, these tend to be wildly inaccurate due to the many uncertainties and the phenomenon of straight line thinking. Too often futurists tend to look at what’s been happening recently and simply project a straight line into the future.

Even a cursory look at history will knock enough holes in this procedure to make Swiss cheeses look like solid objects. Imagine the application of straight line thinking to the U.S. economy in the summer of 1929, the likelihood of war in Europe in 1913, the future well-being of the little Roman village of Pompeii in 78 AD (Mount Vesuvius erupted the following year), and so many more examples of unexpected and unpredictable events that dramatically change the future.

One thing that struck me abut these predictions was that they were for the most part pessimistic, in contrast with the usual fol-de-rol about a Jetsons future with flying cars and an abundance of everything. Here are some excerpts with my comments:

Isaac Asimov: “Assuming we haven’t destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war, there will be 8-10 billion of us on this planet and widespread hunger.”

Isaac’s view was fairly accurate, even though he was a little on the low side on population (it’s actually just something over 7 billion). He was dead on about the looming hunger, hastened by this year’s worldwide drought.

Jack Williamson: “If we had a time-phone, now in 1987, we would beg you to forgive us. We have burdened you with impossible debts, wasted and polluted the planet that should have been your rich heritage, left you instead a dreadful legacy of ignorance, want, and war.”

Of all the predictions, I nominate this one as the most accurate. I have expressed similar thoughts myself, many times. Anyone who looks around the world today with open eyes can recognize Williamson’s vision of our time.
Sheldon Glashow: “The American economy will have experienced a gentle yet relentless decline. Our children will not live such comfortable lives as we do. The spread between the rich and the poor will have grown, and crime will have become so prevalent as to threaten the social fabric. The rich and the poor will form 2 armed camps.”
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Technology—Promise or Curse?

Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

By David L. Brown

Historian Niall Ferguson in an article published in The Daily Beast raises a question that’s long interested me. He asks, in effect, which vision of the future we should embrace: The idea that technology will make the world a better place, or the vision of a world in catastrophic economic decline?

Here”s a brief excerpt from the beginning of his essay, titled “Don’t Believe the Techno-Utopian Hype” (you can read the whole thing here):

Are you a technoptimist or a depressimist? This is the question I have been pondering after a weekend hanging with some of the superstars of Silicon Valley.

I had never previously appreciated the immense gap that now exists between technological optimism, on the one hand, and economic pessimism, on the other. Silicon Valley sees a bright and beautiful future ahead. Wall Street and Washington see only storm clouds. The geeks think we’re on the verge of The Singularity. The wonks retort that we’re in the middle of a Depression.

Let’s start with the technoptimists. Last Saturday I listened with fascination as a panel of tech titans debated the question: “Will science and technology produce more dramatic changes in solving the world’s major problems over the next 25 years than have been produced over the last 25 years?”

They all thought so. We heard a description of what Google’s Project Glass, the Internet-enabled spectacles, can already do. (For example, the spectacles can be used to check if another speaker is lying.) Next up: a search engine inside the brain itself. We heard that within the next 25 years, it will be possible to take 1,000-mile journeys by being fired through tubes. We also heard that biotechnology will deliver genetic “photocopies” of human organs that need replacing. And we were promised genetically engineered bugs, capable of excreting clean fuel. The only note of pessimism came from an eminent neuroscientist, who conceded that a major breakthrough in the prevention of brain degeneration was unlikely in the next quarter century.

Ferguson,  a professor at Harvard and also associated with Oxford University in England and The Hoover Institution at Stanford, takes the same point of view that has always struck me as the right path. In effect, he asks: What is the value of technology that merely puts people out of work and provides wonderful whiz-bang stuff that has no real benefits for anyone. He points out that fifty years ago we were promised flying cars, and instead we have Twitter.

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