[FORUM] What cultural trends do you think will shape the future?
A recent Jamais Cascio blog post, "The Future Isn't What It Used to Be", talks about the failures--the lack of vision, at least--of futurologists. Predictions are made and very often turn out to be false. Why? Basic assumptions are flawed.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the role technological change plays in futurism. The big picture visions of what the next 20-50 years could hold in terms of technologies haven't changed considerably since the beginning of the century, and (for the most part) since the early 1990s. Moreover, what we've seen in terms of real-world, actual technological change has been largely evolutionary, not revolutionary. Or, more to the point, the revolutions that have occurred have not been in the world of technologies.
Molecular nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and robots, augmented reality, life extension, and space colonies are all examples that Cascio provided, examples that he himself wrote about (for instance in his setting books for the Transhuman Space RPG). What came of them?
Since then, some of those concepts have turned into reality, while others remain on the horizon. But pin down a futurist today and ask what technologies they expect to see over the next few decades, and you'll get a remarkably similar list -- often an identical one. As a telling example, the list above could serve as a rough guide to the current curriculum of the Singularity University, minus the investment advice.
There hasn't been a ground-breaking new vision of technological futures in at least 10 years, probably closer to 15; nearly all of the technological scenarios talked about at present derive in an incremental, evolutionary way from the scenarios of more than a decade ago. The closest thing to an emerging paradigm of technological futures concerns the role of sensors and mobile cameras in terms of privacy, surveillance, and power. It's still fairly evolutionary (again, I could cite examples from Transhuman Space), but more importantly, it's much more about the social uses of technologies than about the technologies themselves.
For me, that's an interesting signal. In many ways, we can argue that the major drivers of The Future, over the past decade and very likely to continue for some time, are primarily socio-cultural.
These sociocultural changes, Cascio argues, have not been considered in nearly enough detail, or even imagined. The recent decline of American hegemony, the rise of cities and economic inequality, the continued division of the Koreas, the non-appearance of more hyperterrorism, and bottom-up social movements like the Arab spring are all cited. Cascio provides four reasons for this systematic oversight: futurology has a built-in bias towards; models of societies and social change are very much imperfect; discussions of cultural change are emotionally loaded in ways that discussions of technology change are not; and, the traditional bias of many futurists (Herman Kahn, say) is towards the hard power of tech rather than soft power of culture. If, in fact, culture is a co-determinative factor, neglecting it in considerations of the future is a major flaw.
What do you think? What trends do you think will emerge anew, or will take on new strength, or will diminish?
Nowhere is this more visible than in the role technological change plays in futurism. The big picture visions of what the next 20-50 years could hold in terms of technologies haven't changed considerably since the beginning of the century, and (for the most part) since the early 1990s. Moreover, what we've seen in terms of real-world, actual technological change has been largely evolutionary, not revolutionary. Or, more to the point, the revolutions that have occurred have not been in the world of technologies.
Molecular nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and robots, augmented reality, life extension, and space colonies are all examples that Cascio provided, examples that he himself wrote about (for instance in his setting books for the Transhuman Space RPG). What came of them?
Since then, some of those concepts have turned into reality, while others remain on the horizon. But pin down a futurist today and ask what technologies they expect to see over the next few decades, and you'll get a remarkably similar list -- often an identical one. As a telling example, the list above could serve as a rough guide to the current curriculum of the Singularity University, minus the investment advice.
There hasn't been a ground-breaking new vision of technological futures in at least 10 years, probably closer to 15; nearly all of the technological scenarios talked about at present derive in an incremental, evolutionary way from the scenarios of more than a decade ago. The closest thing to an emerging paradigm of technological futures concerns the role of sensors and mobile cameras in terms of privacy, surveillance, and power. It's still fairly evolutionary (again, I could cite examples from Transhuman Space), but more importantly, it's much more about the social uses of technologies than about the technologies themselves.
For me, that's an interesting signal. In many ways, we can argue that the major drivers of The Future, over the past decade and very likely to continue for some time, are primarily socio-cultural.
These sociocultural changes, Cascio argues, have not been considered in nearly enough detail, or even imagined. The recent decline of American hegemony, the rise of cities and economic inequality, the continued division of the Koreas, the non-appearance of more hyperterrorism, and bottom-up social movements like the Arab spring are all cited. Cascio provides four reasons for this systematic oversight: futurology has a built-in bias towards; models of societies and social change are very much imperfect; discussions of cultural change are emotionally loaded in ways that discussions of technology change are not; and, the traditional bias of many futurists (Herman Kahn, say) is towards the hard power of tech rather than soft power of culture. If, in fact, culture is a co-determinative factor, neglecting it in considerations of the future is a major flaw.
What do you think? What trends do you think will emerge anew, or will take on new strength, or will diminish?