How far do you think ahead?
St. Cloud (MN) Times• May 5, 2010
How much time do you spend thinking about the
future? Not next week or next year, but "the future"
as in decades from now, say 2050, 2100 or beyond?
The odds are good the answer is "very little,"
because American culture is oriented toward the
short term — the coming paycheck, the next
quarterly report, the annual profit/loss statement,
the biennial election cycle.
The most distant events people commonly plan for
today are utterly predictable, like saving for college
or retirement. Monday's announcement from the
Pentagon that the U.S. nuclear arsenal has decreased
by 84 percent from its 1967 peak is a reminder that
it wasn't always this way.
The generations that came of age during the Cold
War did think about the future — and often
despaired for it. That threat has been muted for a
generation, replaced by other fears that can't
compare to the bleakness of nuclear winter and
Mutual Assured Destruction.
One result is that young people have stopped
despairing for the future — and perhaps thinking
about it much at all. Ask a teenager what he or she
imagines the world will be like at mid-century and if
you get anything in response it may be some vague
prediction about technology (smaller, faster
computers) or social change (people will be nicer to
one another.)
This isn't their fault. It's simply a reflection of our
cultural preoccupation with the short term and the
small scale.
Despite this lack of attention, futurists — people
who professionally study the future — are making
bold predictions for mid-century and beyond.
Some of their projections are obvious, logical
extrapolations of current trends. For example, most
agree that by 2050 the U.S. will be a majority-
minority nation (i.e. non-Hispanic, single-race
whites will be in the minority.) And few would argue
access to information and communication technologies
will improve in quality and speed,
perhaps beyond what we can imagine having a use for today.
These are examples of what former Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once famously called
"known knowns." The more interesting projections
fit Rumsfeld's "known unknown" category, things
that might happen but will require significant but
conceivable leaps in technology, major social
changes or some other driving factor we are less
able to predict.
This category could include disruptive innovations
like new energy sources (i.e. nuclear fusion), m
edical breakthroughs (genetically modified
humans?) or even the looming consequences of
global climate change.
But the most intriguing category corresponds to
Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns," i.e. things we
can't adequately conceive of now because our
capacity to imagine them is bounded by our present
reality. This category commonly includes
speculation about what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls
the "singularity," the idea humans could one day
create a machine or a human-machine hybrid that
exceeds the cognitive capacity of the human brain.
Should that occur, the resulting intellect could
logically produce innovations beyond the capacity
of purely biological humans to even imagine, much
less create.
Such "transhuman" entities could represent an
evolutionary leap from our present state and bring
about change of a nature and scale we simply
cannot fathom today. This is, of course, all the stuff
of science fiction, and that's partly the point.
There's a long tradition of imagining the future in
speculative fiction. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were
fairly accurate in many of their predictions. Aldus
Huxley and George Orwell came closer to the truth
than is sometimes comfortable.
Legions of Cold War writers imagined the aftermath
of nuclear war, to varied ends, and thankfully all
were wrong. But young people today are not reading
speculative fiction. They are not burdened with the
constant threat of global annihilation, so they have
the luxury of not thinking far into the future at all.
The unfortunate result is that instead of musing
about the economics of commercial travel to Mars,
the efficiency of organic computers implanted into
our brains, or the ethics of genetically modifying
human embryos, many are simply wondering what
they'll do next summer or where they'll be living in
five years. So the next time you speak with a young
person ask them about the future. Find out how far
their imagination stretches. Then give them a little
push and see what happens.
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Dr.DRL
