A large part of my job is imagining other worlds, including future worlds; and I've been heavily involved in the past month with writing about what the next century might be like. As a
result, my take on the future is somewhat less optimistic than most others.
I'm old enough to remember President Kennedy and the earliest
efforts of our space program. Although I was only in kindergarten,
I was not alone in expecting that I would probably work in space
and visit other planets. I saw picturephones at the 1964 New York
World's Fair, and believed that they would be in homes before I
finished college. When I saw 2001 in high school, the imagined
space station seemed quite plausible for the suggested time
frame. And by now the automobile should have been replaced by
small private aircraft.
None of that has happened (but I'm sure you've noticed this). Yet
much has changed since 1960 that no one anticipated. We foresaw
fully automated centrally computerized homes - which has not
happened except for Bill Gates - but neither the personal computer
nor the Internet. We expected colonies in space and on the ocean
floor - no longer thought to come within our lifetimes - but not
the Global Satellite Positioning System. Our dreams included the
nightmare of a nuclear war, but not the peaceable end of the Soviet
Union. And I think we must take these things in mind when we
prognosticate.
The future will not advance as quickly as we dream, nor in the ways
we anticipate. Mind/machine interface barely has been scratched,
and only in the sense that we can teach ourselves to activate
computer circuits by modifying our own brain waves on an EEG; the
prospect of feeding images or data to the mind directly will remain
a dream until my children are old. Solutions to our transportation
problems will be difficult, slow, and fraught with obstacles;
people will own vehicles for quite some time still. There is more
resistance to changes which impact society and individual choices
than on simple technological ones, and so that which is familiar
will still be here in similar form for quite a while.
In 1984 a lot of people tried to show how the world was like George
Orwell's book of that name. In fact, the similarities were truly
minimal.
Orwell had predicted that all homes would be fully wired with
surveillance equipment so that the government could monitor the
people; that newspapers would be fully controlled so that no one
could know anything but the official line on any story; and that
everyone would be assigned to a job for which he was best suited.
Instead we had a world in which individuals were more and more able
to watch their own governments through television, newspapers were
less important sources of information, and more than ever, people
were able to break out of social classes and find jobs in fields
they preferred.
At the same time, there will be changes to which we will have to
adapt. Wearable computers are already in use by those creative
enough to build their own. Mass transit will continue to innovate,
although still as mass transit for some time to come. The phone and
the computer will become more integrated, and less business will be
done face to face, just as the trend has been over the past century.
Things do change; but they do not change as quickly nor in the ways
which we predict. Futurists tend to miss the things that become
important in the future, because they imagine that these will be an
extension of those which are important in the present; but working
from the past, we see that the present is built more on the
surprises than on the expectations, on the things which will become
important but are not now, rather than on the things which are
important to us now.
Should we prepare for the future?
The best of us do not know what that will be. Besides, it isn't
very useful to be ready for the future too soon. Look at the Amiga
- it was the first true multimedia personal computer, and failed
because no one had any idea why you would want such a thing. You
want to be ready for tomorrow, and for next year; but don't be too
invested in being ready for the next generation. You have to be
successful today first, and you have to watch the future unfold
before you will know what it will require.
M. Joseph Young, J.D
Index to the Writings of Mark Joseph Young
M. J. Young
