The Future
The Future Is Not What It Used To Be
Quentin Hardy, 10.15.07, 6:00 PM ET
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/10/13/pessimism-paramaibo-tech-future07-cz_qh_1015hardy.html
Last July I was privileged to be in Aspen, Colo., where
10,000-square-foot luxury log cabins aspire to the soaring Rockies,
billionaires tool Priuses to private jets and the world's powerful
gather for cold salmon and big truths. And they were feeling bad.
About 20 of us--including venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and
Washington strategists--were asked to imagine the year 2050. With few
exceptions, our predictions were a grim amplification of all of
today's worst headlines: global warming, famine, unending terrorism.
Not much different, I'd guess, from what gets forecast at most salons
and dinner parties when the talk turns this way: The future as a Mad
Max movie, only without the style and thrills.
What's going on here? We were, by almost any measure of space or time,
a group others would kill to become--affluent Americans in 2007. We
are longer-lived and with access to more knowledge and experiences
than any king or pope who has come before, nevermind the lives of the
countless billions whose ordinary tragedies are collectively called
"history." This much luck should make us hug ourselves with delight.
Having slipped catastrophes like the 1914-1945 worldwide conflicts
(with 100 million dead), or the nuclear threat of the 44 cold years
that followed, there are also reasonable grounds to believe we can
work out our problems. The daily advances in science and technology
lend hope that on balance things can be even better. Except that we do
not feel that way.
The opposite inclination, projecting a future of paradise on Earth, is
the province of millennial movements like Communism, Nazism, the
Crusades and much of today's Islamic fundamentalism. Usually someone
has to die in those totalitarian scenarios, and in reality things
works out bad for everyone. A decent future is going to have to have
some chaos in it too--but that does not demand that we forecast
despair.
Another nasty positive comes from the fact that we have gained a lot
of power over nature, from fertilizers and antibiotics to nerve gas
and nukes. We will have more. With so much good fortune on the upside,
the downsides are higher, too. It worries some of the world's top
scientists, who forecast exotic extinction scenarios (see "Our Final
Hour"). Even they disagree about the actual risks, though, and most of
us do not worry about runaway atomic colliders.
An apocalypse is sadly attractive. If we cause catastrophe--by our
rape of the planet, our failure to address a social problem or we
anger a deity--then our generation becomes the most important to ever
have lived. Like the stolid bourgeois that the bohemians have always
attacked, we are more likely to simply muddle through, trying to make
things better where we can. Bo-ring.
Something else underlies all these reasons why we are so dark about
the future, I believe. I call it "The Paramaribo Problem."
I began in journalism on a business newswire. I stayed up all night
reading Associated Press dispatches from around the globe, and sending
readers the stories that might matter to their markets. Mideast
conflicts went on the wire, naturally, but so did earthquakes in
Paramaribo, Surinam, since that mattered to shipping or oil pipelines.
A bus heading off a cliff in rural India might not. The point is that
I read them all--about every crisis, mass death and refugee exodus.
Pretty soon the work showed up in my life. Like almost all the other
novices, I started washing my hands more, checking in with my wife
several times during work and making small talk about scary-looking
people whom I'd seen on the street, or the prospects of war. I was a
walking case of the heebie-jeebies. It was normal, the seasoned vets
told me: Before, I could not have found Paramaribo on a map; now I was
in on its tragic loss of life. I knew about bus crashes in the
abstract, but now I saw them scroll over a computer screen, soon
replaced by a cholera outbreak in Sumatra or gunshots in Kinshasa. The
awareness of so much chaos bore a terrible cost.
That was 20 years ago, and now thanks to cable television and the
Internet we are all in a much bigger and incessant newsroom. There's a
Paramaribo every minute, compounded by a digital fight for our
attention. Even the advertisements and technology breakthroughs play a
role, creating expectations of how things might be that can never
match our mortal realities. The alarming news of the present, raised
to a level of continual urgency, has taught us to think of the future
in terms of continual catastrophe. It affects some more than
others--my friends in Aspen are very well-informed people.
In my newsroom days, the Paramaribo Problem took care of itself over
time. You read a lot of the stories, and maybe your heart broke enough
to scar over, but you gained the perspective to resume some kind of
normality. Experience taught that our close world of work and loved
ones continued on pretty well.
Perhaps we can learn to do that again in our thoughts about the future
of the planet. I suspect that it will be harder to gain the necessary
experience, though. You only get to play out the next 50 years once.
--
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to
escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. -- Marcus Aurelius
Wherever I go it will be well with me, for it was well with me here, not
on account of the place, but of my judgments which I shall carry away
with me, for no one can deprive me of these; on the contrary, they alone
are my property, and cannot be taken away, and to possess them suffices
me wherever I am or whatever I do. -- EPICTETUS
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMcharter.net
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