One of the hardest things to grapple with as a futurist is the sheer banality of tomorrow.
This is a re-posting of an article from 2008 that offers additional perspective on questions being pondered in our current IEET reader poll.
We live our lives, dealing with everyday issues and minor problems. Changes rarely shock; more often, they startle or titillate, and very quickly get folded into the existing cultural momentum. Even when big events happen, even in the worst of moments, we cope, and adapt. This is, in many ways, a quiet strength of the human mind, and a reason for hope when facing the dismal prospects ahead of us.
But futurism, at least as it’s currently presented, is rarely about the everyday. More often, futurists tell stories about how some new technology (or political event, or environmental/resource crisis, etc.) will Change Your Life Forever. From the telescopic perspective of looking at the future in the distance, they’re right. There’s no doubt that if you were to jump from 2008 to 2028, your experience of the future would be jarring and disruptive.
But we don’t jump into the future—what we think of now as the Future is just an incipient present, very soon to become the past. We have the time to cope and adapt. If you go from 2008 to 2028 by living every minute, the changes around you would not be jarring; instead, they’d largely be incremental, and the occasional surprises would quickly blend into the flow of inevitability.
There is a tendency in futurism to treat the discipline as a form of science fiction (and I don’t leave myself out of that criticism). We construct a scenario of tomorrow, with people wearing web-connected contact lenses, driving semi-autonomous electric cars to their jobs at the cultured meat factories, and imagine how cool and odd and dislocating it must be to live in such a world.
But futurism isn’t science fiction, it’s history turned on its head. The folks in that scenario don’t just wake up one day to find their lives transformed; they live their lives to that point. They hear about new developments long before they encounter them, and know somebody who bought an Apple iLens or package of NuBacon before doing so themselves. The future creeps up on them, and infiltrates their lives; it becomes, for the people living there, the banal present.
William Gibson’s widely-quoted saying, “the future is here, it’s just not well-distributed yet” is suggestive of this. The future spreads, almost like an infection. The distribution of the future is less an endeavor of conscious advancement than it is an epidemiological process—a pandemic of tomorrows, if you will.
If futurism is more history inverted than science fiction, perhaps it can learn from the changes that the study of history has seen. One of the cornerstone revolutions in the academic discipline of history was the rejection of the “Great Men” model, where history was the study of the acts of larger-than-life people, the wars fought by more-powerful-than-most nations, and the ideas of the brilliant shapers of culture.
Historians have come to recognize that history includes the lives of regular people. Some of the most meaningful and powerful historical studies of the past few decades, from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to Ken Burns’ popular documentary, The Civil War, focused as much or more on the everyday citizens as they did the “Great Men,” and as much on everyday moments as on the “turning points” and revolutionary events.
What might a “people’s history of the future” look like?
Your post reminds me of the J.G. Ballard quote quote, “I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.”
Any good reading of the effects of a technology, or technology in general, should focus on the lives of common people. A history of the airplane is not about dogfights and nuclear bombers, but about cross-continental families, multinational business and exotic vacations. Space travel is irrelevant because only a select handful have gone into space.
A people’s history of the future would focus on social technologies: cell phones, Facebook, twtter, etc. This where our lives intersect the future. Biotechnology, nanotech, psuedo-AI are all at a distance, they make artifacts we are all already familiar with better. Other human beings are the most important things in our lives, and a people’s history would be about the relationships between them.
The scariest may be that in this future you speak of, beyond each set of eyes we see, lies unknown things. Right now if we look at the typical person, and look her or him in the eyes we known roughly what is happening “in there”. In the future the brain can be edited and changed. Our pattern recognition won’t work, as soon as humans start with even very modest changes. And no, the mind won’t spiral into oblivion or insanity at the first minor tweak. Right now a large part of human brains is occupied with running simulations about other humans - but at some point we will gain access to a pandemonium of engineering options with regards to brains. The transition from the normal state into an upgraded state will be like a narcotics trip - but without the pathology. Let’s say I add a nootropics drip, and let’s say I speed up a certain category of swithing neurons by 50%. This will take getting used to. But in a while the end result will function in some meaningful manner - and the end result won’t have a human cognition and will be anything but banale.
And yes, there will be a LOT of dancing in such a future, in case you were worried.
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