Not only will we spend the rest of our lives in the future, we also spend quite a bit of our present thoughts on it, wondering about, and wanting and dreading, the technologies, problems, discoveries, and upheavals that await us. But this focus on the future might be dulling our edge when it comes to adapting to it in creative ways.
“The future,” as we use the word when thinking about technology and society, is an invention, and a relatively modern one. During most of history the years to come were seldom thought about, or were imagined to be either essentially similar to the present, or to follow a path of gradual descent toward some form or another of dissolution. It was only during the last few centuries, and for reasons that are only partially related to the ever-accelerating pace of technological and social change, that the future as a clearly distinct and often “more advanced” place became part of the implicit mental map of Western civilization.
Thinking, talking, and writing about “the wars of the future,” “politics in the future,” etc, soon became a common topic. Today we have assimilated so deeply this very concrete, almost geographical idea of the future that companies like Intel have precise plans about the engineering and commercialization of products researchers haven’t quite figured out yet how to build. The future is the market we are all exporting to: pitching an idea for a company often has less to do with present conditions than with what will be popular or useful in this place known as “the future.”
But there’s a fundamental difference between mapping market conditions in Kansas and mapping market conditions in the future. Imagine that instead of, say, mobile bandwidth demand in Kansas in 2015, you were trying to “discover” what you will have for lunch tomorrow. It’s true that you don’t have an infinite number of options (a dodo hamburger would be quite surprising), but it also isn’t a predefined fact upon which you have no influence. Much like tomorrow’s lunch, the future is only partly a place to discover; it’s also something to decide.
Science fiction is perhaps the largest and most complex body of thought about this wider idea. Despite common misconceptions, science fiction doesn’t deal with the future. It rather deals, without being too precise about genre definitions that aren’t precise to being with, with possibilities for the real: looking at different possible worlds, and exploring what those differences might imply. Settings “in the future” or “in space” are sometimes, although not always, simply shorthands for “somewhere else,” convenient ways to liberate both authors and readers from the unnecessarily strict rules of mainstream literature (it must be said that all of this is quickly and properly changing, exploration outside narrow limits becoming more accepted by the wider group of readers).
Science fiction doesn’t need to be about aliens or robots. It can be about a world where computers were built in the 19th century (William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine), a world where kids are trained as master tacticians (Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game), or a world where a new kind of human is unable to think, but can perceive the future with total precision and always act in the best possible way (Philip K. Dick’s The Golden Man, which was used as an excuse — the word “inspired” is too strong — for Nicolas Cage’s movie Next). None of those worlds are intended to represent likely or even possible futures, but the effects of computers on societies, the use of kids as soldiers (and the more general theme of the potentials and cruelties of education), and the trade-offs of intelligence when facing the future are nonetheless very relevant to us. Mathematicians don’t need to study concrete reality to discover very real and very important things, and the same holds true for science fiction authors.
Even if not much of the world of 2010, 2015, or 2040 will depend on your choices (and who can say it won’t?), your own situation will depend a lot on what you do in that future, and this will call not only for foresight, but also for imagination and familiarity when exploring and analyzing the weird and the unknown. So, by all means, think about what’s coming in tomorrow’s world. But also take some time to explore what has been and is being written about all those worlds that are not yesterday’s, today’s, or tomorrow’s, but are unique, complex, and full of insight. They might not hold the key to the future, but might give you the seeds of new ones.
IEET Blog