Futurism
Reihan Salam has an interesting an even-handed piece in Slate on futurism, utopianism, and so forth. Interesting and even-handed but, I think, sort of wrong. As he says, "The best futurists take present-day trends in technology and extrapolate from them based on a few fundamentals: that large-scale institutions will keep being slow-witted, that small groups of people are good at learning and adapting to new circumstances, and that death and taxes will always be with us." The trouble is that while this is the best method available, it's really not a very good method at all.
Sadly, it's impossible to develop a reliable method of predicting what future scientific and technological investigations will result in. During a very short span of time, the technological horizon in the field of aerospace expanded dramatically. We went from the primitive jet planes and V-2 rockets of World War II very rapidly to a diverse set of civilian jet craft, ballistic missiles, rockets to the moon, the Concorde, etc. Naturally enough, during that period it seemed to be the case that civilian aerospace technology would keep advancing rapidly with dramatic implications for human society.
But that turned out to be wrong. Progress rather suddenly stopped happening. And, indeed, over the past ten years what we've seen is a trend toward abandonning the two most advanced aerospace technologies -- the Concorde and the Space Shuttle -- as technically feasible but fundamentally impractical. The best method for getting things into space turns out to be a kind of old Soviet rocket and basically nothing of note has altered airplane design. There have been interesting and important changes in air transportation over the past twenty years but all the major innovation has come in terms of business practices rather than underlying technology. Or, rather, the really important technological change has had nothing to do with airplanes -- the internet has killed off travel agents and laid the groundwork for the business practice revolution.
What's more, while there's a bunch of stuff on the horizon suggesting that we can replace gasoline as a fuel for cars, as best I can tell there's nothing to suggest we can run airplanes on anything other than jet fuel. So if fossile fuels really do become scarce and expensive it now seems we're looking at further regression. But, of course, some awesome new way to power an airplane could be invented. And then . . . who knows?
What's more, the broad social trends don't seem to have real directionality. There was a time when the technical innovations of the railroad and the steamship strongly supported the concentration of human living patterns around railroad stations and ports (see Douglas Rae, City: Urbanism and Its Limits). Basically, you had a situation where transportation from port-to-port or station-to-station or port-to-station was quite cheap, but transportation away from the nodes was very expensive. This encouraged people to huddle together quite closely and urbanize, which wound up having implications for how goods were produced, etc., etc., etc.
Mass production of cars, of course, changed all that. And the recent telecommunications revolution seems to have further re-enforced a trend toward decentralization. But it's not the case that "technology = empowerment = decentralization" -- we got so centralized because of empowering technologies in the first place. Even very similar things can have different effects. The use of the radio spectrum to broadcast radio and television shows encouraged centralization of the media. The use of the radio spectrum for WiFi appears to encourage decentralization. And one simply doesn't know what will or won't come down the pike next.
Comments (17)
Grumpy old leftists such as myself think that America has been taken over by pod people whose minds have been injected with futurology, cornucopian economics, self-help slogans, "therapy", ecstatic authoritarian cult doctrine, prosperity theology, and new age religion. To say nothing of anti-depressants.
Pyramid scams, high stakes lotteries, Enron management, "Morning in America" politics, and enormous long-term fiscal problems are the objective outcome of this silliness. It's all the same, and it's all crap -- one big optimistic, lying mess.
Everyone should read Melville's "Confidence Man". This shit was all already there in 1857.
June 30, 2006 8:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Except for the antidepressants.
June 30, 2006 8:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
Reihan Salam has a...piece in Slate on futurism, utopianism, and so forth. Interesting and even-handed but, I think, sort of wrong.
That's my default reaction to almost every piece in Slate.
June 30, 2006 8:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
" And, indeed, over the past ten years what we've seen is a trend toward abandonning the two most advanced aerospace technologies -- the Concorde and the Space Shuttle -- as technically feasible but fundamentally impractical."
Recent revelations about a secret military successor to the SR-71 raises in my mind the possiblity that civilan space flight was deliberately held back as a way of preventing technologies with military application from spreading.
And, I'd point out that the Space Shuttle wasn't even state of the art at the time it was originally designed, due to all the politically driven design constraints. We could have built a better system then, let alone today.
That IS a problem for futurists, who tend to look more at what is physically possible, and not to think too much about how lawyers and politicians can kill progress.
June 30, 2006 9:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Jet engines can run on biodiesel, so if we come up with an ecologically-sustainable way to make that (which is of course a big question) we could keep the jets.
Hydrogen is another possibility. It is impractical at current prices due to its much greater volume per unit of energy and difficulty handling the liquid stuff, but if oil went to $400/bbl that would change. It would be better for the atmosphere too.
Some (although not all) the barriers to advancement out there are political, as noted above.
sPh
June 30, 2006 9:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm still waiting for us to start flying around in those cool saucers from the Jetsons. Of course, the downside is the heavy-handed cultural hegemony of Spacely Sprockets, imposing their ideological agenda on us all.
Still, I'd love one of those flying saucers...
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June 30, 2006 9:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Frederic Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future is a great analysis of futurism/utopianism, a lot of it is about the history of scifi, but it's more generally about the ways in which utopian thinking affects our daily lives. One of his central theses is that utopian thinking is essentially negative in nature, that is, utopians consider what how the world would function were specific forces or concepts removed from it (ie money, emotions).
June 30, 2006 10:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Back then, they called antidepressants "demon rum."
June 30, 2006 10:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Futurism is useless at actually predicting what life will be like in the future. What it's useful is reminding us what life could be like in the future.
In that sense, the Pollyannas and Jeremiahs are equally useful. The pessimists remind us that the future is unpredictable and we as a society, community, and democracy need to become as strong as possible--we need social networks of trust and empathy, because it's almost certain that tragedy and sadness will strike sometime in the future.
The optimists remind us of how very mundane the present and the concerns of all people living in it are. They present us visions of people and machines thousands of times smarter than those alive today, of economies in which poverty is eliminated and all of the Earth's billions of people are actively contributing to increasing humanity's collective prosperity and culture, of civilizations extending to the stars and lasting for millions of years, of consciousnesses so vast that they regard our minds as being those of infants, and of OTHER consciousness so vast that they regard THOSE consciousness as being those of infants.
In both outlook-and every scenario in between--the key to survival and success is to see beyond yourself to the community and world outside.
June 30, 2006 10:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Except alocohol is a depressant.
Oops.
June 30, 2006 1:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
I grew up reading Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark and a bunch of others. I spent my youth far in their future. All in all not a bad place to spend your youth. I dreamed of the world that would be.
Alas, for the most part, it hasn't turned out the way the science fiction writers and futurists I read said it would. Why. They dreamed of advances in the world they knew.
They dreamed of continued advances in transportation. Stories centered on spaceships and supersonic airplanes,warp speed and strange new worlds visited by ever faster and faster versions of sailing ships. The giant world of sail made small by the steamship was made large again by the spaceship. The author of Tarzan told stories of Barsoom (Mars.)
Other stories reflected dreams of the power of ever greater concentrations of knowledge. One of the stories I read focused on visiting whitecoated priests at the local university/library to use a computer. An entire library of stories involved the dangers of giant mainframes controlling the entire planet. Computers as gods.
The authors of my youth were simply projecting the existing age into the future. From the age of sail, through the age of coal and steam on to the age of the internal combustion and jet engines, people were able to go further faster. The world became smaller. Space made it large and mysterious again. In their dreams they visited strange countries and cultures.
The same for the authors who told tales involving great concentrations of information. The great concentration of information began with the written word. The concentration and power of knowledge became stronger with the printing of books and the rise of great libraries. Finally it reached its peak with the early mainframe computers tended by their white coated priests saying prayers over punch cards.
Don't forget radio and television. At their heart both media concentrate great information based power in the hands of a few.
Rome, Renessance Italy, China, India, Northern Europe, all the great civilizations had developed because information was concentrated in the hands of a few who dared to use it against the many who lacked it. The stories of mainframes gone wild or scientist priests or robots with positronic brains saying magic incantations to save the world were simply projections of the world that then existed.
In the event, Asmiov, Clark and the rest failed to fully understand the most important change of our age, probably the most important change since the invention of agriculture--the microchip, and its spawn, the personal computer and the internet. The microchip changes everything in a fundamental way. It breaks the power of the few to concentrate information. It defuses such concentrations. Never again will priests, be they men in frocks, white coats, or business suits behind microphones be able to bar any of us from knowledge.
The microchip also lets us travel in space to strange new worlds. Have you noticed that over the last few years more and more people are content to explore the planets from their easy chairs as robot probes provide almost real time views of Barsoon.
Anyway, none of us know when the next great invention might take place and were it might take us. I do know that we have seen the cumination of one age, and are living during the rise of the next. We are so close to its beginning that it is hard for futurists to even begin to project where it might lead.
Ron Byers
June 30, 2006 8:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
For a few years, anyway. Say 1990-2000. Then minature cameras, TIA databases, RFID chips, GPS-in-everything, and similar "improvements" came along and allowed a level of surveilance and control unknown in human history. IMHO you ain't seen nothin yet; let the Radicals win another Presidential term in 2008 and appoint John Yoo as Attorney General and the universe of Orwell's _1984_ will look like 1776.
It is true that there was a lot of "space opera" and Hornblower rewrites in the science fiction of the 1920-1950 period. Then again, 80% of all published writing is junk in any genre (and I include university-centered "literature" as a genre). The best of the science fiction of that era took technical changes and tried to analyze the _social_ implications. Mostly they got it wrong; most predictions about the future are wrong (cf Yogi Berra). Then again, Larry Niven's Organleggers series is looking quite prescient at the moment, as is Clarke's 1960 deconstruction of the telecommunications industry and its eventual fate.
sPh
July 1, 2006 7:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Greater surveillance, but to what end? The fax machine and just being sick and tired of being controlled by crooks and liars, beat the old soviet union. No matter how good the NSA's technology, oppression takes a population willing to be surpressed. The freedom we have enjoyed since the rise of the internet makes that very unlikely. The more people who know more, the harder it is for any group at the center to truly control information. The more they have to rely on real leadership.
I guess I am a cornucopian and you are bullfrog. Both honorable positions. One of us will be right. I hope it is me.
Ron Byers
July 1, 2006 1:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
As usual, Matt doesn't get it when it comes to science and technology.
Give it up, Matt. You're talking about stuff you're clueless about.
Comparing AI, nanotech and biotech to cars and the Concorde and the Space Shuttle merely demonstrates your ignorance of the issues involved.
You ARE correct that the guy is wrong when he says "death and taxes will always be with us." Neither is true. But if one continues to think that way, then obviously it is true.
I read an article by Greg Palast the other day that demonstrates that while there IS such a thing as "Peak Oil" - in fact, there isn't. "Peak Oil" is a phenomena that occurs with regard to PRICE - not the existence of oil bearing strata. With the price of oil sufficiently high, the tar sands of the world become another Saudi Arabia. And nanotech is likely to be the enabling technology of a process that liberates tar sands. The net effect might be that one can fly jet airliners for the next century on plain old jet fuel.
But of course that won't happen - because nanotech will also modify the technologies used to provide air transportation.
The point is that NO science or technology or the applications derived from them can be determined by examining only ONE such. All of the interactions and applications of one science or technology to all the others must be considered.
And you're right, Matt - there's no easy way to do that.
What IS easy is to determine that in fact technological progress will continue - and things that we think can't be done now may well be done - or made obsolete by other applications we can't think of now.
Nanotech will affect computer science which will affect biotechnology - which will also be affected by nanotech. Enhanced computer science will enable advances in both nanotech and biotech by enabling better simulations. And so forth and so on.
What is important is to be imaginative in applying the possibilities revealed by science and technology to the issues of the day and of the future. Creating them is at least as important as trying to predict those possibilities.
July 1, 2006 4:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
I would argue that even though the methodology of futurism is limited that it still matters greatly as we are inherently future-oriented people and so the notions of what the future might be like that are floating around in our noggins matter a good deal for our actions today.
Futurists are entrepreneurs who seek to change the notions floating around in people's noggins and hopefully cultivate a professionalism in how they do so.
So We will see!
dlw
A blog-activist dedicated to the reduction of the faith-based political acrimony in the United States of America so as to make our political system more democratic and just and to improve our witness to the rest of the world.
July 2, 2006 12:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: You ARE correct that the guy is wrong when he says "death and taxes will always be with us." Neither is true.
As long as government is with us, government will need to be funded somehow-- hence taxes.
And until someone finds a way to get rid of the Second Law of Thermodynamics death will be with us too, though we may well find ways of postponing it for centuries.
July 2, 2006 12:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
As long as government is with us - well, that won't be long now - by the end of this century, most likely.
As for the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I'll take a few million - or billion - years over what I have now, thanks. That gives me time to figure out a way around the Second Law. I'm rather more concerned about gamma ray bursts and the like than I am slowly going cold...
July 3, 2006 2:04 AM | Reply | Permalink