

Who killed the futurist in you? School or you? - krisnair
https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/7d8210000eaf

======
Udo
_> We are either too smart or too dumb to find god and tell him problems of
our world_

The correct reaction to the world being awful is not to seek the help of a
bronze age deus ex machina. The problem is not that we are too smart or too
dumb for deities to help us, it's that they can't really help us on account of
being fictional.

The premise of futurism being dead seems conveniently modern because there is
a lot of perceived (and actual) downturn economically. But the conviction that
we can design a better future for ourselves is not coupled to that.

At the core of our desire to improve ourselves as both a civilization and a
collection of individuals is still the one big revelation from the Age of
Enlightenment: that in the absence of the supernatural the universe is ours to
discover and understand and that we can by virtue of our intellect become
vastly more than what we are today.

Nobody killed the futurist in me, although school and society at large
certainly tried. Life is already better in the Western world than it used to
be. All we have to do is to go forward. There are times when progress seems to
be in serious danger but I'm still hopeful that we can and do find the
motivation to keep marching. Which, again, is really all we have to do. Even
at our current glacial pace, we'll get there.

~~~
icebraining
Yeah, as Warren Ellis wrote in Transmet, _"the world is, generally and on
balance, a better place to live this year than it was last year."_

Of course, it's easier to believe this when I'm not part of the 40% of young
unemployment in my country.

~~~
rbanffy
> "the world is, generally and on balance, a better place to live this year
> than it was last year."

On average, yes. The standard deviation doesn't look as promising.

------
mindcrime
When I think about futurism, I'm always reminded to this quote (apparently by
billg):

 _We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and
underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself
be lulled into inaction._

On the other hand, in some ways, life today isn't much different than life 30
years ago. Or even 100 years ago. Or since the advent of the Industrial
Revolution at least. People wake up, go to work, come home, eat, sleep. In
between they go to church, seek mates, sing songs, drink, etc. The details
change, but the basics don't.

When I try to think about the future, I usually start from the idea that
tomorrow will actually be more like today than we expect. Even the wildest
advances in technology (to date) don't change human nature or basic patterns
of human behaviour. So ask yourself how technology and change will affect out
ability to go out, seek mates, drink, seek spiritual enlightenment, find food,
earn income, etc.

If you believe the evolutionary psychologists, a lot of our basic
psychological responses evolved 30,000+ years ago, and we - as humans - are
fairly poorly adapted to the world we live in. Human nature may be
fundamentally at odds with an urbanized, technology driven, fast-paced
society. I find myself wondering if we _can_ "fix" most of the problems we
have in our world anytime soon.

So I guess I think we can make incremental improvements, but I'm not convinced
we can, for example, "end war" across the board, etc.

~~~
zanny
I like how you put forth a routine, so I'd like to postulate some ways to
modify it with future advances in the next 50 years (hypothetical, but
optimism is great):

Waking Up and Sleep go together: Neural implants that reduce the amount of
sleep needed drastically by stimulating the brain into REM sleep immediately,
or by outright replacing parts of the brain (or body) that need the
recuperation time. I don't think it will be healthy for a while to avoid sleep
(unless you replace a significant portion of the human body or endocrine
system), but we should be much better at letting people do it.

Work: Since we are moving to post-scarcity, I easily see us having automated
transportation of goods, automated farming (or even better, molecular printing
that fabricates food from carbon and friends), automated mining - and we
should be able to easily automate construction to just taking an input design
and having a machine crew do the work. Robots that can maintain their peers
and themselves, communicating their defects so they can be serviced. No human
involvement. People could then commit themselves to either constant leisure,
artistic pursuits, or the sciences, and only if they want to, since they would
no longer have to.

Eat: Soylent and its ilk are even right now aiming to change this, and if the
above considerations happen, you don't need to work to feed yourself, and can
print any food you want. Though it will be some time before humans start
replacing their digestive tract with 3d fabricators so they just plug
themselves in to electricity to "eat".

Church: Already dying in the newer generations, due to the pervasiveness of
knowledge and freely available information. If anything is the death knell for
religion, it is the Internet and its ability to distribute knowledge anywhere
instantly. It makes rationalizing the unknown less about guesswork and
superstition and more about googling it.

Seek Mates: I think this will be around because human beings are stubborn and
set in their ways, but beyond 50 years I expect us to transition away from
sexually partnered couples with children to a system where everyone is
sterilized and children are grown (with perfect genetics) as needed and raised
in public institutions where (through rigorous study) we (collectively) have
figured out how to best promote creativity and open minds. It is one of the
greatest weaknesses in modern society that because everyone is in their
developmental years bound to the behavior of their parents they can have
vastly different advantages and disadvantages throughout life.

In the absence of the superficial need to spawn being bound to romantic
relationships, I expect people to be more fluid and have sex with various
acquaintances. I also have a feeling that, biologically, humans are inherently
much more bisexual than anyone wants to admit, and we are culturally driven
into a singular sexual preference (usually the straight one - I'm asexual, and
I feel it was because I was never pressured into having relationships I didn't
want), but I have no idea how true it is. Just an intuition.

Sing Songs: I hope so!

Drink: Would be nice if people weren't so depressed and sad they needed to
lose their ability to cognitively reason and lose their ability to recall what
is happening.

I'm all for changing the basics. But I agree, we have this culture that is
very resilient to change that will take fundamental changes to bend to
something more fulfilling for people.

~~~
kcorbitt
Many of the changes you propose -- all of them, actually -- would tend to make
me less happy and less satisfied with my life than I am currently.

We may have the capability to do all of these things within 50 years, and some
of them much earlier. But I'm skeptical of whether these sorts of cultural
"innovations" will see widespread adoption if they don't improve quality of
life.

We've had the ability as a species to have sex without physical consequences
for more than half a century now, and yet most people, once they reach a
certain age, still seem to derive more satisfaction from a stable, monogamous
relationship than any other arrangement. Maybe we're just wired that way.

~~~
rbanffy
> once they reach a certain age, still seem to derive more satisfaction from a
> stable, monogamous relationship than any other arrangement

Polygamous relationships are, roughly, O(n^2). You may not want to go there.
;-)

~~~
loup-vaillant
On "polygamy": I have seen a nice gender-neutral term on LessWrong:
"polyamory".

~~~
dragonwriter
"polygamy" is already gender neutral; the gender-specific forms are polygyny
(having more than one wife) and polyandry (having more than one husband).

~~~
loup-vaillant
"Polygyny". I just learned something. And so did my spell checker by the way.
"Polygamy" may have become gender neutral in technical circles, but I doubt
the general population have caught up yet (though by the look of the relevant
Wikipedia pages, they will soon).

Also, "polyamory" doesn't have the notion of marriage in it. Maybe that could
be a useful distinction.

~~~
dragonwriter
> "Polygamy" may have become gender neutral in technical circles, but I doubt
> the general population have caught up yet.

The thing is that virtually all polygamy that has existed in the real world is
polygyny, so the distinction between that gender-specific form and the general
form (as well as any reference to polyandry) is of almost entirely of
theoretical/technical/specialist interest.

> Also, "polyamory" doesn't have the notion of marriage in it. Maybe that
> could be a useful distinction.

I think it is.

------
rayiner
Engineering school killed the futurist in me. When I was a kid, I read books
projecting that we'd have manned missions to Mars by 2025. I went to school to
be an aerospace engineer and work on stuff like that. Then I realized that the
reality of the field was spending $1 billion to improve the fuel efficiency of
a commercial airliner engine by 1% every decade so that the airlines could
stave off bankruptcy just a little bit longer.

I learned that the nature of technology is rapid development, followed by
plateau. Thus, while new things might surprise us, the basics are pretty much
here to stay. I don't foresee that, 50 years from now, the existing mature
fields will be all that different. E.g. I doubt medical technology will
advance meaningfully for the median person. I plan to live a healthy life of
75-80 years, just as my grandfathers did in Bangladesh who were born early in
the 20th century. I will almost certainly be living in a house that looks more
or less like houses do today. My car might drive itself, but as an urban
dweller the only meaningful difference will be not having to make smalltalk
with a cab driver.

~~~
patrickk
_"I doubt medical technology will advance meaningfully for the median
person."_

One way that I see meaningful medical change (which we probably have the
technology for right now) is in _any_ kind of visual test (such as x-rays, CT
scans, various types of blood tests) basically anywhere you have a highly paid
human who uses their eyes to scan an image/microscope for a pattern that
determines if you have some disease, fracture, something in your blood work is
off, etc.

At the moment, these test are time consuming (days minimum, often weeks or
months) and very expensive because those highly paid humans can only scan so
many samples in a lab every day. Once we turn computer vision algorithms onto
the task (trained to spot visual clues for disease over thousands or millions
of positive and negative samples, similar to how Google trained an AI neural
net to recognise pictures of cats[1]), the time & costs of any type of visual
medical scan will fall dramatically. Imagine getting the results of an x-ray
back in seconds, with a result accurate to 99.99% certainty of a fracture.

Of course, that main obstacle to widespread adoption of this type of
technology will be political. Radiologists and other professionals won't take
too kindly to being displaced.

And of course then you will have AI technologies like Watson, which should
allow doctors to get much more productive, so they get to see more patients in
less time and reach a diagnosis with great accuracy than before. This will
mean you need less doctors (lowering medical costs) but you get better
outcomes.

I think AI tech like Watson and computer vision will have a dramatic impact on
medicine in the near future.

[1]
[http://www.dailytech.com/Googles+Unsupervised+SelfLearning+N...](http://www.dailytech.com/Googles+Unsupervised+SelfLearning+Neural+Network+Searches+For+Cat+Pics/article25025.htm)

~~~
rayiner
That might make certain kinds of medical care cheaper, sure, but what will be
the value to the average person? Are they going to live a longer, healthier
live because a CT scan costs $500 instead of $5,000? I don't think that's
really the bottleneck. For your average person, what's gating quality of life
at older ages is things like bad knees, bad backs, etc. Are we going to see
cheap, convenient, safe, knee replacement by the time I hit 60 (30 year from
now)? Considering that 30 year ago was 1983, and old peoples' knees are just
as bad today as they were then, I'm not optimistic.

~~~
harryh
Arthroscopic surgery has advanced significantly in the last 30 years.

~~~
rayiner
Fair point, though it's still not that great as far as I can tell.

~~~
icelancer
Isn't that a point in favor of it rapidly improving down the line?

------
afreak
> What I’m worried about the Techcrunch reading me is, somehow we all are
> programmed to think short-term, too short term; 5-8 years.

This is a consequence of the financial world, but in the world of science it's
a different story. Many, many long-term projects are in progress and it will
be like that for a long time.

One of the things overlooked in this article is that we live in periods of
time where certain things dominate the world we live in. The 1500s, 1600s, and
1700s were periods of European settlement in the Americas, the 1800s and early
1900s were focused on developing modes of transportation (trains, planes, and
automobiles), and the past 50 or so years has been centred around the computer
which has pretty much transformed the world from typewriters and paper to
devices that were only thought to be in the world of Star Trek just 30-years
ago.

Just because every day you and I still go to work more or less the same way we
did decades ago does not mean that we're stagnating. Human behaviour hasn't
caught up with technology fully and we're still trying to get used to what we
have in front of us.

I think that the author in the article is thinking too short-term really.

------
zacharyvoase
I'd posit that the great leaps that occur don't happen because of one
individual thinking 50–100 years into the future, but due to masses of
individuals thinking 5 years ahead.

The computer revolution came about because of many, many people working on
_slightly_ improving transistor technology, whilst others built compilers that
were _slightly_ better than their predecessors, whilst others still were
working on very basic computer graphics, and so on. Added up over 50 years,
those ‘short-sighted’ individuals’ accomplishments added up.

I guess I’m trying to say maybe the future will happen as a result of typical
human behavior, not despite it.

~~~
sliverstorm
IMO long-term vision is great and all, but only if you can concoct a realistic
vision. This is why we are in a 5-year mode; nobody can effectively predict
things like our manufacturing capabilities or even which countries will still
be around 50-100 years out, so any plans you make would be worthless.

------
sbirchall
Because others are replying with their futurist fantasies, here is mine:

[taken with a large pinch of salt...]

Humans are not trying to save the Giant Panda. They are using the fluffy
harmless critter as a convenient smokescreen for the development and testing
of large-scale genetic engineering to implement the (inevitable) eugenics
program that will create the stratification required for a colonial species.

Systems incorporated into our world on the basis of "security", "healthcare"
and "culture" will be used to analyse the population for weaknesses using
social media databases, soft-tissue scanners, genetic screening and routine
psychological testing. And as this conscious stratification continues, the
human species will fracture and contract upon a few very highly
advanced/specialised branches.

Essentially humans have gone from voracious, highly specialised, hunter, to a
doe-eyed herd, to a full scale hive. The Internet is the persistent storage
medium that humans use to transmit colonial orders, like ants use pheromones,
and various testing grounds exist the world over to develop the next
generation of technologies that will internalise our virtual world and extend
our senses so that humans no longer understand a world without it.

Priority is being given to nano- and quantum-technology as this will allow
humans to harness their genetic inheritance and use the natural world as they
see fit - taking solutions developed over many millions of years through
trial-and-error evolution and implementing them for intelligence driven
engineering, improving on them and turning them to situations never before
experienced in the physical universe.

This will begin with the advent of the Techological Conflagration, a war to
make all previous aggression look like a fart in a hurricane. In this battle,
nation states will effectively dissolve as they will be unable to adjust to
the rapid pace of development of those super rich individuals capable of
amassing a small private army with a weapons infrastructure built on intense
iteration (I call this The Batman Hypothesis). I suspect the testing grounds
for this future are already well known: places like North Korea and
Afghanistan offer a sandbox environment where the powerful can play.

But the chilling part of this is that you have long ago sold yourselves down
this river as Plutocracy has taken over the entire world and created a global
hegemony that amorally seeks it's own stability and advancement. International
consortia offer fronts for the production of infrastructure that will support
the transition to this bleak view of our future (modern airports and stadiums
are little more than vast crowd management systems and prisons are gulags in
all but name) and people are constantly fed subliminal media that prepares
them for the changes that are to come. It will begin with your military, but
soon things will begin to be outsourced as more and more private entities flex
their muscles.

More than likely Homo Sapiens will not survive and if it does it will be as an
augmented slave species to the Meta Sapiens (no longer affiliating with the
branch of humanity) that will have attained god-like powers...

~~~
sentenza
But I am confident we'll somehow manage to shoot Khan and his henchmen into
space in the end.

~~~
sbirchall
Or at the very least: McPanda Burgers. Yum!

------
daniel-cussen
Prices. I was really into drones in 1998, when I was in the third grade. I
wanted one so bad...I figured I could get one (a $600 remote control airplane)
if my Golden Retriever had a few $400 puppies. But lo, it was out of reach. So
were remote control helicopters. My mother told me about a remote-control
sailboat, but I didn't care...it had to move around in 3-D, like a submarine,
to catch my attention.

So, yeah, prices. Right now, I'm eyeing a Physical Random Number Generator
from ID Quantique for mathematical experiments, but those are like $1500
dollars. Nuts.

I think the big plus in technology is that yesterday's expensive impossible is
today's affordable plausible. I remember tiny remote control helicopters going
for $20 recently.

------
JonnieCache
I stopped having that thought when I realised only thing I could see was war
and servitude. These days I try not to think about the future.

It was all very well for Turner, he was painting from the vantage point of an
empire on the ascendancy.

Is anyone else here terrified by the feeling of geopolitics shifting under
their feet? I think it's a bit too specific for a support group...

~~~
EthanHeilman
The feeling of geopolitics shifting under my feet always cheers me up, it's
one of the few things about the future that gives me hope. Yesterday's ash
pile is today's hegemon. It adds long term fairness to the international
system (every nation gets it's 15 minutes of power). The question is how long
can this constant table turning last, it probably will not survive once 90% of
the nations reach parity of development.

What gives me nightmares is what a competent authoritarian state, corporation
or network could do with present technology. Think Stalin with the
capabilities of the NSA or Hitler with a first rate human genomics and
sequencing program. Such a power could actually accomplish their insane ideas
of racial (kill everyone that has these three SNPs) or ideological purity
(kill everyone that thinks the government is doing a bad job).

~~~
JonnieCache
_> What gives me nightmares is what a competent authoritarian state,
corporation or network could do with present technology_

This is what I'm actually talking about. Of course I don't begrudge china
their time at the top (not that they haven't been there before...) but rather
I'm scared by the uncertainty. Of course the future is uncertain by
definition, but it particularly uncertain now. I'm not sure that even makes
sense... As you can tell I'm very confused.

This kind of rambling 24/7 in my head was basically what caused me to stop
thinking about it.

------
zwieback
What's this guy talking about? I think there are always way too many futurists
and too few people doing solid and useful work.

------
omnisci
Is there an option for "other people?" Speaking with people about the future
is difficult when they don't really have a full perspective on what we've
accomplished in recent history. If technology continues to move at the rate
it's moving (which it won't, it will only move faster), we are in for some
really cool shit in the future;) I can't wait to see what the future
brings..but I do plan on putting my 2 cents in and making it kick ass.

~~~
zanny
This, everyone focuses on the negatives, their fears, and the what ifs, not
the near-guaranteed and positives. We should have fully functional (and
available) bionic limbs _this decade_ , with the ability to get them 3d
printed to your exact proportions. It is the future!

------
wwweston
"For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any
attention to (all three of them) have been slyly declaring that the Future is
over... I think they're talking about the capital-F Future, which in my
lifetime has been a cult, if not a religion. People my age are products of the
culture of the capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a
product of that. If you're 15 or so, in 2010, I suspect you inhabit a sort of
endless digital Now.

"The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or a radioactive
post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely more stuff...
Upon arriving in the capital-F future, we discover it, invariably, to be the
lower-case now."

\- William Gibson, 2010 Book Expo speech

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ5duD15P9s>

------
netcan
I'm not entirely sure what he means in his question, but I think I'm more
futurist, not less. That is I'm more convinced and engaged by futuristic ideas
like the singularity, simulated universes, techno solipsism and immortal (or
less mortal) humans. I'm very ready to believe that our grandchildren could be
be snowboarding at 90. I fully expect international culture to eventually melt
national barriers. Educational opportunities will transcend the birth lottery.
We will sire generations of smarter people, better people than us. Grandsons
of industrial peasants will be intellectuals by the standards of the past.

For the most part I'm positive about the future, excited by it. Jealous of
people in the future. Sometimes I'm fearful of it, focusing on scary trends
and consequences of a technological world. I worry that our cultures can't
adapt fast enough. I see strain on our social/familial institutions. The
loneliness of so many people, living outside of these institutions. The fear
that future totalitarianism will have more tools at its disposal. The mental
health and depression trends. Obesity. The fact that the world is so
competitive and many people clearly lose the competition. The resilience of
religion and the worst ideas contained within it.

If I were an artist, I think I would be depicting these ideas in some way. I
don't know how though. I guess that's what makes me not an artist.

------
com2kid
School gave me the tools to enable me to build the future I dreamed of as a
child.

Who said the futurist in me ever died?

------
otikik
I'm from the future.

I came to your era to bring you this detergent.

------
hga
Watching the science establishment block almost all progress in "real" Drexler
style nanotechnology for a quarter century after the publication of _Engines
of Creation_.

~~~
marcosdumay
Didn't it happen because Drexler style nanotech is hellish hard to create?

Really, I don't get how any kind of establishment can block that kind of
research. It's somewhat cheap (at most at semiconductors level price, not at
astronomy or high energy physics level), enough to lots of companies to afford
and maybe individuals (there is only a ceiling estimative to costs, there is
no floor). And it has a huge potential for short term revenue.

If there is nobody researching that, I'm willing to bet that it's because
nobody knows where to start. Not because anybody is blocking them.

~~~
hga
It sounds like you're contradicting yourself, how can it be both "hellish hard
to create" and "somewhat cheap"? It's only the latter when compared to some of
the most expensive science artifacts in history, "one of a kind" ones.

The way they could block _direct_ progress on it was to make sure it got no
government funding, which also influences industrial and private funding (see
how NASA blocked private space efforts for decades because their people, or
people in big companies that supplied them, were the only ones who could vet
alternatives; that private space is finally getting somewhere is only due to
the (early) retirement of the Space shuttle). So they claimed a lot of their
projects were nanotechnology and since they by definition control the purse
strings....

If you want some hard evidence, if you're familiar enough with Drexler's
proposals, look at the first round or two of Nobelest Richard Smalley's
"debate" with Drexler. Smalley was making strawman arguments, a very good sign
he didn't want to debate what Drexler was actually proposing.

Anyway, it needs government or Bell Labs style "pie in the sky" funding right
now because it is "hellish hard to create" and a lot of basic R&D remains to
be done. Although as Drexler pointed out in _Engines of Creation_ it's going
to happen sooner or later, natural progress in various fields such a
semiconductors and molecular biology will keep pushing the state of the art
closer to what's needed to execute his vision.

------
ronaldx
Economics - a company with Apple's cash pile might be able to look toward the
future, but they still need to build things for today and tomorrow.

------
dyakuzy
The alienation of work I guess...

------
ttrreeww
The Economic System we have killed it. I got bills to pay right now.

