Fifteen Minutes into the Future

One of the hardest things to grapple with as a futurist is the sheer banality of tomorrow.

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Complete entry

Posted by David Roden  on  03/12  at  05:53 AM

Love recursion! I'm anticipating the heady post-transbanal.

Posted by Michael Burnam-Fink  on  03/12  at  12:51 PM

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.

Posted by Khannea Suntzu  on  04/29  at  04:23 PM

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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