Wednesday 19 April 2017

This Is Not The future I Remember

I remember the future ... it was an age of prosperity ... it was an age health and leisure all looked after by machines of loving grace. There would be no war and no famine ... science and technology would enable everyone to have what they needed - there would be enough for everyone. There would be a base on the moon and people would be exploring Mars and the rest of the solar system.

This is how we imagined the future (the 21st century) in the 1960s ... an age of new freedoms, liberal thinking and life (not just "sex, drugs and rock and roll") when we were getting closer to stepping on the Moon and there were ambitious plans for science and technology to expand humanity into space and into the future. This is how we extrapolated the 1960s into the future.

Well ... here we are ... we took the long way into the future and had to live through 50 years of human nature to get here. Taking the long way to the future - I've lost the the optimism that comes with the innocence of youth, call it experience or maturity or a reality check but here we are and the long road to the future has led somewhere else - this is not the future I remember.

This future, our present, is a pretty depressing picture - war, famine, greed, inequality, poverty  - we haven't got a moon base .. the government show off about record levels of employment but and we all work longer, harder for less and are more stressed than ever.

Taking a shortcut to the future by extrapolating the present and the future looks pretty dismal.

But ... maybe there is hope ...  the short cut visions of 2057 may be as far off as taking the short cut to 2017 from 1967 ... the long way to the future may result in something very different and hopefully a lot better than the way I see it now.

Unless there is a major breakthrough in science and technology then I am unlikely to be around to remember the future in 2055 ... maybe this time I had better write it down so that someone might be able to remember it for me :)



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