I've been reading Gerd Leonhard's stuff recently and seems to be a good conversation, sort of like a counter-argument for a Kurzweillian future..
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I've been reading Gerd Leonhard's stuff recently and seems to be a good conversation, sort of like a counter-argument for a Kurzweillian future..
Besides some science fiction authors that got a couple of things right (due to the sheer abundance of their prophesies) we have never been able to predict the future because simply we cannot take all the parametres into consideration.
I think both of them get the idea of the future wrong. Remember. There are science fiction movies of the 90's that portray 2010's with flying cars, A.I and all the other goodies. What we got instead? Plenty of hypes with little to no use. People thought for example that having a see through fridge would save us the trouble from opening it. Little did we know that the idea would fail since nobody is comfortable sharing their mess inside the fridge.
Part of the problem is that we are not honest with our deepest desires. We are self centered, egotistic but like to see ourselves more like altruists, kind, trying to make a world a better place. Sure we do try to accomplish something bigger than us (if we manage to get the basic ego satisfactions in life) but very few end up doing so.
Everything made is for the common folk. The average user. The only correct prediction I see for the future is Idiocracy. We be building more and more virtual reality spaces, more and more basic cyborgs to fuck and date. We will make our houses prisons that we won't have to leave for anything.
Idiocracy is already here, in a way. I wonder how the technological developments correlate with the number of people with at least a basic clue about how their latest toys work. Most can't even change a car tyre or describe what a car's gearbox does.
There is even a school of self-declared intellectuals, especially in arts and literature, who pride themselves on knowing nothing about math and technology. They are in fact admitting they haven't got a clue about much what is happening in the world, yet they somehow find this ennobling.
Not sure if I've read anything back then that indicated this in some pretty decently reasoned-out book or it was just portrayed simply as scifi.
One of the most possible paths but still only a prediction, plus there'd always be a counter-culture..