The Missing Near Future

The near future – let’s peg it 2020 and beyond -- is a blank because there is almost no vision of a near-future that seems both desirable and plausible. Most stories, “worlds,” and scenarios of say the year 2050 are dystopian. Take your pick of nuclear self-annihilation, mortal pandemics, planetary floods, robotic overthrow, alien invasion, or fascist apocalypse. They are all very plausible, but not desirable.

The advantage of the far future is we don’t have to be told the story of how we arrived there, of how we passed through the near future. It’s far away enough that the creators can punt past it. But the near future is such a conundrum that is it has disappeared from our culture.

Computer scientist and inventor Danny Hillis, born in 1956, noticed that when he was a child the future was ‘far away’ in the year 2000, but that as he grew older, the future remained rooted to the year 2000, as if newness could not move beyond that boundary. He describes it as feeling as if the future was “shrinking” year by year until in 1999 the future was only one year long. Now that we’ve passed through 2000, the future has effectively disappeared – except for the far far future.

This disappearance has been made more real by key science fiction authors, futurists, and the brainy, nerdy folks who ordinarily keep busy churning out visions of tomorrow. A common belief in this circle is that things are moving so fast and weird that it is physically impossible to imagine the future of 2050 and beyond. Many of these futurists believe this discontinuity, called the singularity, is eminently desirable, because it is sure to lead to great intelligence, greater wealth, greater heath and immortality. But because it is forecast to come about via the shattering of what we understand humans to be now, many others will resist this future at all costs. And others believe the singularity future is not only undesirable, but implausible.

Either way, we are left with a blank for the near future. We have no story of progress that fits in the next century. There is no vision of 50 years hence that billions of people on earth would say, yes, that is what I want. Billions of people in the developing world know what they want tomorrow: clean water, free education, self-governance, cheap consumer goods, and hope for their kids. But beyond that, what? What do the billion in developed nations want? A clean environment and opportunities for meaningful work and ……?

...there is no shared vision of what this is headed, or even where we’d like it to head. There’s no agreed way on measuring if in fact our actions are titled in the desirable direction – because there is no desired direction. Muddling through blind is the default scenario of the near future.

Via the Great Kevin Kelly. Read it all here.