Looking Forward: Creating the Future

What will tomorrow be like? Human beings are fascinated by the future. We project our thoughts into unknown territory, using the brain's talented prefrontal lobes to explore and envision, sometimes even noticing a few errors in time to evade them. Progress doesn't always go the way we expect it to. It is sometimes wiser than we are.

Tired of the insipid "left-right" political metaphor? Interested in exploring which dogmas or reflexes you might have adopted out of reflex? Take a simple questionnaire in which I poke at the deeper assumptions that under-lie many ideologies we take for granted. Like: do you believe there ever was - or will-be - a human "golden age"? Do you see progress being made through incremental problem solving or dedication to an ideal?
The aim is to help folks step back and ponder why they cling to certain types of ideology. Try it. Only be warned. You may gain flexibility... at cost of some comfy certainties!

Most efforts at prophecy seem to shrivel under close and skeptical scrutiny. It happens so consistently that one has to wonder humans keep on trying. Yet we do keep attempting to look ahead. We spend a lot of time and money trying to make educated guesses about future events, with much of our economy dedicated to variants on the same theme. But now we have the means to track predictive successes and failures --- to determine what really works. Transparency in action.

It's not about "left-vs-right" or "morality" or any other 20th Century cliché. The issue is Modernity and how to deal with a new century of change. Decent people of every generation struggle for human improvement -- more knowledge, better kids. The best of our ancestors strove hard to help make us a bit more strong and knowing. But romantic mystics -- whether "right-wing" or "left wing" -- see history as a long slide from some past golden age. Human effort is futile against this slide. Underneath all that hyper-tolerance posturing, there lies hatred of the very notion of progress.

So, is the Google era empowering us to be better, smarter, more agile thinkers? Or devolving us into distracted, manic scatterbrains? Is technology-improved discourse going to turn us all into avid, participatory problem solvers? Or will the Web’s centrifugal effects spin us all into little islands of shared conviction — midget Nuremberg rallies — where facts become irrelevant and any opinion can be a memic god? The truth lies somewhere between "Google is making us stupid" and "the Internet will liberate humanity....

Oligarchy -- reflects the same old pyramid that failed the test of governance in nearly 100% of previous civilizations, always and invariably stifling creativity while guiding societies to delusion and ruin. It also means a return to zero-sum logic, zero-sum economics, zero-sum leadership thinking, a quashing of nonlinear synergies... the death of the Enlightenment.

Is the world improvable by means of human intervention? The question can be debated endlessly on a philosophical level. But there is little argument over this basic premise within the community of those engaged in philanthropic activity. We share a common belief that vigorous investment and intervention in humanity can help humanity as a whole -- and countless individual human beings -- to achieve goals starting with basic necessities but extending to the limits of ambition.

One of the most powerful novels of all time, George Orwell's 1984 foresaw a dark future that never came to pass. That we escaped this may be owed in part to the chilling tale -- which served as a 'self-prevening prophecy'. Our civilization's success depends at least as much on the mistakes we avoid as successes we plan, but sadly no one compiles lists of these narrow escapes. They somehow seem less interesting than each week's crisis.

Will our descendants conquer the last barriers standing between humanity and Olympian glory? Or may we encounter hurdles too daunting even for our brilliant, arrogant, ingenious and ever-persevering species? There can be no better topic for this contemplation -- the last in a series commissioned for iPlanet -- about our future in the coming millennium. Essay number one cast perspective on our accomplishments during the Twentieth Century and the second dealt with near-term dilemmas we may face in the twenty-first. Now let's take a long-view, exploring the possibility that our great grandchildren will be "great" in every sense of the word... and have problems to match.

For we already live in the openness experiment, and have for two hundred years. It is called the Enlightenment -- with "light" both a core word and a key concept in our turn away from 4,000 years of feudalism. All of the great enlightenment arenas -- markets, science and democracy -- flourish in direct proportion to how much their players (consumers, scientists and voters) know, in order to make good decisions. To whatever extent these arenas get clogged by secrecy, they fail.

Moreover, this approach to deterrence may give us — civilization’s rambunctious, argumentative, yet cooperative citizens — the last laugh. We can catch, punish and outlast them, of course. But above all we’ll deny villains any chance to win through violence a bigger place in history than the hard-working, creative people they hurt and despise. Who knows? Some of those angry ones out there, who are teetering with indecision each desperate day, may even decide that it’s better to help lay a few bricks, alongside the rest of us, than to claw after infamy by tearing the walls down.

History would seem to favor pessimists. In COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond shows how past cultures toppled, sometimes with little warning. Supplementing historical records with discoveries in archaeology and climatology, he offers a guided tour of crashes and narrow escapes, ranging from Viking Greenland and the Yucatan Mayans to the Anasazi peoples of America's southwest. Then, globe-hopping from Australia and China to Montana and Southern California, Diamond surveys how modern societies are adapting to even greater perils. The lesson in a nutshell: learn from history, or risk repeating it.

Author David Brin on new ideas and ways to fund them. He discusses the gedankenexperiment: how the human brain creates and tests a 'thought experiment' to explore the future consequences of our actions. How can crowds make smart decisions for our society?