Most every article about our future is gloomy. There are all these old people, for instance. When the herds of Baby Boomers retire and our nation is awash in codgers, will we be able to make fat free soylent green? And our education levels are abysmal. What if tomorrow’s youth are too bad at math to design evil robot overlords? We’ll have to import robot overlords from China, and that’ll put a bunch of factory workers our of jobs. So our economy will tank.
When pundits wallow in depressing forecasts they often fall prey to a major fallacy. Namely, to project problems we have today onto the future without the ability to foresee their solutions.
Imagine how horrified a bureaucrat from 1880 would be if we traveled back in time and told him present-day America has over 300 million people. For starters, how could the Pony Express possibly keep up with that much junk mail? We’d have to cordon off Kansas as one giant grazing lot. By 19th century standards there wouldn’t be enough arable farmland in the entire country to support 300 million people. Everyone would be chronically malnourished!
So his vision of the future would be a horrible dystopia, with mass starvation and hordes of Pony Express riders spitting chewing tobacco all over the place. Instead of our current horrible dystopia of mass obesity and not one but three Kardashians.
Our hypothetical number cruncher is capable of projecting then-present shortfalls and the technology of that era, but he is not capable of factoring in future inventions and solutions. He cannot foresee tractors radically improving agricultural efficiency, automobiles replacing horses, Segways replacing automobiles, hover tractors replacing Segways, the Internet replacing brothels, or MTV2 replacing MTV.
Between now and 2050 there will be game changers. That makes forecasting an exercise in futility. So keep your spirits up: we may well perfect delicious, fat free soylent green before Social Security taps out.
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9 Comments
SOLYENT GREEN IS PEOPLE
Organic and locally grown!
This lifted my decidedly pessamisic view this morning. I believe you are right. We have
not addressed our problems yet with solutions for the future. Thank you.
Glad to hear it. Thanks, Carla!
Hear! Hear! The future is only foreseeable insofar as we can expect history to continue repeating itself, albeit in new and strange iterations of past events. Excluding the passage of some apocalypse-sized meteor, or the very real possibility that the Glorbulons of Farxis III finally decide that the credit limit has run out on their whole “building the pyramids for us” scheme from a few decades or so back, mankind is quite likely to come up with solutions for its problems much in the same way it always has – which is to say, just enough, just short of being too late. Who could ask for more?
A number of your readers have known you when you’ve been single. Where does that fall in dystopian futures?
Presumably in the future my girlfriend and I combine superpowers to lay waste to puny, pathetic humanity.
According to Robert Anton WIlson there was a commentator in New York in around 1900 who predicted that New York would never have more than 2 million people as the number of horses required to run a city of 2 million people would deposit so much horse poop that it would reach up to the fifth floor windows and render the city unlivable.
That’s a great example! Robert Anton Wilson proves the point. Thanks!