The Lonely Savage

The past few weeks, I’ve read a lot of science fiction from the 60s and the 70s. While filled with amazing vision and ambition, it seems almost quaint to read it in the year 2010. If there’s one thing we can say for certain about our visions of the future it is this: We can never know what to expect if we try to base it on today’s paradigms.

The books that I’ve been reading have mainly been random books by Philip K. Dick. The latest one I finished was Our Friends From Frolix 8, a story about a man living in a totalitarian surveillance-heavy society containing – in addition to ‘normal’ people – two transhuman groups; the Unusuals and the New Men. The Unusuals have psychic powers in one form or another; they may be able to read minds, move objects with their minds, start fires or something similar. The New Men are like Humanity++, they have the same skills as us, but super-charged. They can do trigonometry before their tenth birthday, look better than the rest of us, are healthier, and so on.

The predictable adventures occur – okay; semi-predictable, actually, since this is, after all, a Philip K. Dick book – and the protagonist eventually gets the girl (no, wait, she dies) and the ruling order of Unusuals and New Men is toppled.

Since Philip K. Dick wrote this in 1970, a number of things we take for granted today weren’t even thought of at the time. The characters in the book actually walk to phone booths to talk to each other; but these booths have video functionality. The thought of picking up a phone that fits in your pocket was so foreign at the time that it didn’t even fit into the mind of this, one of the most visionary of Science Fiction authors of the past 100 years. The Internet didn’t exist at the time, so nowhere do we have any mentions of widely accessible databases of information that are stored and accessible from across the world. Instead, we have filing stations with microfilm that are accessible from anywhere within the building where one is sitting. People travel from one part of the world on flying ships to meet each other instead of engaging in telepresence. Cars don’t just drive on the streets, they can fly now … and they’re called squibs.

While the book was fun and had some very interesting plot twists, it – and the others that I read – have gotten me thinking. A lot of people have wild dreams about the future. They might be technology-optimistic immortality-yearning Extropists. They might be expecting aliens to come destroy the world. They might think feminism, Greenpeace and whale-saving will make the world a fantastic place. They might think overpopulation will ruin all hope for the future. They might be espousing a specific economic or political theory that will change everything, but they all tend to do one thing wrong.

They do it expecting their own paradigm to be the one to dominate in the future.

Imagine, 300 years ago, when a person was asked how the world would look if it would grow to contain nearly seven billion people who all need to travel long distances to get to where they need to be on a daily basis. This person, stuck in their own paradigm, would imagine carriages drawn by horses littering the streets, the masses of farms needed to sustain such a huge population, the complete and utter chaos as the aristocracies of the world try to maintain order. Fast forward 300 years to today and notice that none of this is a problem; science and social progress has created a complete paradigm shift.

We don’t even need to look at centuries as a time scale to see things like this, Moore’s Law can be applied to society as a whole as we see accelerating change all over the world. Only twenty years ago, it was rare for a person to even know what the Internet was. Ten years ago, people had dial-up and ISDN connections to the Internet and were able to do basic tasks over it. Today, most people in the western world carry an Internet connection in their pocket on a daily basis and access Twitter, Facebook and their e-mail from wherever they want to be.

I was recollecting my dreams and hopes with a friend of mine yesterday. We both work within the telecom and datacom industries and remembered how we, ten years ago, dreamed about how Wireless LAN would be rolled out and be accessible to everybody everywhere, with maybe ten or twenty Megabit connections available to all! We can try to imagine what the ruling paradigm will be in ten years, but it’s almost impossible to do so today. We just have to wait and see or try to take part in changing the future.

What I suppose I’m trying to say is this. If you try to predict the future, try to step outside of your current paradigm.

Don’t expect the future to resemble the present in any way.