Salon: Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The future will not be cool
Futurists always get it wrong. Despite the promise of technology, our world looks an awful lot like the past.
Close your eyes and try to imagine your future surroundings in, say, five, 10 or 25 years. Odds are your imagination will produce new things in it, things we call innovation, improvements, killer technologies and other inelegant and hackneyed words from the business jargon. These common concepts concerning innovation, we will see, are not just offensive aesthetically, but they are nonsense both empirically and philosophically.
Why? Odds are that your imagination will be adding things to the present world. I am sorry, but this approach is exactly backward: the way to do it rigorously is to take away from the future, reduce from it, simply, things that do not belong to the coming times.
I am not saying that new technologies will not emerge — something new will rule its day, for a while. What is currently fragile will be replaced by something else, of course. But this “something else” is unpredictable. In all likelihood, the technologies you have in your mind are not the ones that will make it, no matter your perception of their fitness and applicability — with all due respect to your imagination. ...
... So, the prime error is as follows. When asked to imagine the future, we have the tendency to take the present as a baseline, then produce speculative destiny by adding new technologies and products to it and what sort of makes sense, given an interpolation of past developments. We also represent society according to our utopia of the moment, largely driven by our wishes — except for a few people called doomsayers, the future will be largely inhabited by our desires. So we will tend to over-technologize it and underestimate the might of the equivalent of these small wheels on suitcases that will be staring at us for the next millennia. ...
... Technology is at its best when it is invisible. I am convinced that technology is of greatest benefit when it displaces the deleterious, unnatural, alienating, and, most of all, inherently fragile preceding technology. Many of the modern applications that have managed to survive today came to disrupt the deleterious effect of the philistinism of modernity, particularly the 20th century: the large multinational bureaucratic corporation with “empty suits” at the top; the isolated family (nuclear) in a one-way relationship with the television set, even more isolated thanks to car-designed suburban society; the dominance of the state, particularly the militaristic nation-state, with border controls; the destructive dictatorship on thought and culture by the established media; the tight control on publication and dissemination of economic ideas by the charlatanic economics establishment; large corporations that tend to control their markets now threatened by the Internet; pseudo-rigor that has been busted by the Web; and many others. You no longer have to “press 1 for English” or wait in line for a rude operator to make bookings for your honeymoon in Cyprus. In many respects, as unnatural as it is, the Internet removed some of the even more unnatural elements around us. For instance, the absence of paperwork makes bureaucracy — something modernistic — more palatable than it was in the days of paper files. With a little bit of luck a computer virus will wipe out all records and free people from their past mistakes. ...
Taleb is always thought provoking.
I find myself frequently wondering if the consumerism of late and post-industrial capitalism isn't transitional phenomenon on the way to a new order of things. Industrialism created wide spread abundance of material things. The production of that abundance continues to explode, using less and less energy and resource per unit. At some point do we get to the point where the added satisfaction of the next thing is not very satisfying? The availability of things, even if I don't own them at the moment, is so abundant that there is no drive to keep acquiring? Does focus return to less cluttered existences while still incorporating the technology and innovation that created stuff in the first place? I don't expect this will play out globally in my lifetime (maybe in the West?), but might it play out over the next century or two? Just something I wonder about.
Warning.... some rambling ahead....
Fascinating article. The section you did not include where he gave is opinion of "nerds" was intriguing.
I spent a bit of time this fall pondering some of the things about the future I was "promised" as a child. I can't help but think that some of these "broken promises" contributed to the grumpiness of many of my age peers this year.
I think the promises were offered to us by Disney and the various films about the future we watched in elementary school. Extremely upbeat predictions. People were not going to have to work very hard. 4 day weeks for the working class. Good jobs for everyone no matter how incompetent. And Smart people were not going to have to do much work at all and it was all going to be meaningful work. Life would involve more play than work.
I watched space flight after space flight. Each more amazing than the last one. There was a time when I could have named every space flight and every astronaut. I drank tang and ate space food sticks. The future was bright and exciting.
I'm about to turn 55. That means I am a boomer too young for Vietnam (and too young to remember that the 1st NASA rockets blew up). But I turned 16 just as the Arab Oil Embargo was beginning. The economy went into the tank in 1974. I know that economists will technically disagree with me but I don't think we have ever really recovered economically and psychologically. We are a grumpy pessimistic people. I think some of that grumpiness is related to those "broken promises."
Posted by: ceemac | Dec 05, 2012 at 11:01 AM
Interesting take.
"I watched space flight after space flight. Each more amazing than the last one. There was a time when I could have named every space flight and every astronaut. I drank tang and ate space food sticks."
We may be twins separated at birth. ;-)
Posted by: Michael W. Kruse | Dec 05, 2012 at 11:28 AM