The Future isn’t What it Used to Be
“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.” — Paul Valery (French Poet, Essayist and Critic, 1871-1945)
“Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.”
Marshall McLuhan (philosopher , futurist , and communications theorist, 1911-1980)
A current futurist, Ray Kurzweil, adds another dimension to this chicken little tale. In his book The Singularity is Near he makes some stunning predictions about the impact of technology in the next century. Sci-fi, artificial intelligence and utopian vision aside, one chapter read 9 months ago has infected my work in ways I haven’t experienced since my first encounters with McLuan.
Kurzweil extends Moore’s Law (Moore’s Law describes an accelerating, exponential growth pattern in the complexity of semiconductor circuits – which gives rise to more computing power, smaller chips, decreasing price points, increased storage of information, etc.— all the kinds of things that make our laptops and mobile devices profoundly different than the pricey first-generation PCs we bought in the 1980s.) to predict that paradigm shifts will become increasingly common, leading to “technological change so rapid and profound that the next 100 years will represent a level of change in culture and practice equivalent to what we have seen in the past 20,000 years.”
That is a pretty big concept to digest. Kurzweil argues that our default setting for anticipating change is an intuitive and linear view of progress — which means we consistently underestimate the pace of change. Which is why we are routinely caught off-guard by technological change and social transformation.