Saturday, July 29, 2006

The future is un-predictable

I’m at the world future society’s annual meeting – this year in Toronto. And boy, does the future ever look un-predictable. Seems we’re going in many different, mutually exclusive, directions at once.
Just to name a few: Turning back the burning of fossil fuels to anything near sustainable levels looks rather unfeasible on a 30 – 50 year timescale – So, we’re cooking the planet, with a lot of ensuing suffering in all kinds of ways.
Or: Will nano and bio-tech combined instead lift us out of the mess, make us capable of creating anything we like at low cost, solve the energy crisis, make everything recyclable, and change us into a new species of super-smart cyborgs in the process – in pretty much those same 30 – 50 years. Or less.

1 comment:

Christian Renaud said...

Peter,

I agree. I came away from the workshop in Toronto with little hope that the current generation will sober up from their 100-year-cocktail-party with the ecosystem and turn things around.

The only encouraging thing I saw was the energy behind the younger participants at the conference to actually change things now. Not talk about them, change them. If only there had been more than 20 of them there......

C