Google docs informs me that I created this document on April 21, 2021.
I DO NOT KNOW the future, not my future nor the future of civilization. I do not think anyone knows. Stated more clearly with nuance, I do not think anyone knows for certain what the future will be. The future is a great unknown, mysterious and exciting or, perhaps, dreadful. But this does not mean that there is nothing about the future to explore.
I think no one, no one, on December 31, 2019, before the coronavirus pademic, could have accurately predicted what we lived through in 2020 and 2021. Yes Bill Gates, the US intelligence agencies and others had for years been warning of coming pandemics. But there were no predictions with timelines by anyone in any meaningful level of detail to be of much use. For me, 2020 and 2021 have been very different from anything I had planned or imagined. This is probably true for most of the inhabitants of earth.
In 1971 I was working as an accounting clerk maintaining records of inventory. I had trays and trays of cards on which I recorded purchases and requisitions. At the end of each month, I added up the ending amount in dollars on each card using a hand crank adding machine. I could not have imagined the incredible changes in office technology that I experienced over the forty years of my career. When it comes to the future impact of artificial intelligence, intuitively, I sense that we are at about 1971.
I was born in 1951. There are no predictions of the future from that year that remotely resemble the reality I experienced in my life. Looking back, the best “predictions” were in the science fiction books I read as a teenager. Perhaps that is true today. But in the genre, some scenarios will be wildly off target and some will probably be close to a bullseye.
In 2019 my expectations of the future underwent a paradigm shift. Until then, I had a traditional liberal worldview and I imagined a future of ongoing, but uneven, incremental progress. Doubts had been growing in my mind for several years. In 2019 I began to understand how fragile civilization is and that the risk of catastrophic failure is high.
I discovered, broadly, two themes in the scenarios of the future - breakthrough or breakdown. Both seemed plausible. I was skeptical when I encountered dogmatic assertions of either possibility. I concluded that the future is unknowable, that it could go either way. I now think that we are indeed living in a liminal time.
I recently read the 7th edition of the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends report, published in April 2021. (Essay About Global Trends Game B has it better.)
Perhaps the most important fact for each one of us personally, is the date of our death. I hope to live for thirty more years, living to 100, an age reached by both my mother and grandmother. But as change continues to accelerate, I know that there will be more change in the next thirty years than what I have witnessed in the last thirty.