Visions of the future

Where is the new dictionary for those of us who have not been in the technical wave?

I look forward to reading it!

The "soft technologies" such as "how to do Open Space," or ritual forms of gathering, and all these other things are just as important as the "hard technologies" of software and hardware.

I think I can intuit what you're talking about, but I'm eager to hear what you have to say.

I've written about 5 drafts of a response. They all get too long or over-explanatory. So, here's my 5 minute version.

Basically, socially, I think we're going to start clustering into groups. Electronic communications will get 1000's of times easier, and physical position (where you live) will become much less important. We'll get a lot more mobile, not just with our computing devices, but in terms of where we live, how we work, etc., etc.,.

"Civil Society" is how we'll fix a lot of the problems we currently can't imagine the solutions to. I don't believe energy is going to be a catastrophy, because there are tons of technologies being made to address the energy issue. I appreciate the fear people have about it, but I'm personally not part of the scare. "Y2K bug."

We're not going to be driving cars all over the place. The energy problems posed by cars will be mooted by telecommuting. It's going to be like the "paperless office:" first, overhyped, and not real, and then gradually, something that slowly becomes reality.

I believe I know a lot of things about how technology is going to develop, and how technology is going to change us. It's horribly misleading to present an image of the future that doesn't include all the wacky things technology will introduce. I simply lack the time to describe it all here.

I recommend looking through the future wiki, which I contribute to some times. In a week and a half, my servers will be back online, and you can see the TaoRiver future wiki, that I have contributed much more to. I had a timeline on there, it's too bad the server is down right now. Another one is CommunityWiki:HiveMind. I also recommend "Future Imperfect," and for a look at what American society would look like if we had an economic crash (entirely plausible) and the technology revolution, Cory Doctorow's "Themepunks."

We used to say: "There will be robots. Oh yes, there will be robots." This was a joke, because people didn't believe us when we said there'd be human-shaped robots within our lifetime. "Hundreds and hundreds of years out..." ...remember when people said that? But people can see the videos from Japan, now, and know it's real.

Now I have to say: "There will by cyborgs. Oh yes, there will be cyborgs," because everyone knows about the robots, but is still skeptical about the cyborgs and virtual reality. And AI, too. It's all going to happen.

I am struck by the phrase "Those who choose to envision a preferred future". I think that we are always shaping the future by what we are thinking, or not thinking, about it. Huge potentials are lost for lack of concieving the possibility while nightmares are lived out through inertia and despair. Susan, who I was thrilled to meet at the Salon, did her Doctorate thesis on the power of collectively held Images of the Future (IOF). "The IOF concept emerged from trans-disciplinary historical studies in the late 50's indicating that the single factor correlated with the successful reorganization of a civilization in transformational breakdown was the existence of a coherent and compelling Image of the Future held by a marginalized creative minority (typically more developmentally complex than the majority". I have no doubt that if we hold a clear and resonant vision we will bend the unfolding world toward it. A strong vision is a 'strange attractor' that creates a kind of gravity from the future. So how do we create a strong collective vision? I think the "great story" may be one very helpful way to integrate science and religion, and perhaps it can also serve as a uniting cultural story. For myself personally, I believe in God and have devoted my life to the path of Yoga, so the "Great Story" for me is not the loom of my meaning. I find the story awe-inspiring, informative and generative. It is also something I support as a loom for a common social fabric. I think I see it kind of like a global second language- each culture has their own mythic constellations, but we draw from the great story as our common 'myth' - primarily because science already IS a common language. To me what the great story does is free science from its Baconian dogmatism and allows it to be an enterprise of heart. It addresses what so many are yearning for in "Intelligent Design", but without undermining the enterprise of science as that approach does. Science in some other cultures has evolved without such a separation from a holism which includes the psyche and spirit- chinese medicine for instance. Our science evolved with strict avoidance of soul,psyche and spirit because that was our unspoken compromise with the church- we divided the arenas. The church could handle the matters of the soul while science could address matter and the body. So the great story mends that rift. But for me the most important reason why I support the great story is that I think we as human being need VASTNESS of time and space, history and scale- in order to awaken to who we are. In my loom of meaning the entire cycle of material creation is 'a blink of the eye of Brahma'- and yet the Divine is embodied fully 'center everywhere, circumference nowhere'- so we are both ephemeral and eternal, a glorious fusion of matter, energy and consciousness. On the other hand, it may be far more important to establish our relationship to the loom and the fabric (paradigm and myth) than it is to simply have a common myth. I'm not even sure having a common myth would be any progress at all unless we have also evolved a common capacity to be meta- myth- to hold our paradigms and myths as temporary stations an evolutionary process.