Info Feed Weblog
[FiRe] David Brin: Looking Beyond Five Years
These are notes from the Future in Review conference. More here.
David Brin, an author and futurist, had one of the clear highlights of the conference with a talk frequently interrupted by laughter of the whole room or even applause. He made a powerful credo for optimism. A few tidbits from that talk:
Self-preventing prophecies: Science fiction has helped us to improve society by providing us with "self-preventing prophecies". These are a phenomenon that is seldomly understood, but extremely important. Just take Orwell's Big Brother vision from "1984", which made sure its predictions never happened, because it was so convincing and so frightening. The atomic war is another such self-preventing prophecy.
Morals & Progress: One of those often-voiced convictions of our time is the following: "Our moral and ethical convictions could not keep up with technological change." -> This is complete and utter bogus. Our society has become way more open, tolerant, decent than most people would have ever expected decades ago. And the whole of mankind has increased its welfare dramatically and even across the board. Most science-fiction from a few decades ago does indeed look quite pessimistic when compared to the actual society we have.
Pessimism by the Left: Lefts can be blamed for much of the pessimism: They should cheer up and admit that we're 10% as sexist, 10% as racist and 10 times more environmental than we'd ever been before. We have indeed made progress, eventhough the whiners won't admit it.
Futurist Orientation of Society: Business planning, analysis, etc. are all important parts of the economy just concerned with looking into the future. Today: Technological armed and empowered people armed with educational system that teaches initiative and mental agility. Our society is almost the only one today that doesn't look back to some earlier paradise ("Garden of Eden", "Atlantis"), and that's good. The alternative to going forward and to further technological change is so much worse than all the risks of progress, that we have to undertake it.
Suspicion of Authority: He mentioned that one propaganda image, although seldomly identified that way, is the most wide-spread notion that there is in popular culture: It is the "suspicion of authority", which is prevalent in each hero, in each movie, in each music video. We as a society are utterly conspicious of all organized authority.
Other interesting comments:
- If the holodeck existed, no man would ever be seen again.
- Dentists are the first doctors that have turned the corner and are indeed making themselves less necessary.
- "Non-fiction is ten times the work and 10% of the money of fiction, and on top, your characters can sue you."
- Don't dismiss your critics easily. How lunatic they might be, they might find one question, one answer that you have not thought of.