h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Its a funny thing, but the future usually seem to defy all attempts to predict it. Look at what everyone in the past thought we would be doing now, Living in communes, wearing transparent clothing, flying about with jet packs...
all damn good ideas, if you ask me, but sadly not taken up..

I think (hope) people will get bored with endless repeats on the television and go and seek some meaning in their lives. But I fear that as a race we are likely to get fatter and more stupid, but then again, the Greeks probibly thought that to. And here we are.

The weather will get more unpredictable simply in defiance at our attempts to predict it. Which guarantees that our successors something to talk about after everything else has been automated and made safe.

Ack

I've always been fond of the story that, in about 1897, the head of the United States Patent Office suffested the office be closed as 'Everything that can be invented has been invented'.

I also like Bill Gates prediction of the 1980s that it was inconceivable that anyone would ever require more than 640kB of memory.

And Malthus' prediction that population growth would outstrip the world's capacity to sustain its human population!

Oh, sh!t - that one's true! See "Present causes, future consequences thread".

Then there was the prediction by the UK Labour government of the 1970s that if the Tories cut income tax as much as they promised they would have to raise VAT to 17.5%!

D'oh! Let me try another one. You'll like this:

"I can see it all - oh there's flowers growing on the Berlin wall" (Transvision Vamp, Falling for a Goldmine, c1988) Nice prediction, remarkable timing.

OK here's some you might like that didn't turn out quite as predicted...

"Ulysses Grant, the Civil war hero and US president between 1868 and 1876, remarked that 'within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade'. How prescient - except that his country did rather better than his prediction"

( http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4447095,00.html )

and then there's the prediction made in the 19th century that if London's rate of growth continued, by the end of the 20th century Londoners would be knee-deep in horse excrement!

What about George Orwell's 1984? He suggested that we'd all be under constant supervision by 'big brother' and now (only a little late!) we have CCTV constantly watching us, governments have powers to monitor our phone calls and internet traffic, computers keep tabs on our spending habits etc etc

(seen in the Guardian yesterday)

Many countries have tightened things up following the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

The Economist recently had a feature on this, including a map of the erosion of civil liberties over the last year. It's scary stuff!

The USA is fast becoming a police state. Just with better PR that Orwell envisaged...

Asimov tried to deal with this in the Foundations series.
Predictability cannot deal with personalities.
It is with personalities that invention is found.
You cannot predict invention.

History shows us that the writers of history were a remarkably uninventive bunch of fellows.
Fiction shows us that the writers of Science Fiction were bouncing their ideas off the world that they knew.
Stupidity is what holds the world back from its future.
How do you cure stupidity?
You can't. Humans are stupid.
So you have to find a way to use it.
Marketing.
Religion.

More people spend time online than they ever did in shops or churches.
Many are thinking for the first time in their family tree's history.

Government observation of online activity can only lead to the contamination of the government, because even bureaucratic sycophants have dreams.
When the government of the world is run by real people, instead of propped-up figure heads, when a vote can be taken from everyone online, then we will have concensus.
And the concensus will probably be that there are some things just not worth bothering about:

like wearing a tie or high heels to a job where you just sit on your butt surrounded by other people wearing a tie or high heels.

like sitting on your butt watching a badly written, poorly realized movie or TV show when you can make your own on your very own computer, that while it may be puerile and tacky, is your's to modify and share, instead of hypnotizing yourself along with every other bored sod on the planet to the tune of George Lucas' stilted imagination.

like having a bunch of old guys with no imagination sending young men off to die, when the only one's who really care are the old guys. So let the old guys duel and televise it and the winner gets to retire.
Two birds with one stone.

like letting the lawyers and the legislatures avoid meeting the same standard they expect their victims to meet. Ignorance is no excuse.
No more closed doors. You do it in public or online and you get an instant response. No more landed idiots deciding the way life should be for everyone else.

like not having a test for fiction or nonfiction before you put up a website. Humor and parody are fine, but outright lies are not. Belief in your particular deity or brand of commerce is no defense against facts. Go lie to your mother. She might not believe you, either, but she might buy something from you out of pity.

like not knowing that real life and 'education' have very little to do with each other. The computer gives everyone an opportunity to revel in knowledge or ignorance. If you and your child believe that the 'education' system is wrong for you, then you should be able to contruct your own curriculum from all the available true data.
When 'education' is out of the hands of the same government that can't figure out how to justify its own accounting procedures, then maybe that government will become obsolete.

like not realizing that the basic freedoms include being able to go to sleep knowing that your house won't get blown up and that you will be able to find something to eat tomorrow. With all the money people are willing to spend on superfluous clothes, electronics and furnishings, there has to be a fad that will allow them to help other people go to sleep without starving or having their house blown up.

like clinging to a philosophy that does no good because its only purpose is promulgate itself. If there is no progress, there is no thought. If you beat a drum long enough, it wears out. And your arm gets tired.

There are a lot of people on this planet that are tired. If enough tired people get online, then maybe they can retire some of the things they are tired of.

BRAVO - I agree with every letter...

Maybe people will find spirituality and contentment instead of consumerism, greed and dissatisfaction. And discover how wonderful the world can be if we work with nature instead of against it.

Exactly.
Or realize we "are" nature, instead of in dominion over it.
Sharing something is not always controlling it.

So Happy Together!

If you live in the States, you'll notice that after sept. 11 you need GOVERNMENT ISSUE ID to fly anywhere, Ex. Drivers license, state ID, passport, something of the sort: how much longer do you think before you can't do ANYTHING without a government issued form of identification which is used to monitor you wherever you go and keep record of everything you do. We've lost enough personal freedoms in the world, I don't see a very bright future ahead.

Little government, little problems.
Big government, big problems.
It is easy to get lost in the corridors of bureaucracy.
I don't worry about it too much.
You hire a bunch of new people quickly, a good percentage of them are lazy and incompetent, particularly if the ones doing the hiring are lazy and incompetent. Bodies are never a solution.
You create a few new bureacracies and try to clean up the old ones, there is a flurry of activity, but meanwhile, in the cubicles and the donut shops, it's business as usual.

Remember, even at their most bloated, the civil servants, the police, and the military only equal less than 1/50th (I'm guessing. better data if requested.) of the population of the entire nation. Try as they might, they need us more than we need them.


Good Enough For Government Work!

Oh, you are all whistling in the dark. Find me one great prediction that came true or better yet one dire definition of our present condition that changed the future in a positive way. Asimov was indeed right in saying that as individuals we can't change history to any extent unless we create. Distruction falls in on itself, creation grows.

Quite right, my friends,
Dont forget that there is a power within prophecy and predictions to become self-fulfilling, that is when enough people believe that somthing is going to happen, they have then, subconciously, set the wheels in motion for that result to happen.
For this reason I think it playing with fire to make doom-laden predictions. If they dont come true people will often modify the truth to make them fit (Come on, be honest, you are not really likely to get taken away by the thought police, not here anyway..)

A point about survellance.
In order to survey eveybody's internet use, whatch all the closed circuit tv, track the mobile phones, etc etc, surely would require maybe a quarter of the population ?
99% of the time if anyone was bored enough to track my internet use, for example, they would be wasting their time and deserve my sympathy.
I make a point of visiting suspicious sounding sites now and again - if everyone did this monitoring would be almost impossible.

Things really will continue to get better. Benign survellance could easily let us allow more individual freedoms than ever before, by making it possible to target the people who are a real (physical) threat to society..

Doom-laden predicitions might be necessary to make people take action - for example this weekend's environment report suggesting £222bn of homes etc in the UK at risk from rising sea levels - surely it's a way of making people think about what sort of a future they want?

On the surveillance issue, I think it's just a question of storage - the records would be available to the 'authorities' if they wanted to see what a particular suspect had been up to, rather than monitoring of everyone all the time.

I would think that saying your house will get wet if the river floods (which it may be expected to do more often due to faster draining fields, changing rainfall patterns etc.) is a statement of present fact rather that the sort of prediction I am talking about.

Please can you clarify what sort of predictions you are talking about?

Is it predictions that involve future events not directly caused by present actions, eg. less tolerant views in future leading to more oppressive states etc?

Rather than future events necessarily resulting from current actions, eg. further extreme weather conditions over the next 30 years caused by human activity now?

Yes, thats what Im getting at.
Its not very perceptive to state that if you run towards a brick wall, eventually you will hit it, but shifting opinions and conciousness about issues that we are now unaware of brings real change.

I think you are both talking about changing weather and rising oceans due to global warming. If you look at the weather on a scale of centuries you will see that there has been the tiniest blip in change. Nothing so far has been the least bit out of the ordinary. Global warming is a fact but it's effects have yet to be predictable since the model is to big to even guess at. In addition we are most certainly entering the very thin edge of an ice age which will slowly grow over millenia and which may be counteracting it's effects.

I am reminded of doomsayers at the beginning of the industrial revolution who predicted dire consequences. We would go mad if we travelled over 30 miles per hour or lose our souls if we went under anaesthetic. I just don't understand people that see all the negatives and few of the positives. We live in a golden age in so many ways compared to even a few decades ago. We must be vigilante but not Luddites.

If history teaches us anything (and if you're sure you know, please keep it to yourself), it is that the chronicalers of most periods have no real idea what is going on in their own time, so when they deigned to try to deal with the future, they projected their ignorance forward.

The future is not being made in some seminar or symposium or conclave somewhere. It is being made in a barn or a shed or a garage somewhere, being lovingly obsessed over by some poor chap or chapess that we probably won't hear about until they are dead.

So, look around you. The future may be sitting next door.