The Future

Wednesday 28th September

The future?  Well, who know what it holds, either personally or collectively.  I can remember as a boy being told I was stupid when I said (shortly after Sputnik was launched) that mankind would travel to the moon and other planets.  Likewise when I pointed out that car fumes must be dangerous, belching out smoke into the air; ‘what did a child know’ I was told.  Not that that record of correct observations is any guarantee of future predictions.  My book ‘2066, a personal memoir’ was an attempt at imagining a possible dystopian but maybe also hopeful future.  All we can do is to extrapolate from current knowledge and try to imagine how people will react and possibly change in the future.

Some predictions are easy.  Yes, we will undoubtedly visit and probably inhabit other planets at some point in the future, but whether that will be in the services of Capitalism or to help the human race is unknown.  We will probably with technology’s help be able to cure almost all diseases, but whether we will ever all have equal access to good health is still not clear.  Computers and Artificial Intelligence will surely continue to develop and bring us unforeseen benefits, but what then of human intelligence; at some point AI will supersede our own organic chemical brainpower, so what becomes of humans then?  If computers become better at all decision making than people, what will become of us?  Impossible to predict how things will transpire.