What's to Come

Future Files

Richard Watson is a futurist writer and speaker and has written a book called "Future Files - A History of the Next 50 Years" . Chapter 1 is downloadable as a PDF and gives a flavor for the book. It actually reads more like Sci-Fi than reality, but I suspect there are some very relevant points and projections made.

The downloadable chapter is compelling enough to buy the book, so I'll do this and discuss it in another post. For those of you interested in these topics, please grab a copy of the book and read along. I suggest you balance these thoughts with the writings of Ed Barlow and Dr. Lowell Catlett.

I'll leave you with these quotes from chapter 1 of Future Files:

there’s a trend called too much information (TMI) that has a distant cousin called too much choice (TMC). In a nutshell, mankind is producing too much stuff. The amount of new information we now produce is estimated to be around 2 billion exabytes annually. That’s (very roughly) 2 billion billion bytes or about twenty billion copies of this book.

and....

For the technically minded, doorbells will disappear in favour of proximity indicators. We will constantly know where our friends and family are thanks to the descendents of services like Friendfinder, and we will be able to screen out the unknown and the unfamiliar. This will undoubtedly increase our safety, but it will remove the element of surprise from our lives.

Amazon’s recommendation software already removes chance encounters with totally unrelated books. Other types of software could do the same with people in the future. This is bad news for society and especially bad news for new ideas, which thrive on social interaction, cross-fertilisation, and serendipity. We will therefore meet more people like ourselves in the future and be protected from people and ideas that are strange or unfamiliar. This is hardly a recipe for global harmony and understanding.

posted by Andy Huckaba @ 12:22 PM