From Future

I love the idea of trying to predict the future. In fact, before I stumbled upon this wiki, I was considering how interesting it would be to make a wiki about the future.

This is obviously a fledgling operation, and unsurprisingly, the participants are utterly obsessed with technology over everything else. If you're going to predict the future, this is a mistake, because, for one thing, it is a mistake to assume that humans will continue their relentless pursuit of technology. As difficult as it might seem to imagine technology slowing down, it is possible, especially if technology continues to be hijacked by a minority as a vessel for amassing personal power and wealth. Or moreover, technological advancement may become so powerful in the near future that it is used to enslave most of the world, and in the process most of us could cease to have access (as a matter of protection for the ruling class).

Technology does not necessarily follow a logical path, because people don't. In some ways, we have already become slaves to technology, and therefore to our current upper classes (who are themselves mentally enslaved by technology, power, and money). Just consider: If our advancements in technology over, say, the last 50 years, have really been as great as we say they have (and I think they have), then why is most of the populace still working 40 hour weeks? In fact, why are we working harder than bushmen, or harder than our ancient ancestors, or, harder than most animals? The answer is that our technology has taken on a life of its own. Where is the extra time that we work going? It going to the advancement of technology.

We buy lots of technology, which fuels the tech industry. Then we work to pay off the credit card bills.

I'm not trying to say that technology is all bad, otherwise, why am I here writing in this wiki? I'm only saying that this wiki, in looking into the future, emphasizes something about the authors - that they are so obsessed with technology, they forgot about all the other things that can happen in the world.

Just think, some day you may be playing a game in some hyper-realistic format, and realize that when you turn it off, the same game was right there all along. Of course, our curiosity compels us to invent many games that could never happen in reality, but we may eventually find that what reality has provided for us is really what we enjoy the most in life, because, after all, it's what we evolved to enjoy in the first place.

This point can become moot if we start fundamentally changing our minds (pun intended). But if, before that, we snap back towards nature like a rubber band, there's no telling whether we will actually get as far as fundamentally changing our own brains.

Or maybe a few people will, and they'll create a race of super-cyborg-serial-killers who hunt down the "lower humans" for sport.

Happy predicting!

(For discussion on my little essay here, see the discussion page.)