Making A Future

by Blake Harris

(Note: This was an old preface to a book I began writing a couple of years ago. The book has shifted considerably in its focus, but the original preface had some interesting things to say.)

© Copyright 1999 Blake Harris. All rights reserved.
 

Preface

"With monotonous regularity, apparently competent men have laid down the law about what is technically possible or impossible -- and have been proved utterly wrong, sometimes while the ink was barely dry from their pens."  -- Arthur C. Clarke

"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us."  -- Marshall McLuhan, 1964
 
 

    History, noted Peter Drucker, is marked by great divides which tend to be unspectacular and hardly noticed when first crossed. But once crossed, the social and political landscape changes significantly and swiftly.

     It is now generally accepted that we have crossed such a divide -- one that will transform our culture as profoundly as as the shift from an agricultural to an industrial-based economy. In this new era, rather than the capital investments that built the smokestack factories of yesteryear and the raw materials that fed them, "knowledge is becoming the true capital and the premier wealth-producing resource," to quote Drucker.

     Wealth creation is increasingly dependent on the exchange of information and information related products. This information commerce now occurs in a global and yet increasingly fragmented marketplace -- a marketplace defined less and less by geography or mass-market segments and more and more by niche needs and desires.

     More significant still is the fact that this information exchange -- including pictorial and sound information -- whether for commercial, research, educational or entertainment purposes, is increasingly accomplished digitally through networks of computers.

     This book is about some key aspects of the future as it now appears to be emerging. In its broadest sense, it is about the new ways human beings will fight and compete in a complex new age. Yet its undercurrent of prediction should raise caution in the reader. For as Arthur C. Clarke so aptly put it, "It is impossible to predict the future, and all attempts to do so in any detail appear ludicrous within a few years." The reason, argues Clarke in Profiles of the Future, is that the future is not logically foreseeable.

     There have been rare exceptions to the general rule. Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1292), for example, imagined optical instruments and mechanically propelled boats and flying machines -- devices far beyond the existing or even foreseeable technology of his time. There was no way that Bacon could have arrived at his vision through logic. To do so, he would have to marshall vital facts that were still undiscovered. He would have had to guess at scientific truths whose existence were not yet even suspected. His predictions were not based on the trends and knowledge of his time, but rather, as Clarke puts it, a "triumph of imagination over hard fact."

     What really throws prediction for a loop are unforeseen scientific and technological breakthroughs, and this predicament has dogged the field of computers just as it has any other field. In 1949, Popular Mechanics made the daring forecast, "Computers in the future may only weigh one and a half tons." That was probably a completely rational prediction at the time given existing technological trends. Today we laugh.

     In 1958 the Harvard Business Review predicted that computers would revolutionize American business and that by the end of the 1980s, business would be concentrated as never before. The economy would be dominated by a few giant firms. And within each firm, important decisions would be made by a handful of executives with access to the firm's single, big computer.

     Since the late 1960s, even before the advent of desktop computers, the exact opposite began to occur. The computer contributed significantly to a drop in the average number of employees per firm as well as to the wide scale decentralization that has gone on in business over recent decades. Similarly, in government, decentralization of decision-making and services is increasingly the trend.

     One of the basic problems with accurate long-range prediction lies in the fact that the future is never written in stone. It is not some waiting destiny that wings ahead ready to pounce at its appointed time regardless of what we do in the meanwhile.

     William Bolitho in Twelve Against The Gods, his classic examination of some of the individuals who forged history through their personal drives and passions, made the point, "At the beginning of most careers stands an adventure, and so with states, institutions, civilizations. The progress of humanity, whatever its mysterious direction, is not motored by mere momentum."

     Human affairs do not form a wave that sweeps along beyond control or influence, beyond change or redirection. Individuals do arise from time to time to wield vast influence. Unheralded discoveries and inventions throw askew the most logical of predictions, sometimes upsetting even the most carefully thought out social planning.

     And on a lesser scale, as individuals and as groups, we all fashion little pieces of our own futures by what we do and what we refrain from doing.

     Most scientific efforts to predict the future are really attempts to interpret present trends in light of history, either to say what is similar about them or what is different. Of course, this is not a new idea. "I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided," said American Revolutionary orator and statesman Patrick Henry, "and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past."

     But the subject has become complex, not just because of the number of factors involved in a truly global community, but also because our views of the future are a key part of the equation.

     "We are all accustomed to thinking of the past as a cause of subsequent events -- a decision was made, a law was passed, an encounter took place, and as a result various other events transpired," explained Willis Harman, director of the Center for Study of Social Policy at the Stanford Research Institute. "We reason this way every day. Less obvious is the fact that our view of the future shapes the kind of decisions we make in the present. Someone has a vision of the future -- of a great bridge, a new industrial process, or a utopian state -- and as a result certain events are taking place in the present. Our view of the future effects the present as surely as do our impressions of the past or the more tangible residues of past actions.

     "If our image of the future were different, the decision of today would be different. If our expectations are inaccurate, our decisions are likely to be faulty. If our vision is inspiring, it will impel us to action. If our collective vision arouses no enthusiasm, or if there is no commonly held image of what is worth striving for, our society will lack both motivation and direction."

     In other words, it is not just technology that is transforming our society. How we view that technology and our expectations from it are also integral forces of change.

     If there is a difference in modern perceptions of the future, it is that the future no longer seems to be something that lies out there waiting quietly for us to approach. The breakneck pace of technological change is hurling the future down upon us faster than we seem to be able to assimilate or make sense of it. "Until this century..." wrote the novelist and scientist C.P. Snow, social change was "so slow that it would pass unnoticed in one person's lifetime. That is no longer so. The rate of change has increased so much that our imagination can't keep up."

    In some ways, we've become a little intoxicated with the idea of change itself. Yet the very speed of change offers also offers us a unique opportunity of seeing and understanding the forces of transformation that are now upon us. Marshall McLuhan explained this:
 

In the past, the effects of media [and technology] were experienced more gradually, allowing the individual and society to absorb and cushion their impact to some degree. Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival and at very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment because like previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves. Because of today's terrific speed up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us -- and thus win back control of our own destinies.

     Few people in the late 19th century were aware of how fundamentally their lives would change. Most did not foresee the exodus of people from rural communities to urban areas, the transformation of work from craft production to mass production and the decline of small, proprietary business in favor of large, vertically integrated firms.

    "Although revolutionary in their ultimate effects, the changes wrought by new technologies took place in an evolutionary fashion," stated a report from the U.S. Office of Technological Assessment entitled Electronic Enterprise: Looking To The Future. "Moreover, these impacts were both positive and negative, requiring considerable time and social and economic restructuring before they could be fully absorbed."

    This report also suggests, "Unlike the lawmakers and businessmen at the turn of the century, who only reacted after new technologies had restructured their society, citizens today have an opportunity to comprehend and prepare for the radical changes taking place."

     If there is one lesson above all others to be learned from the past, it is that our primary weapon for survival down through the ages will continue to be our most important tool for survival in any future that unfolds. That weapon or tool is our freedom and ability to think and understand as individuals in a complex technological society. Writer Ben Bova pointed out a number of years ago, "We succeed as individuals, as a society, as a species, when we are able to bring order out of confusion, understanding out of mystery... Only when all people know what is possible will it be possible to know what to do. As long as an elite controls the power of science and technology, the masses will be manipulated. And such manipulation will inevitably lead to collapse and destruction."

     Or, as anthropologist Carlton Coon put it in The Story of Man, "A half-million years of experience in outwitting beasts on mountains and plains, in heat and in cold, in light and in darkness, gave our ancestors the equipment that we still desperately need if we are to slay the dragon that roams the earth today..."
 

More writing by Blake Harris can be found at www.blakeharris.com.