Future blindness
We have entered a whirlwind of such technological acceleration that the attempt to make long-term predictions quickly becomes poor science fiction. Hyper-connectivity and the exponential advances of technology have not only disrupted our way of life, work, and relationships, but also our ability to foresee the future.
Imagine if the technology behind ChatGPT had been launched a hundred years ago. We would speculate on “the next hundred years with language models”. But such a statement today would sound ridiculous. Technologies that seem disruptive are increasingly rapidly overtaken by even more revolutionary ones, stripping us of the ability to glimpse into the future and make predictions with a degree of certainty.
Adjustment periods are becoming a thing of the past. How do we absorb significant changes before they are replaced by new ones? How do we teach about something that becomes obsolete before it is fully understood? Social media exploded in our faces, but we won’t have time to discipline ourselves in its use after learning lessons before the next big thing.
Science fiction, traditionally a primary source of visions of the future, is struggling to predict it in the medium term, leading authors to focus on very near futures or grossly exaggerated presents to resemble tomorrows. The space operas, set in a distant future, have turned into a comfortable and familiar fantasy setting, like the middle ages for epic fantasy, but far from the comment on the future of humanity they once were. Perhaps because we have departed from the timeline of classic science fiction due to mankind’s lack of immediate interest in populating the cosmos, preferring on our own planet interconnectivity and digital immersion over mobility. It’s not far-fetched to think that in the coming years we may be able to live a walk on Mars from our room in such a vivid and sensorially real way, that our desire to go in reality becomes numb. In the last century, however, it was unthinkable to deviate from the car > airplane > spacecraft sequence.
Technological accelerationism is also creating an unprecedented generational gap. Parents find their children increasingly strange, not only in attitudes or tastes but also in the way they relate to the world and interact with technologies. And this gap affects not only the human side of the equation. It’s also generating increasingly extreme technological predictions in an attempt to keep up with innovations. The eagerness for the arrival of ‘AGI’ or the ‘Singularity’ often seem like attempts to project an end to this whirlwind that brings back a milestone that lasts for decades.
But the world no longer works that way.
This permanent sense of urgency and chaos places us in an unprecedented scenario, full of challenges and paradoxes. We need a vision of the present that allows us to understand the true consequences and potentials of each technological innovation. In this new context, anticipation must be cautious and reflective: if we have future blindness, we must focus more than ever on what we do in the present and what it can bring us. In a scenario of constant change, learning to adapt and think about complex systems is vital. Therefore, the construction of the future depends more on our current choices and actions than our ability to predict. In such a changing world, crystal balls are useless.
