Two Futures

[forsyth]

Humans like to divide things into twos, it makes for nice simple binary choices. How well that reflects reality is debatable, but let's choose two extremes for our discussion here, to start with.

The first is the future you often see profiled on the TV news, in far away countries, when some celebrity hasn't died, no blonde-haired white ladies have gone missing, and there's been no shark attacks for at least a week. That's the Grim Meathook Future, a term I first hear via Warren Ellis, and was originated by a man named Joshua Ellis, whose original post seems to have been eated by something. But the Grim Meathook Future is, well, exactly what it says on the tin. It's the depressing, violent, chaotic, deadly future that's now, in a lot of the world. Wars over religion, wars over water, wars over oil, wars over minerals, wars over the last war. Poverty, famine, the rest of it. And then on top of this, throw in climate change screwing up weather patterns, rising sea levels, peak oil, all that kind of fun stuff.

It's the not fun, not shiny, and it's REALLY easy to look at all that, and make generalizations about "The Poor" or people in foreign countries, or whatever.

That's the worst case scenario. And it's unfortunately close to the Way Things Are in large parts of the world.

The second of these I've posted about before, it's the optimistic shiny future I've been shorthanding as a Star Trek Future. Peace, prosperity, and post-scarcity.

Exactly what form the future's gonna take, I can't really say. I don't think anybody can, there's too many variables dependent on too many things. Even without invoking The Singularity, changes ARE happening faster, because there's more people, more tech, and we have more influence over the world. That means more stuff happens.

The real future is likely to combine elements of utopian and grim meathooks, plus certainly things we aren't even considering right now.

There is one thing about the Grim Meathook Future, though. Most of the problems, we have the technological know-how to fix. We CAN fix many of these things. We're not lacking the knowledge, we're lacking the organization, resource, or the ability to convince anybody they can make money off it.

Comments

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

In the endnotes to one of his short story collections, Phil K. Dick wrote that in his stories, "the future is just like the present, only more so." (I'm paraphrasing from memory, but I think that was close). The ontological riffs that abound in his work notwithstanding, I always thought he had a point.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

That's very true. What makes the future different is what parts of the present are emphasized as the more so. That line's doubly true for science fiction, though, since fiction is limited by having to make a kind of sense, reality isn't.

There's also a case to be made for looking at how broadly the future is spread around. Honestly, good chunks of America and Europe and pretty much all of Japan live in the future now. Or at least a future.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

And to reply to myself, the bit about the present, only moreso, is kinda exactly the point of WorldChanging, one of their main points is we have most of the answers we need already. Part of it's a choice to emphasize answers over problems, and opportunities over the difficulties.