The Future is Coming--Will We be Ready?

When I think about what the next fifty year's hold, I think about my great grandmother.  She was born in the early 1900s on a farm in Golden Pond Kentucky.  By the time she died the automobile had completely remade American society (see Jane Jacobs, the interstate, the death of the hat), air travel meant she could be in Tokyo in less than 24 hours, plastics reigned supreme and the Internet had been invented.  All this when as a child she listened to first hand accounts from relatives who lived through the civil war and showed her the caves they hid in when the "Yankees" came through.

As a millennial, the amount of technological development that is likely to occur in nano technology, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, over the next fifty years is going to rapidly alter human society.  Not since the greatest generation will people have lived through so much change.  The past thirty years have seen tremendous changes in how we communicate, but the technical development that is around the corner will radically alter how we get around (self driving cars), how we get goods and services (3-D printing), what we eat (lab grown meat), and how long we live (nano medicine).

We are not ready. Policy has a terrible track record when it comes to regulating innovation. Whether Wall Street financial trading (Credit Default Swaps), Internet communications technology (Net Neutrality 2015), or transportation technology that set off a mad scramble to license self driving cars, policy and regulation tend to lag badly.  This isn't always a bad thing since it provides time for technology to take off, and invention is actually more about figuring out its uses than its creation. However, as technological change gets more rapid, and the types of changes on the horizon portend larger more seismic changes in society we also leave ourselves vulnerable to becoming the tools of our tools.  The outsize influence nano medicine or artificial intelligence promises to have on society means that people need a voice in the process. What that voice can and should look like is actually what we should be spending more time on.

It's not like there aren't possible examples of what these guidelines could look like.  Scholars have long understood that studying technology in terms of its what it actually does (separate communication and transportation, for example) can let us anticipate challenges facing innovations such as the Internet by looking at historical issues that arose similar inventions like the telegraph.  We should be approaching the future in the same way: recognize that policy is always going to lag innovation, but to protect people look to history to anticipate when protections are needed and what they might look like.  Don't try to regulate each individual new technology, but look for broad similarities between new technologies and old technologies to categorize innovation into various policy spheres. To understand your future, look to your past.

Sci Fi isn't all Technology

I thought this NPR list of the top 100 science fiction and fantasy books was really interesting.  So often when we talk about the future we focus on how technology is changing everything.  It's app this, and 3-D printer that.  The reality is good sci fi is more about how change impacts society, and the tensions that change creates.

Good sci fi isn't just about technolgy, but about making you question how we live, and especially what choices we make and which ones are being made for us.