www.byjp.me/content/bookmarks/shaping-the-future.md

title	date	emoji	publishDate	bookmarkOf	references	summary
Shaping the future	2024-09-02T10:54:02Z	🚀	2007-05-13T22:44:00+0100	https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping-the-future.html	bookmark url type name summary https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping-the-future.html entry Shaping the future (One of the things that goes with being an SF writer is that people expect you to talk about, well, the future. Last week, engineering consultancy TNG Technology Consulting invited me to Munich to address one of their technology open days. Here's a transcript of my talk, which discusses certain under-considered side effects of some technologies that you're probably already becoming familiar with. Note that this is a long blog entry — even by my verbose standards — so you'll need to hit on the "continue reading" link to see the whole thing.)	What does the future of technology hold, to a predictive thinker in the year 2007?

What does the future of technology hold, to a predictive thinker in the year 2007?

An excellent read from Charlie Stross, made all the more interesting because the two-decades-hence predictions are only three years away for us now…

Highlights

All of this is irrelevant. Because computers and microprocessors aren't the future. They're yesterday's future, and tomorrow will be about something else.

---

(That, incidentally, is what makes the world wide web possible; it's not the technology but the fact that millions of people are throwing random stuff into their computers and publishing on it. You can't do that without ubiquitous cheap bandwidth and cheap terminals to let people publish stuff.

---

any BBS or network system seems to require a certain size of user base before it begins to acquire a culture of its own.)

---

you can't easily predict the consequences of the mass uptake of a technology by observing the leading-edge consequences when it first arrives.

---

Countries look much more homogeneous on the large scale — the same shops in every high street — because community has become delocalized from geography.

---

(In the future, the 20th century will be seen as a dark age — while previous centuries left books and papers that are stable for centuries with proper storage, many of the early analog recordings were stable enough to survive for decades, but the digital media and magnetic tapes and optical disks of the latter third of the 20th century decay in mere years.

---

we've got the ability to communicate, to bind time, and to plan, and we've got a theory of mind that lets us model the behaviour of other animals.

---

we'll be raising a generation of kids who don't know what it is to be lost

---

We're also in some danger of losing the concepts of privacy, and warping history out of all recognition.

---

young people, under about 25; if they've grown up with the internet they have no expectation of being able to conceal information about themselves.

---

We're time-binding animals and nothing binds time tighter than a cradle to grave recording of our every moment.

---

One of the biggest risks we face is that of sleep-walking into a police state, simply by mistaking the ability to monitor everyone for even minute legal infractions for the imperative to do so.

---

This century we're going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything.

---

we're going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages.

---

Total history — a term I'd like to coin, by analogy to total war — is something we haven't experienced yet.