And Love too?

All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.
John Ruskin

The Future (From Cityvision Magazine)

To think about the future is hardcoded into our genes. The awareness that gives us a sense of ‘self’ also connects us to the concept of time. We remember and think about the past and we imagine a better tomorrow. While the past-to-present connection helps us understand consequences, the more abstract idea of tomorrow is essential for survival. The projection of possibilities that it provides is the driving force for the creativity that defines us as specie. Without it, we would regress. In this way, tomorrow is be the most important consequence of awareness.

Any discussion about the future is about control. Are we dreaming, planning and creating it or are we just coming along for the ride? As a passenger, you can only observe the future as a progression of the present. Extrapolations can provide good wakeup calls, but they disregard our potential for change. Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory put a mixture of psychology and math in the shape of sociology and statistics in the context of history in order to understand the future. The invented science is fascinating. As it predicts the behavior of large masses of people it becomes the passenger’s ultimate dream – an infinite GPS who not only explains where we’re going but why. Today, psychohistory doesn’t seem quite as futuristic as when the Foundation novel was written 60 years ago. Fueled by today’s obsessive social logging and tweeting, algorithms that detect societal moods already exist.

But before the herds of marketer rush to predict what we are buying tomorrow, it’s worth to know that Asimov also understood the limitation of the science. It was good at accurately anticipate the behavior of masses, but clueless against the actions of extremely strong individuals. This may be perfect irony of future predictions: it can only be anticipated if we disregard the strong individuals who actually create it.

Jakob Trollbäck

http://pastshock.tumblr.com/