...is often the enterprise of noticing something in the headlines and then extrapolating it to insane proportions by imagining that it will continue expanding on to infinity through all time, space and eternity (as the inimitable John C. Wright discusses here).
Chesterton talks about this a century ago in his wonderful introduction to The Napoleon of Notting Hill where, after chronicling various prophetic utterances by the trendy writers of the day about what the future surely held (all of which were to be exploded by the actual events of the 20th century, though many of Chesterton’s forecasts were eerily fulfilled), he says:
All these clever men were prophesying with every variety of ingenuity what would happen soon, and they all did it in the same way, by taking something they saw ‘going strong,’ as the saying is, and carrying it as far as ever their imagination could stretch. This, they said, was the true and simple way of anticipating the future. “Just as,” said Dr. Pellkins, in a fine passage, “...just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant, just as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, grow taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so we know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human politics has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches to the sky.”
This mania for prophecy based on current events and intellectual fashion seems to me to be a peculiar product of the 18th and 19th Century obsession (still very much alive today) to find an All Explaining Theory of Everything. So, for instance, 200 years ago electricity was going to be the religion of the future cuz they zapped a dead frog’s leg and it jerked. It’s the germ of the novel Frankenstein. Today, a computer wins at Jeopardy and we are once again at the second creation of a new rational creature by a new race of Gods! Or so this guy thinks. He has a sort of religious zeal for the future of the super computer. And, as with so many of Chesterton’s contemporaries, it’s probably not a coincidence that he doesn’t seem to have much zeal for actual religion as he cooks up this latest gimcrack one out of a few inches of newspaper headlines.
A classic example of somebody not believing in God and therefore believing in anything.
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Funny. I was just in a doctor’s office yesterday reading the 2/21/11 issue of TIME. The cover story—“2045: The Year We Become Immortal”—focused on super-genius Raymond Kurzweil and his mathematical curve. Using his curve, Kurzweil predicts that by 2045 technological changes will be so rapid and profound that there’ll be a shear in the human experience. The middle of the seven-page story descends into your standard “Future World” gush of wondrous cures, stodgy naysayers and mild cautions. The overall tone, though, is the grim determinism that is the technocrat’s favorite substitute for a moral compass ... the kind that says, “There’s nothing you can do to prevent it, so you may as well lay back and enjoy it.”
I saw pretty much the same flaws you did in the article you read:
—The expectation that humanity will progress along the same path it always has;
—The expectation that there’ll be no material or physical limitations on the advance;
—The expectation that the economy will continue to expand and fund the research necessary;
—The belief that life expectancy should continue to increase, that mortality is curable; and
—The expectation that the advances will be available to everyone, that technology will make greed disappear from the human condition.
Here’s the link if you wish to read the article. There’s something touching about the faith of technocrats ... the future of this world can never be dystopian.
I’m still waiting for the flying car I was sure we would all have about ten years ago.
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