My Past Through Tomorrow–Introduction

Late last evening, Augur challenged me to be more specific in my futurist predictions. He stated that while it was interesting to read about vague references to the changes that are in store for America and the rest of the human race, it might be useful if I could put all of my speculations in one, easy to reference document.

I spent very little time sleeping last night. By morning, I had managed to mentally outline a set of six blog posts which would feature news stories from the next forty years. I plan on printing them, one per day, beginning tomorrow. I’ll finish up with a post a week from tomorrow summarizing the exercise and answering any questions that you might have raised that were not sufficiently covered in the discussion.

Some caveats, though:

First of all, I don’t know what the future is going to bring, really. What I am going to be positing is the most likely, in my mind, path that humanity is going to take. As was demonstrated in 2001, a couple dozen determined individuals are more than capable of changing the course of history on a world-wide scale. As technology gives individuals more and more power, the groups of world-shakers will become smaller, not larger. Therefore, as time progresses, the specifics of my educated guesses will probably diverge further and further from reality.

Even trained science-fiction writers and technical experts are dismal at predictions. Only Heinlein, that I know of, successfully predicted the sudden fall of the Soviet Union. Tom Clancy was the only person in techno-thriller fiction that proposed the use of airliners as weapons of mass destruction. Very few of the prognosticators of the 1960s came within a block of understanding that computing would be distributed in the 21st century, not locked into huge mainframes.

Therefore, I would consider myself a genius if I managed to be more than about 75% correct on these predictions. I’ve thought about each of them at length, examining the root causes, as well as the effects that they will have on the lives of individuals and the chain of events that will result from them.

The future will look a lot like the past with a few things changed in major ways. As the rate of technological change accelerates, that future will become less and less comprehensible to those of us living today. Many of you reading these posts will live the forty years necessary to see the predictions succeed or fail. Like me, you’ll find yourself on a journey from a lost world (like the one I describe in my Tonica Days stories) to one in which every day presents new wonders, for good or for ill.

So, beginning tomorrow, we’ll take a walk on the wild side. Any of you who are budding science-fiction writers are welcome to take any idea that I present here and run with it. If you do so, please include a note of credit for the germ of your story in the introduction, that’s all I ask–my ego will supply the rest of what I need from that. I reserve the personal right, of course, to do the same, although fiction-writing is not in my current plans.

The posts will be in the form of short news stories, similar to those that one can currently find on CNN.com or The Drudge Report. We’ll start slow and familiar with a couple of six month intervals, then proceed to five years, then a decade or so before ending in 2047. All commentary is welcome in the comments section (except for screechy monkey poo, of course.)

Ready to go? Let’s fasten our seat belts, folks, it’s going to be a bumpy ride….

Tom