Rough Guide to the Future
My day job just now is writing The Rough Guide to the Future, due out in Autumn 2009.There is a blog about this project at unreliable futures, mainly designed to persuade other people to help me with the hard bits. Thanks in advance if you care to take a look.
Here's a bit of blurb on the work in progress...
Why a
Rough Guide to The Future?
But the
future isn't what it used to be. Future-oriented language rings hollow.
Politicians still speak of 'going forward', of 'progress', even 'modernization',
but fewer now believe them. The developed world's trajectory looks hard to
sustain, and the affluent have much to lose. The gap between them (us) and the
poor, North and South, grows wider. For many people, the future seems uncertain,
if not downright threatening. Climate change. Oil shock. Biological weapons.
Nanotech nasties. New and re-emerging diseases. Loss of biodiversity.
On the other
hand, science and technology might just save the day. There
are plenty of predictions, forecasts, or just plain hopes of high tech cures,
clean energy, nano-miracles, supercomputers, space colonies, or brain science
which helps understand and improve human conduct.
So there's a
striking tension between available visions of the future. Is our civilisation
on its last legs, headed for unavoidable eco-collapse? Or will we soon move to a new technological plane, the
next stage of evolution? And how on earth is the average citizen supposed to
make sense of all this, look after their interests, or even do the right thing
by everyone else? As the Australian futurist Damien Broderick reckons, Òpeople
overwhelmingly state that their individual lives are quite contented and their
prospects good, while agreeing that the nation or the world generally is
heading for hell in a hand basket.