SCHOLAR ISLAND

"The Gods see what is to come, wise men see what is coming, ordinary men see what is come."

"Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature; for never is life so low or so little as when occupied with the present."

"Finally, an issue all Americans can rally behind: winning the future! Surely most of us would like to be victorious down the road. The alternative is losing the future, and that doesn't sound very good, does it? If the future is lost then what will become of us?"

"It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time."

"Everyone can see something of the future-provided that they adapt their intellects to do so."

"One would expect people to remember the past and to imagine the future, but in fact....they imagine the past and remember the future."

"There are two classes of people who tell what is going to happen in the future: those who don't know and those who don't know they don't know."

"Nobody knows where the human race is going. The highest wisdom, then, is to know where you are going."

"We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can. Learn what we can., improve the solutions, and pass them on."

"As we've seen, our future is a race between good innovation and bad innovation. That's a sprint that will be decided purely by our ability to create."

"The future is worse than the ocean-there is nothing there. It will be what men and circumstance make it."

"Future-seeing is divided from futurology by two mutual misunderstandings. It is popularly believed that psychics can automatically see the future without recourse to mundane forms of help. This sometimes appears to be the case, but it is not true generally. Futurologists popularly believe they can extrapolate the future without recourse to psychic insights. This likewise appears to be the case sometimes, but is not true generally."

"We not only romanticize the future; we have also made it into a growth industry, a parlor game and a disaster movie all at the same time."

"The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disappointed in you when you cannot be sure....."

"Dreams and predictions. . .ought to serve but for winter talk by the fireside."

"What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass."

"Since about 1930 the world has given no reason for optimism whatever....Nothing is in sight except a welter of lies, hatred, cruelty and ignorance, and beyond our present troubles loom vaster ones that are only now entering into the European consciousness..."

"The higher aims of "technological progress" are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in ‘the future’. We do as we do, we say "for the sake of the future" or "to make a better future for our children." How can we hope to make a good future by doing badly in the present, we don’t say, we cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist:- the existence of the future is an article of faith. We can be assured only that, if there is to be a future, the good of it is already implicit in the good things of the present. We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race," we have the same pressing need that we have always had-to love, care for, and teach our children."

"The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history, given the share of these events in the dynamics of events.

But we act as though we are able to predict historical events, or, even worse, as if we are able to change the course of history. We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer-our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). Owing to this misunderstanding of the casual chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance-like a child playing with a chemistry kit.

Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan, coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs, means that certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating-or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie."

"Our major economic competitors in the 21st century are spending seven, eight, nine percent of their gross domestic product on infrastructure....We're spending almost nothing at all."

"ultimately, we face a future of mass transit strained beyond capacity, planes sitting on tarmacs, slow traffic and wasteful sprawl, ports that lack the capacity to operate efficiently, and increasing numbers of bridges and dams that are obsolescent and dangerous to the public's health and safety."

"The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."

"When the time comes, the lightning-flash of history will tear apart the clouds, consume all obstacles and then the future, like Pallas Athene, will spring forth in full armour. Faith in the future is our inalienable right, our highest value; faith in the future fills us with love for the present. In moments of trial this faith will save us from despair; and this love will live in noble acts."

"The modern prophet is a scientist, and not a prophet at all; he calls himself a 'futurologist' . And his predictions are not inspired, they are not revealed knowledge; they are a result of his brilliant mind applying some rigidly scientific methodologies (which he has invented) to the 'data' (which he has selected) ."

"The contemporary futurologist winks at the fool: "Wanna sire a couple of Einstein’s"? We got the genetics for it, you know, almost."

"Earasmus of Rotterdam's biting little book (In praise of Folly) written in 1511 shows us how closely connected quackery and university were even then. "

"By comparison, the government often has a relatively poor track record when it comes to predicting the future. For example, in 1913, the U.S. government actually prosecuted Lee de Forest of RCA for telling investors that his company would soon be able to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic Ocean. The idea seemed so absurd to the government that de Forest was assumed to be a swindler. Indeed Philip Tetlock, in his award-winning study Expert Political Judgment, found that the professional "experts" who advise government are actually more often wrong in their predictions than right. Industry equally has a mixed track record. For example, IBM president Thomas Watson famously said in 1943, "i think there is a world market for maybe five computers"

"Our advances in technical intelligence have not improved our ability to predict any specific war."

"There is a back and forth between dreams and reality. Science fiction offers the dreams, the engineers make it the reality, and the readers are the ones who pilot the technology in planes, cars, rockets, whatever."

"Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest."

"Much has been written about the future, yet, for the most part, books about the world to come have a harsh metallic sound. "

"The fool as Malthusian, the fool as space traveler, the fool as cunning strategist, the fool as 'one-world' citizen is in paradise . "

"What will happen five minutes from now is pretty well determined, but as that period is gradually lengthened a larger- and larger number of purely accidental occurrences are included. Ultimately a point is reached beyond which events are more than half determined by accidents which have not yet happened. Present planning loses significance when that point is reached...Here is the fundamental dilemma of civilization. . .there is serious doubt whether the way forward is known. "

"People often ask historians to tell them about the future. Heaven knows it is difficult enough to know about the past. The historian is no more competent than anyone else to foretell the future. In fact in many ways he is less competent because he understands the infinite variety of what might happen. When people ask me 'will there be another world war?' I am inclined to answer ' If men behave in the future as they have done in the past there will be another war. ' But of course it is always possible that men will behave differently. As a personal hunch I think it is unlikely and that there will be a third world war. One day the deterrent will fail to deter. "

"Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have ever been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results."

"You'll often hear people say that the future is inherently unpredictable and then they will put up some stupid prediction that never came to bear. But actually the parameters of it are highly predictable."

"The French are going to win. It is a fight that is going to be finished with our help"

"1921 New York Times editorialist chided Goddard for the notion that rockets could fly through space with air to push against."

"He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator."

"Heaven only knows where we are going, and heaven knows what is happening to us-"

"Citizens, can you imagine the future? City streets flooded with light….nations brothers…..no more events. All will be happy."

"Almost all the population growth over the last few decades has taken place not merely in cities, but in developing-world cities. The results have been staggering, especially to the cities themselves. Nearly every major city in the poorest parts of the globe has multiplied in size by a factor of ten. Many have grown by even more. Cities like Dhaka in Bangladesh, Kinshasa in the Congo, or Lagos in Nigeria are about forty times larger than they were in in 1950.

For modern-day conflict levels, this news is mixed at best. As Ralph Peters darkly tells, "The city-capstone of human organization-is growing, changing, producing fantastic wealth....and rotting." The impact he sees on war is best described in the title he gave a landmark article for the U.S. Army's journal "Our Soldiers, Their Cities."

"in the future, we'll all have fifteen minutes of privacy....that is what scares the shit out of me."

"You will not have any doubt that psychological Time is a mental disease if you look at the collective manifestations. They occur, for example, in the form of ideologies such as communism, national socialism or any nationalist, or rigid religious belief systems, which operate under the implicit assumption that the highest good lies in the future and that therefore the end justifies the means. The end is an idea, a point in the mind-projected future, when salvation in whatever form-happiness, fulfillment, equality, liberation, and so on- will be attained. Not infrequently the means of getting there are the enslavement, torture, and murder of people in the present."

"The future appeals to you? All yours ! Myself I prefer to keep to the incredible present and the incredible past. I leave it to you to face the Incredible itself."

"We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present."

"At the moment I do not anticipate the fall of Vietnam. . .There's an opportunity to salvage the situation by giving the South Vietnamese an opportunity to fight for their freedom"

"The Professor (Robert) Goddard with his "chair" at Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution does not know the relation of action and reaction, and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react-to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."

the New York Times in a 1921 editorial criticizing the rocketry research of R.H. Goddard

"Small atomic generators, installed in homes and industrial plants will provide power for years and ultimately for a lifetime without recharging."

"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax."

"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility…..

"Rail Travel at High Speeds is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia."

"The search for longitude may represent the first great public high-technology program. In its costs and benefits it became one of the most successful."

"People were encouraged to entertain an idle dream: the cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles away from my office under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it to in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work….enough for all."

"This is my prediction for the future; whatever hasn't happened will happen! And no one will he safe from it!"

"The world is moving, men tell us, to this, to that, to the other. Do not believe them! Men have never known what the world is moving to. "

"There is in society a mass of men who are capable only of conserving what exists; so mean are they, that they will sacrifice none of their present wealth in order to build a better future; and in order not to appear so mean and miserable, they deny the very possibility of a better future , and attack those people who attempt to achieve progress. Such is the vulgar mass of men

"There are destinies of splendour after all our doom of littleness and meanness and pain."

" We know that there is no human foresight or wisdom that can prescribe direction to our life, except for small stretches of the way . . , . Fate confronts ( us ) like an intricate labyrinth, all too rich in possibilities, and yet of these many possibilities only one is (our) own right way, "

"Motherhood is the greatest experience a woman can have to develop concern for the future."

"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority."

"The study of the future may well be the most exiting intellectual enterprise of today. But is it more than an exciting adventure , It is an awesome responsibility. "

"Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth."

"The things we thought would happen do not happen; the unexpected God makes possible: And that is what has happened here today. ", .

"The way to know the shape of things in advance is to listen to seers and mystics instead of to economists and statisticians. The world had ample warning of every event which it has greeted with such gasps of surprise in the past twelve months. Part of the preparation for the perfect world society will be the recognition of seers. It will be required of the President of the United States that he read one poem and one parable or fable a day, in addition to the editorials in the Times . The brotherhood of man can never be achieved till the democracies realize that today' s fantasy is tomorrow's communiqué. "

"Jules Verne's novel of a lunar voyage was science fiction that came so close to the actual events you could almost believe he had a clear vision of the future, or that NASA scientists had used his novel as the basic script for their own moon adventure.

Verne predicted that the first moon voyage would be an American project. He was right. Verne sent three adventurers on a four-day December flight to the moon. The Christmas 1968 voyage of Apollo 8, which was the first to place astronauts (William Anders, Frank Borman, and James A. Lowell) in lunar orbit, took three days from launch until arrival at their orbit around the moon.

Verne launched his astronauts from a 900-foot cannon, the Columbiad, buried in the earth near Tampa on the west coast of Florida. The Kennedy Space Center, from which Apollo 8 was launched, is located less that 120 miles away on the east coast of Florida.

Verne's astronauts were picked up by a United States Navy vessel that accidentally witnessed their splashdown in the Pacific Ocean southeast of Hawaii. The Apollo 8 landing was witnessed by the United States Navy's aircraft carrier Yorktown. It was four miles away and waiting to pick up the Apollo 8 crew. The similarities between fact and fiction go on."

"Are we going to control life? I think so. We all know how imperfect we are. Why not make ourselves a little better suited for survival? That’s what we’ll do, we’ll make ourselves a little better."

"The denizen of the technological state of the future will have everything his heart ever desired, except, of course, his freedom."

"….whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they re produced by men who ever have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same result."

"Disrespect for futurology can be happily liberating for the scholar tempted to dabble in predictions, the strain of preserving academic detachment and stifling moral judgments can be forgotten. In the predictions made here. I candidly confess my unscientific notion of the job and my abhorrence of the future I foresee. The museum-keepers may rescue their relics of our world from its burned-out shell; or from a moonscape crumpled and dusted by ecological disaster; or from an unpeopled planet reconquered by resurgent nature; or from a colony of space invaders; or, most surprisingly of all, from something recognizably similar to what we have got. But I propose in this epilogue to forgo their perspective and to envisage only the relatively short-term future prefigured in the trends of the last thousand years-to see how the next millennium might start to grow out of the last.

Futurology is a fashion. The approach of the end of the current millennium has stimulated it, but, judged over the length of a lifetime, it looks like a fashion in decline. It seems to my wife and me, as we gather, like citizens of Flatland, around the sort of hearthside evoked in the epigraph to Part One of this book, to have peaked in our own childhood and youth when public interest in the future was enlivened by debate between scientific perfectibilians and apocalyptic visionaries. The optimists predicted a world made easy by progress, lives prolonged by medical wizardry, wealth made universal by the alchemy of economic growth, society rectified by the egalitarianism of technologically prolonged leisure. The pessimists foresaw nuclear immolation or population explosion or a purgative world revolution-a cosmic struggle reminiscent of the millennium of Christian prophetic tradition-which would either save or enslave mankind

No one gets excited by such visions today. Scientific progress has been, at best, disappointing-encumbering us with apparently insoluble social and more problems; or else, at worst, alarming-threatening us with the mastery of artificially intelligent machines or genetically engineered human mutants. Economic growth has become the bogey of the ecologically anxious. Meanwhile, world revolution and the nuclear holocaust have been postponed, and apocalyptic prophecy has resorted to forebodings-variously unconvincing or uncompelling-about ecological cataclysms….."

" I saw that if I could go 50 years ahead, everybody would leave me alone. And that’s exactly the way it happened. I was allowed to do anything I wanted and people said, "Well you’re very amusing, but obviously I can’t take you seriously." But because I’d deliberately got to living and thinking 50 years ahead on a comprehensive basis, I inadvertently got myself into a strange position. I began to live on that frontier, and it was like any wave phenomenon: I was living where it was cresting and things happened to me long before they happened to the rest of society."

"Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures-both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a tribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe-a jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food- with MTV , Macintosh, and McDonald’s pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network; one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitately apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment."

"In the winter of 1996, futurist Erin Whitney-Smith put together a conference on the internet that brought together mountain people from all over the world. She found that men and women in the Urals, the Rockies and the Alps in common hated the people in the valley, who they felt exploited them, were independent; disliked governments that interfered with that independence; and cared deeply about the environment. That group has now become a virtual community and shares experiences, successes and failures in ways that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Mountain people have bonded through the virtual identity they have developed on the Web. The question that should concern government and law enforcement agencies around the world is that there are thousands of such groups spawning each year. Each group brings together like-minded people who arguable share more common interests and a greater loyalty to each other than they do to the country where they were born."

"WE have trained these (men) to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, wherever he is."

"Future n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured."

"If a man carefully examines his thoughts he will be surprised to find out how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead. Such a creature is probably immortal."

"Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come."

"The most prevalent opinion among our so confused contemporaries seems to be that tomorrow will be wonderful-that is, unless it is indescribably terrible, or unless indeed there just isn’t any."

"Because unless you believe that the future can be better It’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so, If you assume that there’s no hope. You guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things. There's a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours."

"Sometimes in the next thirty years, very quietly one day we will cease to be the brightest things on earth."

"It is possible that we may become pets of the computers, leading pampered existences like lapdogs, but I hope that we will always retain the ability to pull the plug if we feel like it."

"We used to think our future was in the stars. Now we know it’s in our genes."

"Frightened by the accelerating speed of technological change, distressed by the loss of disposable income, worried about a future without jobs, and angry at the government, the electronic self oscillates between fear and rage."

"The sense of the future as a gradually unfolding toward a known and desirable end is precisely what we Americans seem to have lost."

"The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively."

"I don’t think that life in the cosmos, more than a fraction of it, is some distorted replica of our chemistry-I would put my money on the silicon memory bank as an immortal form of life and on the disembodied form as the ultimate."

"We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there."

"Our resurrection does not lie wholly in the future; it is also within us, it is starting now, it has already started."

"Two futures beckon us. ‘We can choose to engineer the life of the planet, creating a second nature in our image, or we can choose to participate with the rest of the living kingdom. Two futures, two choices. An engineering approach to the age of biology or an ecological approach. The battle between bioengineering and ecology is a battle of values. Our choice, in the final analysis, depends on what we value most in life. If it is physical security, perpetuation at all costs, that we value most, then technological mastery over the becoming process is an appropriate choice. But the ultimate and final power to simulate left, to imitate nature, to fabricate the process brings with it a price far greater than any humanity has ever had to contend with. By choosing the power of authorship, humanity gives up, once and for all, the most precious gift of all, companionship."

"Those on the other side of the fence, liberals and skeptics, secular believers in science and progress, still expect that the future will follow the patterns of the past century: sleeker machines, more immersive virtual worlds, , longer life spans, further ecological deterioration. They accept economists' projections of limitless growth and ignore other figures indicating depletion and devastation. Faced with terrorist threats, most are willing to forfeit a degree of freedom for a measure of security. They ignore or avoid the underlying aspects of our situation that contradict their hopes and plans for the future."

"Extrapolation doesn’t work, because neither nature nor human society is guaranteed to act reasonably."

"But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident.....of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked , nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort."

"Dante, in the Divine Comedy, gives an exact description of the Southern Cross, a constellation which is invisible in the Northern Hemisphere and which no traveler in those days could ever have seen.

SWIFT, in the Journey to Laputa, gives the distances and periods of rotation of two satellites of Mars, unknown at the time.

In 1896, an English author, M.P. Skiel, published a short story in which we read of monstrous criminals ravaging Europe, slaughtering families which they considered were impeding the progress of humanity, and burning their corpses. The story was entitled the S.S.

A novel called Futility by Morgan Robertson described an ocean liner called the Titan which struck an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage. (written fourteen years before the Titanic)

The book Hadrian VII by Baron Corvo contained predictions of the invention of color photography and the murder of the Russian Royal family.

‘If you have a creative experience, it has to be prophetic because nature is prophetic."

"The great and blessed property of true art has a mission which is both educational & prophetic."

"Foretelling the future, however, is not only pointless; it can actually be destructive. To have power even over the future is a way of giving ourselves a false sense of security. It is a tactic for shielding ourselves from the open-ended nature of the present, with all its precariousness and unpredictability. it is to use the future as a kind of fetish-as a comforting idol to cling to like a toddler to its blanket. it is an absolute value which will not let us down because (since it does not exist ) it is as insulated from the winds of history as a phantom. You can also seek to monopolize the future as a way of dominating the present. The true soothsayers of our time are not hairy, howling outcasts luridly foretelling the death of capitalism, but the experts hired by the transnational corporations to peer into the entrails of the system and assure its rulers that their profits are safe for another ten years. The prophet, by contrast, is not a clairvoyant at all. It is a mistake to believe that the biblical prophets sought to predict the future. Rather, the prophet denounces the greed, corruption and power-monger of the present, warning us that unless we change our ways we might well have no future at all. Marx was a prophet, not a fortune-teller."

How would you react if you could no longer conceive of the future-but live only in the present and past? It sounds like a philosopher's puzzle or a science fiction nightmare. But with the use of posthypnotic suggestion, Dr. Bernard Aaronson has explored this and other drastic alterations in our perceptions of space and time.

In experiments conducted at the Bureau of Research in Neurology and Psychiatry, Princeton, New Jersey, Dr. Aaronson and others gave this posthypnotic instruction to six volunteers: "Do you know how we divide time into the three categories of past, present and future? When I wake you, the future will be gone. There will be no future."

The researchers didn't know what to expect when one region of time was suddenly erased or ablated. The results were extraordinary. In some cases the subjects experienced behavior changes than one would anticipate only with the use of powerful psychoactive drugs. One subject "found himself in a boundless, immanent present." He became fascinated with colors and textures, and went so far as to describe his feelings as "mystical." Ordinarily goals and deadlines are located in the psychological future; these plans, in turn, produce hopes and anxieties. But without a conception of tomorrow, the subjects generally lost all their motivation and all their anxieties.

Later , when the subjects were asked to experience "an expanded future," the effects were different but equally remarkable. The subjects felt they had been given all the time they needed to accomplish everything they ever intended. They were calm and happy, and any apparent fear of death vanished.

In other tests, Dr. Aaronson hypnotically expanded or eradicated his subjects' past and present. Eliminating the present was by far the most disturbing: subjects felt profoundly depressed and behaved almost schizophrenically. One volunteer described the sensation of "unbeing," a lonely, deathlike detachment. Eliminating the past also had a negative impact, characterized by drowsiness and impaired functioning: several people suffered memory losses and had difficulty speaking. Everything seemed meaningless.

In contrast, expanding the past and present produced good feelings. Widening the world of the present encouraged exuberance and enhanced both visual and auditory sensation. On a car ride one subject asked the experimenter to stop and let him out; for many minutes he stood by the side of the road watching a cow leisurely chewing its cud. Expanding the past bought on dreamy retrospection."

Just over fifty years ago, the poet W.H. Auden achieved what all writers envy: a prophecy that came true. it's embedded in a long work called For the Time Being: A Christmas oratorio, where Herod enlarges on the distasteful task of massacring the Innocents. he doesn't want to, because he is at heart a liberal. but still, he says, if that child is allowed to get away,

"Reason will be replaced by revelation. Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions-feelings in the solar plexus induced by undernourishment, angelic images generated by fever or drugs, dream warnings inspired by the sound of falling water. Whole cosmogonies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of schoolchildren ranked above the greatest masterpieces.

"Idealism will be replaced by materialism....diverted from its normal outlet in patriotism and civic or family pride, the need of the masses for some visible idol to worship will be driven into totally unsociable channels where no education can reach it. Divine honors will be paid to shallow depressions the earth, domestic pets, ruined windmills, or malignant tumors.

'justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish. every corner-boy will congratulate himself: "I'm such a sinner that God has come down in person to save me' Every crook will argue: 'I like committing crimes. god likes forgiving them. Really the world is admirably arranged. 'the New aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough diamond, the consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Tragedy, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire."

See article "How to Predict Everything by Timothy Ferris "New Yorker, July 12,1999

Books: Encyclopedia of the Future …edited by George Thomas Kurian and Graham T.T. Molitor, Macmillan Library Reference.

Exploring your Future: Living, Learning and Working in the Information Age, edited by Edward Cornish

"The future Ain’t What it Used to Be: the 40 Cultural Trends Transforming your job, your life ,your world. By Vickie Abrahamson, Mary Meehan, and Larry Samuel.

"In Huxley's future, hedonism is everything, immediate pleasure the entire point of life. The only concern people have is over aging, because this life is all there is-ever. There is no religion other than gratitude to what was then called capitalism and today is referred to as free-market globalism (so as not to embarrass the Chinese): There is no tradition. No past; no future. Life is now. In fact, that's all life is-the pleasures of right now. In Huxley's future, the literature of the past has been put away-why upset people with tales of suffering? There is no suffering."

"There is also the argument, first advocated by J.D. Bernal in what has often been called the best book about the future ever written, The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929). That planets are not the right place to live, anyway. Our ultimate home will be space, in the weightless environment of artificial worlds that can be created nearer to our hearts’ desire. More recently, the late Gerard O’Neil promoted the idea in his book The High Frontier (1977); and, perhaps biased by my scuba-diving experiences, I too have argued that we will not be really happy until we can escape from gravity. We are exiles here on dry land, in transit between the ocean of water in which we were born and the ocean of space where most of history will run its course.

Perhaps. I have no doubt that space colonies will be built, some of enormous size. But there is a great deal to be said for a planetary environment, and gravity is not all bad. Because it has such enormous inertia, a planet is a fail-safe, automatically correcting system: it is not easy to wreck it, though sometimes we seem to be doing our best here on Earth. In comparison, space colonies appear fragile constructions with few back-ups-disasters waiting to happen."

"Consider the feudal person, unaware that he lived on a planet loaded with natural resources like fossil fuels, which could power machines which would create more complex machines and produce chemical-electrical energy....Today, at the end of the industrial age, at the dawning of the cybernetic age, most digital engineers and most managers of the computer industry are not aware that we live in a cyber-culture surrounded by limitless deposits of information which can be digitalized and tapped by the individual equipped with cyber-gear....There are no limits on virtual reality. It's all about access to information. The donning of computer clothing will be as significant in human history as the donning of outer clothing was in the Paleolithic."

"Even four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon emphasized that the most important advances are the least predictable. Three ancient discoveries especially astonished him: gunpowder, silk, and the mariner's compass. In Novus Organum he writes "these things....were not discovered by philosophy or the arts of reason, but by chance and occasion," They are "different in kind," so that "no preconceived notion could possibly have conduced to their discover." It was Bacon's belief that "there are still many things of excellent use stored up in the lap of nature having nothing in them kindred or parallel to what is already discovered.....lying quite out of the path of imagination."

Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning: How terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In This Century-on Earth and Beyond

"When I am up against a tough situation, if I can do anything about it, I do it. If I can't, I just forget it. I never worry about the future, because I know no man living can possibly figure out what is going to happen in the future. There are so many forces that will affect that future. Nobody can tell what prompts those forces-or understand them. So why worry about them?"

"The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on hind legs, it is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you knew is wrong."

"It's not merely a technology that will change how we act, but it is a technology that is akin to a new species. It will change everything. Indeed, more than we can imagine because the new entity will be doing the imagining."

"I see a future world in which a lex talionis operates among nations, pretty much like today. but not the lex talionis of Leviticus, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. More like the code of hammurabi. an eye for an eye if you're in the same class, two eyes if you're one class lower, and so on down to anything you like if you're in the servant class. This sort of law amounts to a kind of international order."

"I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. it's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges or scrub the floor."

"At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and the most thrilling period in its history. it will be an era in which the very nature of what it mans to be human will be both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity."

"For all the talk about the environment these days, I don't think human beings have ever been more distanced from nature. And much as I hate to say it, I don't think this trend is going to reverse itself. It just seems inevitable that people are going to continue to live more and more through technology. I think the gene-based, corporeal life we are familiar with is just the incipient stage of an evolutionary development of universal intelligence. Already you can see signs of an advent of avatarism. Humans are happy to go through synthetic self-transformations....breast augmentation, botox, plastic surgery, tummy tucks, etc. At the same time many others neglect their physical selves adopting (sometimes false) computer identities. Altogether people are less and less resistant to the synthetic. At the same time people do more and more online; shop, work, socialize....Inevitably there will be huge market demand for the technology to create artificial selves, avatars, to function in the online world for us."

"To this day in most Asian science fiction, especially in the anime genre, the robot is usually the hero who battles evil. This has heavily influenced both Japanese scientists and that nation's culture. "The machine is a friend of humans in Japan. A robot is a friend, basically," says Shuji Hasimoto , a robotics professor at Waseda university in Tokyo, "so, it is easy to use machines in this country."

Japan's traditional religion of Shintoism holds that both animate and inanimate objects, from rocks to trees to robots, have a spirit or soul just like a person. Thus, to endow a robot with a soul is not an illogical leap in either fiction or reality. Indeed, in many Japanese factories, robots are given Shinto rites and treated like members of the staff. mashiro Mori, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, explains that Buddhism also makes for a more soulful approach to what a westerner would see as just a tool or maybe a mechanical servant. Mori, who wrote a book called The Buddha in the Robot, argues that robots can have a Buddha-like nature and that humans should relate to them as they would a person. "If you make something, your heart will go into the thing you are making. So, a robot is an external self. If a robot is an external self, a robot is your child."

"No one has been more wrong about computerization than George Orwell in 1984. So far, nearly everything about the actual possibility-space that computers have created indicates they are not the beginning of authority but its end."

"the science fiction writer William Gibson (Necromancer and Count Zero) imagines that all who live by computers will one day commingle in a jointly created virtual reality-"mankind's unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline."

"What needs to be articulated, regardless of the format of the man-machine relationship, is the goal of humanism through machines."

...."People degrade themselves all the time in order to make machines seem smart. Before the 2008 stock-market crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before the bank makes bad loans; we ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our specie's bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology good, but every manifestation of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic artificial intelligence projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? The fragments of human effort that have flooded the Internet are perceived by some to form a hive mind or noosphere-terms said to describe what is thought to be a new super intelligence. A significant number of AI enthusiasts, after a protracted period of failed experiments in tasks like understanding natural language, eventually found consolation in the hive mind, which yields better results because there are real people behind the curtain. Wikipedia, for instance works through what I call the "oracle illusion," in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text super-human validity."

"Dan Gardner argues that anyone who tries to predict the future is deluding himself and the rest of us."

Book: Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better"

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Book: "Toward a Remotely-Manned Energy and Production Economy." Martin Minsky MIT

Book: "UBIQUITY: The Science of History....or Why the World is Simpler Than We Think" by march Buchanan

Book: "Inevitable Surprises: Thinking ahead in a Time of Turbulence" by Peter Schwartz

Book: "Hope and Despair: How perception of the Future shapes Human Behavior" by Anthony Reading

Book: "Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict In the 21st Century" by P.W. Singer

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