There is always a future, but it has the inevitable habit in
our lives of soon enough becoming the past. For several
centuries, this transfer of the future into the past has been
increasing its velocity. Technological revolutions used to
take several generations to take effect and be realized.
Then they took place in a lifetime. Then (amazingly) in a
single generation, or several in one lifetime. We now witness
and feel the impact of technological change in only a few
years. Soon it will be months. And then, under “artificial
intelligence” machines (robots), probably only days or even
faster.
The institutions of government adapt slowly. Institutions of
business and commerce adapt more rapidly (by necessity)
in our democratic capitalist system.
Although many of our scientists, researchers, analysts and
other technicians deal with this phenomenon in their own
fields all the time, and a few even try to understand its
overall impact, most of us go on with our lives only dimly
aware of the speed of change and how it alters the ways in
which we live.
I am writing this as a suggestion to all of us (myself included)
to take the currents of technological change more consciously.
I write about political and public policy events, usually trying
to examine the immediate and easily foreseeable
consequences of them. We always do have provocative
political personalities, and our own time has not a few of
them --- in our own country and elsewhere. Specific issues of
healthcare, taxes, education, public spending, human rights,
the environment, and other subjects appear and reappear.
My point is that these issues are not accidental. They are in
some way connected to, and arising from,the whole world,
and our whole country, changing. Is our survival at stake?
We need our diversions. Sports, detective novels, TV sitcoms,
fantasy movies, computer games, hobbies, pets, and other
interests, are (and should be) be part of our lives.
But something is rapidly taking place all around us, and it is
happening with a velocity that has not ever occurred in human
history.
Just saying.
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Copyright (c) 2017 by Barry Casselman. All right reserved.
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