The Day the Future Died...

The new year has come and gone, and like everybody else, I've gotten a bit reflective with the change in calendar.

It seems like back in the 90s, everyone in the industrialized world was aglow with the notion of progress, technology, and a brighter future. Magazine articles and TV programming was awash in futurism. For many people in the modern world, the biggest issues facing the world were the social problems we were going to run into from future technologies. Advances, problems and solutions in nanotechnology, genetics, AI, the internet, were on the tip of everyone's tongue. Down to Earth folks who never talked about "pie in the sky" dreams were suddenly striking up conversations about future technology.

And then suddenly, as the change of millenium came and went, the notions of boundless technology, of improving our lives through science, of progress, and a better world withered and died. Almost overnight, we stopped caring about any of that "future" shit and started worrying about terrorist attacks, environmental decay, and poverty. And when the future does come up in the popular sci-fi, it is dark, (in many cases literally dark, as a matter of artistic style), and riddled with grim conflict. And I think I know the exact moment our outlook as a world changed...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Dg2eEhB30
*conspiracy theorists take note: at 2:25 you can see the steel buckling INWARDS on its own*

This act struck deep into the soul of the Western world. Progress got a bloody nose when the tallest buildings in the world were destroyed. Some, even in America, began to question our own actions and policies and seemed to take the criticisms of Western society from the Islamists to heart. And all the world's dialogue shifted, from worrying about problems from out own progress per se, to worrying about terrorism, war, and environmental decay. And in that respect, I believe the terrorists WERE successful in spreading a blanket of fear, and spreading their message.

I think this shift in our dialogue as a society could very well cause problems in the future. We have largely stopped talking about the potential pros, cons, and dangers of genetics, nanotechnology, cloning, the social impact of the web, and other emerging technologies. And we may very well find ourselves blindsided by issues from those technologies in the future. In other worlds, if we're not careful, our new vision of a dark future may very well become a self-fulfilling prophecy.