As I think back on the events of this century, the images include relativity, two world wars, television, automobiles, Hollywood, individualism, computers, humanism, social security, improved quality of life, jazz and rock & roll, telecommunications, and, of course, the web. Can all of these images be put into the context of a meaningful trend ? I think so. Despite the overwhelming rate of technological change we have experienced, I think it all makes sense.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the monarchies of Europe were crumbling. The aristocracy was giving way to a rising middle class. The telephone and automobile had already been invented. Medical science had several decades of productive research and in physics so much progress had been made that they believed that everything was already known. Could an astute observer in 1899 have predicted events of the 20th century? I believe they could have. All major trends were already on the radar screen, so to speak, if one knew how to identify them. Similarly, the forces that will shape the 21st century are already on the radar screen if one knows how to spot them.
In 2099, I will be nearly one hundred and fifty years old and looking back on events of the 21st century. This provides a unique opportunity to speculate beforehand and then evaluate those speculations, after the fact. (Obviously, I believe some advances will be made in aging research or this whole idea would be silly.)
In this series of essays, I speculate on the trends of the 21st century. Each essay is about one thousand words, because, I believe that if you can't make a point in one thousand words you don't know what your point is. Further, essays of more than a thousand words place an unfair burden on the time and attention of the reader.
I am putting these predictions on my web page for anyone who is interested to see. All too often people who speculate about the future take credit only for the predictions they got right. Their need to inform others of their correct predictions seems inversely proportional to their rate of correct predictions. Yet in order to get better at predicting the future, you have to make a claim, see how it turns out and then figure out what you did right or wrong. I am also developing a method for studying the future, which will be elaborated upon in one of the essays. I currently have a short piece called "Why you can know the future but cannot know the past" in my Musings which will serve as the basis for that essay. I hope to provide some interesting insights into knowledge, the future, predictability and the next century. Please send an email to me if you have any thoughts or comments.
