John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends: people are getting tired of the hype of technology. Mossberg said in the panel yesterday that a lot of things promised have not happened. People still do straight line extrapolation. The future is created by a collusion of many forces that interplay and these help shape the other forces. It’s never linear. In 1870 London, there were 50,000 horses producing tons of dung everyday, lots of carriages, the engineers warned Queen Victoria that people would drown in horseshit but then the auto was invented. Now we talk about fumes.

The Global Warming movement has become a religion, a product of linear thinking. People should be more skeptical, ask more questions. Now is the time to attend to lowering our dependence on oil.

So how do we understand the future, if not via linear thinking?

  • Don’t get so far ahead of the parade that people don’t know you’re in it: they are not interested in 2050, they are interested in what will happen in a few years in relationship to what they know now. Example: EU leaders can’t even get people to understand that economic reform is necessary to sustain the social model, which is what people are concerned about. There is no leadership in the world. But in the absence of top down leadership, bottom up leadership emerges (are we getting mob rule?)
  • is Europe in decline? if Europe continues to give lip service to economic reform, then it is on the path to decline in comparison to other parts of the world.
  • what methods can we use to predict the future? all the things we expect to happen, happen more slowly (media, politics — e.g. women’s rights). Demand a very high standard from media for reporting.
  • China: what is happening in China is extraordinary, but the hype that it will overtake the US is ridiculous. The same with India. China is so far ahead of India (infrastructure is terrible, China is building great airports, etc.). Investment in India is 1/10 of China. But India has terrible Socialist overhang from the Nehru period, with a nanny government. India is a one sector economy (IT) — they outwitted the government, they did things in spite of the government. You cannot build economic growth on one pillar.
  • Conventional media is in a survival mode. and in trying to survive, they get outrageous to get the blood running through the system. A visual culture is taking over the world (slow death of the “Culture”). We will have newspapers and TV for a long time, but now there is a scramble to figure out everything. So at the turn of the century, we were trying to figure out the automobile. In those first years, there were 2700 auto companies created. The press at that time were covering “breakthroughs” in automobiles. We are going through a long shakeout period in media technology.
  • Visual culture: manifestation of visual culture — the world is a picture puzzle. He gets pieces and he tries to see which fits with which. There are some things that fit together that form a picture. The “word” side is going down (newspapers, magazines), the novel is dead (announced for one hundred years but losing out to other forms of expression). Young people are not reading as much. But there are all these visual images coming out. Architecture today — people building iconic visual buildings — put together with visual media and you see we are moving from paper to film. It’s a faster form of communication but it’s not that the “word” is going away. The mix is changing. We will have fewer newspapers and fewer magazines, and more visual forms.
  • Conflict between Islam and the west: is this a big risk as many of us think? No. It’s overhyped. The terrorist thing is important but it’s running the administration so they gave them importance they don’t have. But we need to get some balance in this. We cannot make it the number one thing that makes us run.
  • High tech, high touch: when we think of high technology, we need to ask what does this new technology diminish and what does it enhance? What does it replace? What is the human response to that technology?

Naisbitt reads letter from Darwin:

. . . up to the age of thirty of beyond, poetry gave me pleasure but now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. My mind seems to become a kind of machine for grinding general laws from large collection of facts and if I had to live my life again, I would have made it a rule to read poetry and listen to music. The loss of these tastes is … injurious to the character… enfeebling the emotional part of our future.

Technorati Tags:

Sphere: Related Content