EXTENSION ON BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING AND RACE | 2007-07-06
At the end of 1800s the wireless telegraphy moved slowly from picking up resonance across a lawn without a wire to a mile away to line-of-sight to ship-to-ship to transatlantic. Despite the telephone, there were learned articles about how VOICE on the new medium was a laughable idea.
In the 1950s one of the top comic strips was Dick Tracy. Tracy had only one high-tech gadget, a "wrist telephone." There were many discussions of whether such a two-way radio could ever be made small enough to go on one's wrist. For one thing, all radio transmitters required a vacuum tube and an electrical supply for it.
A couple of years ago I saw a pair of wrist radios on sale to a generation that never heard of Dick Tracy for three dollars, about a quarter back then.
"You can't do that anymore than you can FLY" But all of us have flown. Technology has a way of catching up with Timeless Wisdom when that Timeless Wisdom depends entirely on what cannot be done technologically. Which is anther way of saying that a society based on the acquisition of knowledge, of simple truth, has a way of rendering the Practical Man's flat statements absurd.
Which becomes OUR problem.
It is relatively easy to talk about some version of the economic collapes of the 1930s, about which we have abundant quotes and which everybody can see in their minds. Meanwhile the actual revolution is literally right in front of us. Every day your cell phones and computers change the parameters of our society. But we keep talking about economic collapse because, as Charles Issawi pointed out, like generals who are always planning the last war, social scientists are always looking forward to the last crisis.
If you want a PICTURE of what I am talking about, try to imagine a roundtable of Practical Men sitting down in 1907 to discuss the Future of the Mass Media in 2007. I do not live in the present, so tome it is always HILARIOUS to hear someone quoting the latest Coming Crisis in terms of a popular book written by an Expert.
TO BE an Expert on the mass media in1907, you would have to know all about the LIMITATIONS of technology in that age. Everything we are ACTUALLY talking about now would be as hilarious to them as everything THEY would actually have discussed to us.
But this is OUR problem, not THEIRS. The Experts and Futurolgists will get paid no matter how silly they repeatedly prove to be. They get paid and promoted in the NOW, not THEN. But if you are trying to save our race, the future is all that matters.
This is critical, not to the Experts, but to US:
BEING RIGHT ABOUT THE FUTURE IS SURVIVAL.
And you're not going to figure out the future just by quoting what is being said now.