Assimilated Futures
I’ve long said that it is backwards to worry that technology will change faster than society can adapt, because the ability of society adapt is one of the main constraints on how fast we adopt new technologies. This insightful 2012 post by Venkatesh Rao elaborates on a related theme:
Both science fiction and futurism … fail to capture the way we don’t seem to notice when the future actually arrives. … The future always seems like something that is going to happen rather than something that is happening. …
Futurists, artists and edge-culturists … like to pretend that they are the lonely, brave guardians of the species who deal with the “real” future and pre-digest it for the rest of us. But … the cultural edge is just as frozen in time as the mainstream, … people who seek more stimulation than the mainstream, and draw on imagined futures to feed their cravings rather than inform actual future-manufacturing. …
When you are sitting on a typical modern jetliner, you are traveling at 500 mph in an aluminum tube that is actually capable of some pretty scary acrobatics. … Yet a typical air traveler never experiences anything that one of our ancestors could not experience on a fast chariot or a boat. Air travel is manufactured normalcy. …
This suggests that only those futures arrive for which there is human capacity to cope. This conclusion is not true, because a future can arrive before humans figure out whether they have the ability to cope. For instance, the widespread problem of obesity suggests that food-abundance arrived before we figured out that most of us cannot cope. And this is one piece of the future that cannot be relegated to specialists. …
Successful products are precisely those that do not attempt to move user experiences significantly, even if the underlying technology has shifted radically. In fact the whole point of user experience design is to manufacture the necessary normalcy for a product to succeed and get integrated. … What we get is a Darwinian weeding out of those manifestations of the future that break the continuity of technological experience. …
What about edge-culturists who think they are more alive to the real oncoming future? … The edge today looks strangely similar to the edge in any previous century. It is defined by reactionary musical and sartorial tastes and being a little more outrageous than everybody else in challenging the prevailing culture of manners. … If it reveals anything about technology or the future, it is mostly by accident. . …
At a more human level, I find that I am unable to relate to people who are deeply into any sort of cyberculture or other future-obsessed edge zone. There is a certain extreme banality to my thoughts when I think about the future. Futurists as a subculture seem to organize their lives as future-experience theaters. These theaters are perhaps entertaining and interesting in their own right, as a sort of performance art, but are not of much interest or value to people who are interested in the future in the form it might arrive in, for all.
It is easy to make the distinction explicit. Most futurists are interested in the future beyond the [manufactured normalcy field]. I am primarily interested in the future once it enters the Field, and the process by which it gets integrated into it. This is also where the future turns into money, so perhaps my motivations are less intellectual than they are narrowly mercenary. …
This also explains why so few futurists make any money. They are attracted to exactly those parts of the future that are worth very little. They find visions of changed human behavior stimulating. Technological change serves as a basis for constructing aspirational visions of changed humanity. Unfortunately, technological change actually arrives in ways that leave human behavior minimally altered. .. The mainstream never ends up looking like the edge of today. Not even close. The mainstream seeks placidity while the edge seeks stimulation. (more)
Yes, I’m a guilty-as-charged futurist focused on changes far enough distant that there’s little money to be made understanding them now. But I share Rao’s emotional distance from the future-obsessed cultural edge. I want to understand the future not as morality tale to validate my complaints against today’s dominant culture; I instead want to foresee the assimilated future. That is, I want to see how future people will actually see their own world, after they’ve found ways to see it banally as a minimal change from the past.
Cultural futurists have complained that the future I describe in my upcoming book The Age of Em is too conservative in presuming the continuation of supply and demand, inequality, big organizations, status seeking, and so on. Don’t I know that tech will change everything, and soon? No, actually I don’t know that.
Added: To be clear, eventually fundamentals may well change. But the rate of such changes is low enough that in a medium term future most fundamental features probably haven’t changed yet.
I think people who worry that, "technology will change faster than society can adapt" have something like the following in mind:
There are always ways that people can defect from social good in ways that hurt others and benefit themselves. For instance, theft, identity theft, selling defective products, misleading consumers about science, even political attack ads that undermine beneficial ways of deciding on our leaders.
Society has evolved ways of curbing these harmful behaviors. Sometimes in a top down fashion (law enforcement) and sometimes in a bottom up fashion (community norms about gossip or sexual fidelity). People who worry that technology will change faster than society can adapt really mean that societal corrective forces can't keep up with the social changes technology brings about.
So yes, in one sense, tech like the atomic bomb trivially can't be brought into play faster than society can adapt. If generals and governments stick their heads in the sand and pretend nukes don't exist and refuse to use them nothing changes. But people can start using the atomic bomb without stopping to change the norms of warfare that applied before the development with disastrous consequences.
Given that society is not homogeneous, what prevents a segment of it from adapting more quickly than the general rate? The question would then be whether the segment in question is a large enough market by itself to continue development of the relevant technology.
This seems relevant because the influence of technology on my life isn't chosen chiefly by me, but rather by a series of specialized groups. My life is chiefly the consequences of their decisions.