Jul 09
31
So You Think That You Can See The Future
How many times have you sat in a room with someone who tells you (when referring to some new product or invention that you start oohing or aahing about) I thought of that ten years ago….?
Yes there are people who have remarkable vision and prescience about ideas, products, and technologies.
Some of them like Gerald Celente, or the Trends Institute, spend a lot of time analysing the economic and political environment in order to be able to create predictions of what will happen next. And by the way, what Celente has to say is not something that everyone should be happy with, so if you respect track records you might want to look at his predictions and then act.
Some people foretell what technology can and will provide us with.
Check out this list of predictions of technologies in the metaverse roadmap that will be around us soon – many in the next 7 years.
Here is one: The Valuecosm…
models of physical space, will allow the emergence
of the Valuecosm, an environment where powerful
economic, environmental, and political actors
will regularly check with the public values
maps of a geographic or virtual community
before taking any major action (new store,
new laws, etc.) within it.”
What is remarkable about this list is that it was in the mid-nineties that Neal Stevenson coined the phrase “metaverse” in his incredible book, Snow Crash, along with predicting the rise of virtual worlds, search engines, and a whole lot of other stuff that frankly, it wouldn't do justice to for me to even try to describe.
The advent of a real metaverse rather than a fantasy one is phenomenal. But what about the social impact of virtual worlds. On the Science Show last week the entire programme was given over to looking at the addictive qualities of multiplayer games.
One of the things that I found fascinating was the fact that there has been so little research on the impact of games on people. Now researchers are starting to seriously look at how games cause adrenaline and dopamine levels to change in the human mind, how brain plasticity is impacted by game play, and a host of other things.
We are moving into uncharted territory. You have heard that phrase being applied to the economy. But the reality is that we are entering uncharted territory in almost every aspect of modern life. What is happening is that we have entered a new age in which we are no longer purely humanoid. We are now hybrid human/electric beings. We are becoming networked to one another.
Is it possible that we will move beyond being carbon based life systems too? At what point will there be enough power in a semiconductor and enough cheap storage available that we can transfer every aspect of the human psyche onto silicon? And how ironic will it be that in doing so we will probably utilize graphene as the conducting material (a carbon nanostructure) rather than metals. So the current will be transmitted via carbon and that will be our continuing association with the substance….
So change is with us. The only people resisting it are the governments and the corporations and the financial institutions of the day. They don't want change. They want the status quo. Under the status quo they can hoover up all the loose change that is sitting around while we are watching TV and playing games.
We all need to pay attention to what is going to happen next. There will be spin. But knowing what is next will be power.