A Response to A Weak Article on Futurism

My mom shared an article on Medium on which I had thoughts. I attempted to post it, but since Medium restricts new accounts from commenting I decided to post it here so I could at least share it with my mom.

The article was "How Tech Will Transform The World in 10 Years", and in it Katie Couric interviewed two futurists whose predictions I found lacking.

"Diamandis’ and Kotler’s answers are using generalities to mask what is legitimately a worryingly dark reality. A fear of the future is not limited to the people who don’t understand it.

Firstly, the current, accelerating climate crisis is going to loom over the 21st century with the same footprint that WWII cast over the 20th. So any speculation on how we’ll live in the future that isn’t built around the centrality of climate change seems suspect.

Secondly, the authors appear oblivious to either the existence or the consequence of the gap between our technological and social development. A healthy society experiments as much with upgrades to the mechanics of distributing prosperity as it does with physics and biology, because the means by which we share our technological breakthroughs are as essential to their fulfillment as the actual act of discovery. However a lack of social progress over the last century has produced a global inequality of wealth and opportunity that is already preventing the majority of the species population from receiving most existing health and leisure technologies.

We currently appear far along a road to what Peter Frase calls “Rentism”: a post-scarcity society that simulates scarcity to maintain the highest possible living standard for a minority. I think the authors’ personal experiences have left them out of touch with the trajectory of the species, and they’ve confused mayday calls all around them for Ludditism."