Sunday, October 28, 2007

Future frameworks

When thinking about the future, it is important to consider how technology may change and also how social, political, legal, regulatory and economic regimes may evolve or at least not be static in future periods. For example,

Security
Analysis of the future of security, warfare, freedom, surveillance and privacy generally occurs under the biased assumption that today’s security regime will persist. The current paradigm is that existing controls, rules, regulations and laws are generally accepted, but will always have loopholes, hacks and breaches. In fact, security in the future may include scenarios of both weaker and stronger control regimes.

Economics
The current and recent historical economic regime also may not be the only possible future. The current model is some form of capitalism, that resource allocation is uneven per initial standing and ability level; those who start with more resources most often end with more too. If market forces become thousands of times more powerful than today's monopolies, what incentives will be appropriate to employ to create market persistence and effective resource allocation? What about a resource that is essentially free but very powerful (say upload processing power). The future may have a variety of capitalist and socialist market mechanisms.

Social
Marriage is already an outdated religious and political tool which will likely see further scrutiny and reform in the future with immortality and the antiquation of traditional human reproduction. The heterosexual monogamous pair-bond is likely to be enhanced with a variety of other alternatives including multi-person families, polyamory and at minimum short-term customized social contracts. The households of the future are likely to be diverse collections of social groupings

Conclusion
In the future, all manner of current and historical social, political, economic, regulatory, legal, etc. regimes should be considered as continua of greater or lesser rigidity which are likely to be co-existing simultaneously.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, Im from Melbourne Australia.

Please check out this profoundly different understanding of where the world is really at right now, and what, if anything, we can do about it.

1. www.ispeace723.org/realityhumanity2.html

2. www.coteda.com

LaBlogga said...

Hi John, thanks for this comment and the links. I certainly agree that greater global cooperation on key issues is necessary. In this blogpost, I am further pointing out the fallacy of analyzing the future through current paradigms.