“The same sentiment is expressed a bit more clearly by Samuel Delany, in a remark filed under “Speculation”: “The healthiest way I know to use the future is to think about what sort of future you would like, then research the factors that would make such a future possible.””
“The thing is, you couldn’t use this book to do that. None of these segments are fleshed out enough or detailed enough to give you the tools to build a future. A few of them suggest approaches, but none of the passages are long enough to prove that they are viable. Here’s an example: In the section on “Population,” Ted Nelson says: “At some point the world population will drop precipitously. I say ‘precipitously’ because, as you can see, humans never do things rationally. We overbuild and overbuild until an earthquake smashes it all.” While that prediction might very well be an accurate one, it doesn’t exactly present what Delany would call a “viable approach” to changing the world.”
““The more productive we become, materially, and the more machines we invent, the more it seems like the kinds of work nobody wants to do should be banished from our lives,” Gourevitch writes, in a snippet filed under “Automation.” But his passage follows one from Silvia Federici, which insists that:
We should be suspicious of all technologies introduced into the workplace. Furthermore, the work of caretakers, which is undervalued and done disproportionately by women, cannot be mechanized. This work is precisely the terrain where the limits of technology become apparent, where the fallacy of the utopian dream of automation freeing us from labor is exposed.”
“Perhaps the best justification of this book occurs within it, in a passage in the “Speculation” section, by the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson. “The future is always receding,” Robinson writes, “it is an idea around which we orient our actions. The future is a subject for cognitive mapping, which might enable us to figure out what to do right now.””
“And we can definitely do better. Right now, tech millionaires are throwing their money at the prospect of immortality: something that only appeals to people with immense power, with bank accounts gathering compound interest.”