This time of year, I begin to think about the future. I’m not sure why, I can barely deal with today, but its probably due to the New Year. We seem obsessed with what is going to happen. I guess that’s so we can plan and make decisions based on guesses on what will be around the next corner. No one wants to be stuck with a garage full of buggy whips just as Henry Ford is firing up his assembly line.
But I think one must look at all the prognosticators with a jaundiced eye. The changes we are experiencing isn’t a straight line of progression from A to B to C. There is no roadmap that we can follow that will get us to success. Every time we turn a corner something explodes in our way and changes everything.
Richard Fernandez writing over at the Belmont Club notes the following:
The future, far from being a stately progression of Five-Year Plans presided over by elites, has turned out to be a flood of destabilizing development, technology and discovery. Current institutions can’t control the future; they can barely cope with it. The voters realized this before the elites did. We will have our hands full just answering the question: “what did we just learn?” “We live in a world whose unfoldings we often cannot prevision, prestate, or predict— a world of explosive creativity on all sides.”
“Explosive Creativity.” Now there’s a term that deserves dissecting. Technology is coming at us from every direction but how we use it, or how it is presented is to me the thing to consider.
The future will be determined not by some fancy new gizmo or hand held this or that. It will be determined by the creative minds that take that gizmo and mold it to fit the needs of a consuming public. It has almost become a time where we first imagine what we want to do, then look around at all the tech that is available and pick one from column A and one from Column B, blend them and voila, we have what we want.
Its that creativity, not the behind the scenes tech, that will make the difference in both the near and long term.
Perhaps we need to spend a bit less time concerning ourselves with fancy new technology and more with just what we are trying to accomplish with it.
I’m considering taking two paths at the same time. One moving ever forward with those modest successes we have had, and the other taking a look at that techno world that surrounds us and seeing just what bits and bobs we can use to create something new a different.
Maybe somewhere out there those two will converge. Who knows?
JVH
