One thing has me puzzled: why we are consistently blindsided by the future. After all, the future consists mostly of an aggregation and accumulation of things present and around us. I can understand why we cant predict exactly what will happen when. The Bible said that God gave the gift of prophecy only to fools and children. What I cant understand is why we cant come up with set of possible things that might happen based on whats currently available to us, under the assumption that future will come from one or more of those possibilities. Once we came up with a set of future possibilities, we could choose the one wed prefer or at least avoid the ones we dont. Arthur C. Clarke, in his book, Profiles of the Future, talked about the two reasons we arent very good at this as our failure of imagination and our failure of nerve. Daniel Bell started a think tank of Futurologists, who are scientists and social scientists whose specialty is futurology, or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities about the future and how they can emerge from the present, whether that of human society in particular or of life on Earth in general (Wikipedia). Shimon Peres, our ex-president, said in front of Ayals graduation class at IDC that we should spend more time studying the future than we do studying the past.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 22:08:19 +0000
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