Profiles of the Future [antikvár]

Introduction It is impossible to predict the future, and all attempts to do so in any detail appear ludicrous within a very few years. This book has a more realistic yet at the same time more ambitious aim. It does not try to describe the future, but to define the boundaries within which possible futures must lie. If we regard the ages which stretch ahead of us as an unmapped and unexplored country, what I am attempting to do is to survey its frontiers and to get some idea of its extent. The detailed geography of the interior must remain unknown—until we reach it. With a few exceptions, notably Chapter 8, I am limiting myself to a single aspect of the future—its technology, not the society that will be based upon it. This is not such a limitation as it may seem, for science will dominate the future even more than it dominates the present. Moreover, it is only in this field that prediction is at aU possible; there are some general laws governing scientific extrapolation, as there are not {pace Marx) in the case of politics or economics. I also believe—and hope—that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the XI