From a recent interview with author William Gibson:
The trouble is there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can’t convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years. I think we’ve been in a very long, century-long period of increasingly exponential technologically-driven change.
We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it’s going literallyexponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of
that – we have no idea at all now where we are going.
Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilisation collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do someVerner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of
everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That’s a possibility too.
You can see it in corporate futurism as easily as you can see it in science fiction. In corporate futurism they are really winging it – it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be
bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.
^
Gibson’s been through the cycle of trying to predict the future a few times. He probably winces everytime he thinks about the “three megabytes of RAM in that Hosaka” from Neuromancer, a book which admittedly shows its age in a time when 3MB is what a watch carries. With his newest, Spook Country, hitting bookshelves this week and sounding very much like Pynchon and Burroughs hybridized in the laboratory of Philip K. Dick, it will be interesting to see what conjectures he makes.
“I don’t write books to express any political philosophy I might have. Partly, I write them to discover what I do think about things. … I don’t want people to believe what I believe, but I love it if I’m encouraging people to ask questions and find their own answers.” ^
Someday, all of these William Gibson interview links will be added.
[...] read thoughts, in other words, but it can read activity in certain areas of the brain. In William Gibson’s futuristic cyberpunk epic Neuromancer, hackers navigate with a headset for visualization but steer [...]
[...] William Gibson: I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my [...]