Positive Liberty

Check out this idea:

Position cameras above all major American cities and shoot one frame — a 24th of a second of film — each day at noon. The frames would be strung together gradually to create a continuous chronicle of each city’s development.

If a camera ran for one thousand years, the result would be a four-hour epic.

I’m curious, though: Given how human tastes and interests have changed so much in the last one thousand years, isn’t it assuming an awful lot to think that people in the future will want to see a movie like this?

Of course, historians would find a film of London or Paris for the past thousand years absolutely fascinating. We’d probably study everything, frame by frame, especially the years with big events that might have left video evidence: 1348, 1666, 1789, 1870, the entire 1940s… It would be the holy grail for today’s historian–but the questions, issues, and methods of history might easily change in the future.

A historian in the year 1004 would not have cared a bit about most of the things that perplex us now; he would have been preoccupied with questions that we similarly find trivial today. What will the future want to know about us, anyway? It’s a question I can’t even guess at, despite all my historical training.

The past is but one of my obsessions; the future is the other. One of my favorite books has always been a book of predictions–published in 1981 (David Wallechinsky et al, The Book of Predictions, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981). It solicited predictions from just about everyone–experts in all walks of life, futurists, science fiction writers, even psychics. As I get older, the collection takes on the feel of a time capsule, showing me more and more just how completely foreign the future really is.

Finding goofy predictions is largely a matter of opening the book at random:

By 1985:
–Noncarcinogenic cigarette.
–Japan will send interplanetary probes toward Venus.

By 1993:
–The U.S. will have ceased to be a great power and will be struggling to hold itself together as a viable nation. The Soviet Union (snicker) will be approaching hegemony over most of the world.

By 1994:
–Mass-manufactured implantable miniaturized artificial kidneys.

By 1997:
–The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. engage in an unpublicized robotic war in space as both sides try to establish networks of laser-armed satellites to serve as ABM weapons.

–By 2000:
First hospital on the moon.

Nuts, all of it.

But one individual stands out from the crowd. Not only were his predictions generally correct so far, but they have been so correct that they seem almost trivial. Futurist F. M. Esfandiary predicted that between 1982 and 1992 we would see the following changes:

–accelerated breakdown of industrial-age systems. Rapid shift to… teleducation, electronic mail, telebanking and electronic funds transfer, teleshopping, teleconferencing, automated and robotic manufacture, telemedicine, teleconomics, decision making via rapid referendums and direct initiatives, electronic communities, etc.

–Continued breakdown of kinship, family, marriage and exclusivity. Rapid spread of new life-styles (sic): singlehood, nonexclusive couplings and triads, nonparenthood and shared parenthood, mobilias (fluid group arrangements), and global networks of friendships.

–Continued shift from nationalism to transnationals, common markets, subcontinental blocs, continentalism, international infrastructures, world economy, global mobility, and global consciousness.

–Continued decline in the relative powers of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Accelerated spread of wealth, power, and information across the planet.

–Continued slowdown of world population growth.

–Extensive mapping of the human brain.

–Extensive mapping of genes. More and more diseases and disabilities treated through genetics.

–Self-control of pain and moods and continuous telemonitoring of vital body functions via implanted electrodes.

Not impressed? Esfandiary suggests that by 2010, “Most of the above predictions will be considered absurdly modest.” Indeed–but just try imagining all these things in 1980!

When you compare his material to all the throwaway predictions about domed cities and a cure for cancer, Esfandiary seems like a genius. Granted, he also predicted that by now we’d have jetpacks and indefinite life expectancies, but hey, no one’s perfect. Apparently he was also a bit of a nutcase; this article says that he changed his name to FM-2030.

But nothing detracts from the fact that he got so many things so completely right. As of today, I’ve added FM-2030 to my reading list; I want a sneak peek at that 1000-year movie.

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