Tomorrow's World
David Clements | 13 December 2003
‘One year ago, Tomorrow’s World was cancelled,’ announced Austin Williams, convenor of the one-day conference Future Vision: Future Cities and chair of the final plenary ‘Tomorrow’s World: Visions of the Future ‘. Indeed, as the knowing laughs from the audience suggested, even though the reference was to the former BBC flagship of TV Science, the implications are wider than that. As one-day conference on attitudes to risk, urban life and the future, came to a close, delegates were left to ponder where we go from here.
Martin Wright, editor in chief, Green Futures, envisioned, well, a green future. The ‘polluting, messy, noisy’ carbon-fuelled age will be replaced by the quiet and clean hydrogen-fuelled technologies, he predicted. Wright described a future characterised by greater ‘connectivity’, not just in information flows, but also with the movement of populations and the transmission of diseases. Such a globalised future would mean a greater dependence on the reserves held by politically unstable states. Thus was his vision of the future undermined by a fear of increasing threats to world peace. His demands for clean technology were as much driven by his belief that terrorists would be put of attacking a benign power source, as they were for the future of the planet.
Kevin McCullagh, director of Foresight, Seymour Powell, described Wright’s depictions of a sustainable future as a ‘barrier to innovation’. Despite this, environmentalist projections have come to the fore as the West has lost its vision of the future. It is telling, he said, that we still refer to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the experimental spirit of the Sixties to conjure up a more optimistic take on what could be.
Science writer and former senior manager at the SETI Institute, Greg Klerkx was far more optimistic describing the period from the launch of sputnik (1958) to the Challenger disaster (1986) as the ‘first space age’. Perhaps routine space flights are still a fiction, but satellite communications are with us; extra-terrestrial mining may be a way off, but we can effectively track the use of earthly resources.
Jeremy Newton, chief executive, National Endowment for Science and Technology in the Arts (NESTA), on the other hand, argued that transport policy has been taken over by the heritage industry. Indeed the only transport innovation we allow ourselves is a ‘machine for reversing time’, the celebration of cutting edge 19th Century technology in the form of trams and bicycles! This presentation which challenged the accepted vision of transport was well received for its wit and whimsy. However, Williams questioned whether simply exposing the folly of a reactionary transport strategy really address the societal shift that now views cars as a problem, lauds pedestrian and decries mobility. ‘Saying that we are in favour of better modes of transport is of little impact if we are unable to challenge the climate of opinion that says that walking and cycling are more responsible means of mobility.’
For Claire Fox, director, Institute of Ideas, we have a problem not only with the future, but we are also ‘profoundly alienated from the past’. The perceived side-effects of our former self-indulgences are projected into a future where human intervention can only bring unpredictable, and more importantly, undesirable outcomes. Opposed to the futurology exhibited by some taking part in the conference, this state of affairs amounts to paralysis, a stifling ‘presentism’.
But for Fox, the adoption of a futuristic outlook would not in itself change things. We can’t design ourselves out of the problem. Innovators are as likely as their ‘eco-worrier’ contemporaries to internalise the gloomy thinking that characterises our times. Ironically, she said, for all their rhetoric about saving the planet, ‘future generations will be ill-served’ by such anti-human apologists.
Whatever your concern, be it the future of technology, of humanity, or of the planet, it is hard to deny that the ‘vision thing’ is conspicuous by its absence, except in vacuous assertions of the need for ‘Blue Sky thinking.’ FV: FC was an important opportunity to explore what is at stake not only for the urban-dwellers of tomorrow, but for those of us in the here and now.
