Futurists
Need to Return to Politics
Sam Ghandchi
The early modern
futurists, such as Ossip K. Flechtheim and Bertrand De Jouvenel who in the years
after World War II advocated going beyond capitalism and socialism to solve the
fundamental issues facing human society, were very politically oriented (1).
Later futurists
essentially left the arena of politics and focused on economic and social
issues. The main reason they avoided politics was that in the view of futurists
their efforts were not aimed at
achieving any specific society, be it capitalist or
socialist. For example when Daniel Bell spoke of Post-Industrial Society, it was
mostly defined as something that was not industrial society, whether in its
capitalist or socialist forms. Thus although his theory was a challenge to
socialism and even played a significant role in challenging the Soviet Union, it
was not predicting any new society. In the following years as post-industrial
society became synonymous with information society, it still was about things
like codified knowledge in products that were being developed in the new economy
sector rather
than a schematic of a new society.
Both Alvin Toffler
and John Naisbitt, who followed Daniel Bell's theory in their respective works
in futurist thought, essentially viewed the computer revolution and later the
genetic revolution as major events showing a path beyond industrial society in
the distant future. Thus, unlike the liberals and socialists of industrial
society who saw the prospects of the new capitalist and socialist societies in
their horizon and worked in politics to further define them and welcome their
arrival, for the modern futurists there was no such prospect in their horizon
and they basically kept distance from politics. At best, some futurists acted
like Alvin Toffler, who supported the American Republican neoconservative
politician, Newt Gingrich.
During the turn of
the 21st Century, Ray Kurzweil proposed his Singularity theory. He showed that
we will approach a technological singularity in human history by 2045 when human
and artificial intelligence will essentially merge. He also defined the law of
accelerating returns, which shows faster returns as we approach the point of
singularity. In other words, just like Moore's Law in computers where one
expects the performance of the CPU to double every 18 months and
the price to be
halved, we can witness the same trend in all technological, economic and social
trends. Therefore, working with the goal of Singularity in mind means that one
should form economic entities that can embody such a mechanism at the core of
their processes and just like CPU makers not only not to break up because of
accelerating returns but to be built around it.
Having this goal of
singularity in mind, today's futurists need to get involved in politics and make
their own political party to plan a political and social system that can handle
the issues such as chronic unemployment which follows
the current trends in economy. In
other words, the whole model of industrial society where income was based on
work may no longer be a viable business model for the whole society because only
a small fraction of the lost jobs are created and the ones who lose those jobs
can never fill the new jobs that are tens of times more sophisticated. The issue
of singularity is not just a simple technical issue and such disruptive changes
cannot be addressed without a political party, and the existing parties with
their platforms of the industrial society do not
have the goal of singularity in mind.
It has been
discussed that we need to start building the singularity economy from now (2).
And that means to incorporate accelerated returns in the very production
processes of the new companies. Otherwise, the companies will be obsolete before
they can even ship their first products. The goal of a new futurist party will
be building the economy and society for the singularity as we approach it and
not just to observe the different technologies making that journey,
as partially incorporated in early drafts for a proposed futurist party platform (3). At
the end of the day, the issue of singularity is an economic and political issue
and not just a technical matter. To see it as just a technical matter will make
us unprepared for such an epochal change.
Sam Ghandchi,
Editor/Publisher
IRANSCOPE
February 25,
2013
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