Ten Steps to the Future
Posted on December 18, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |
In the old days imagining the future was a regular routine for a few gurus called futurists such as Alvin Toffler who took in upon themselves to predict how our lives and society would unfold. The tools are there now for us to do it ourselves, or rather the tools are there to allow us to construct images of the future.
This is my informal proposal to IBM, Sun and Text 100 for the rational use of virtual worlds to imagine better worlds. As we near the year’s end here is how it looks.
1. The Tens’ Committee. Virtual worlds are used by the military to predict battle outcomes so why not use them to generate alternative views of how democratic politics might develop? The Tens’ Committee is a think tank set up in Second Life to envision a number of new processes that might replace the four or five year “bulk politics” of elections with simulated micro-democracies around pragmatic issues like resolving a health care crisis in an inner city or legalising class A drugs in a micro-community.
2. Redistributed Opportunity. A new society of aged citizens is set up to generate a range of possible incentives, rules and policies to promote rejuvenated careers and new economies for the over 50s and to develop new social concepts around the redistribution of opportunity and the creation of mixed reality careers.
3. Agrarian Cities. The agrarian city trials new food micro-economies for urban areas, contesting land-use assumptions of planners with land-use requirements for a healthy food supply and carbon reducing food policy. Suburban estates are hauled down to make way for low carbon food.
4. Hospitals Reconsidered. The Care Committee simulates new hospital accident and emergency arrangements where private consultants in all specialties are forced variously to give 50% of their private hours to A+E attendance or have GP gatekeepers removed from their consulting policies or join client consulting groups run by patients, ex-patients and interested parties who self-appoint to review medical theories of causation for cancer, diabetes, and other auto-immune diseases and to advise on experimental treatment protocols
5. The Product Commons. Industrial design becomes a contributory public scheme with new products granted patents or trade marks only if they have a social network component.
6. Radical Worlds. Child-designed. Many features of the physical environment are given over to children to envisage. Children growing up designing their own lego sets graduate to the design of new schools within specific constraints they nominate such as all materials must be from recycled goods available within fifty miles of the building ,and the idea is extended to city planning, and suburban redesign.
7. The Grand Tour. Walking travel is revived as air travel opportunity and long distance car travel become uneconomic and the theoretical task is to find ways to subsist/provide sustainable activities for the year that the formative trek takes.
8. Appropriate Laws. Formal laws become more flexible, allocated to distinct areas of a country where they might be needed, instead of being universal, moving from one law for them and one for us, to appropriate laws for appropriate people. Informal laws, those of human development, diverge as people hone their lives in conjunction with like minded people leading to the refinement of distinct specialist human traits
9. Boundary Breaking. International political issues are more easily resolved when they become a virtual reality game involving numerous simulated low intensity but continuous conflicts built around a disunited nationals island where terrorists and rogue leaders are engaged with the lure of financial rewards and property gains.
10. Immortality prescriptions. Work begins on an immortality zone where photographs, video footage, concepts, notebooks, drawings are stored so that offspring can resuscitate parents virtually and position them in more interesting and rewarding lives within social mores that the parents approve - sharing, giving society, jungle.
It is Christmas after all.
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Never happen. It’s like one day they will make a light beer that tastes good. That future never arrives.