My book is getting some encouraging feedback so I’ll be posting bits as often as I can. My publisher has also agreed to let me send out the whole of chapter one as a pdf on Sept 3 so watch this space if you want more. Here’s the latest little snacklet..

Another more immediate example of the shape of things to come will be our relationship with objects. In the past objects were neutral. They were not intelligent and did not possess a state of mind. If they had a personally this was given to them by their designers and was entirely skin deep. Otherwise we imbued personality into objects through the application of our own imagination. This will not be the case in the future. Take children’s dolls for instance. Historically these were inert, rather poor representations of the human form. They are already becoming more realistic and more intelligent. Owners of the ‘Amazing Amanda’ can already chat with their doll and ‘intelligence’ is available in the form of facial recognition, speech recognition and RFID impregnated accessories. If you’re a bit older (and presumably no wiser) you can even buy a physically realistic, life-sized ‘love partner’ for US $7,000 from a company called realdoll.com if you’re that way inclined. But you ‘aint seen nothing yet.

Sorry everyone, I’ve been up in the mountains without email. So back to the book. Here’s another sneak peak…

But back to anxiety. What will people be running away from in the future? What will we be afraid of in the year 2050?  The answer is that people will be running away from reality.  People will be disorientated and uncomfortable due to the level and speed of change so they will seek refuge in other places (holidays, books, games, films etc).  The entertainment industry will therefore become the biggest game in town. Add to this the natural human inclination to see what’s next and you have a society that will refuse to tackle current issues like debt, education, healthcare and transport, whilst simultaneously worrying about things that happened in the past or might happen in the future (e.g. asteroid strikes).
We will be afraid of not knowing. We will be afraid of things that are outside our control. We will be afraid of uncertainty. Most of all perhaps we will be afraid of ‘them’ – people that come from somewhere else and I don’t mean the planet Mars. These fears will drive the accumulation of information. We will crave ‘scientific’ data on the statistical probability of everything whilst simultaneously seeking out the personal stories of people, products and organisations as some kind of faux reassurance.

People seem to like this so I’ll keep it coming…comments very welcome.

In Japan there is a social phenomenon called ‘Hikikomori’. The phrase roughly translates as ‘withdrawal’ and refers to boys who retreat into their bedrooms and rarely, if ever, come out. In one case a young man in his early twenties shut his bedroom door and played video games, watched television and slept for fourteen years. Food was supplied by his mother who lived downstairs, virtually alone. The phenomenon is a particularly Japanese condition although nobody can quite understand who or what is to blame. According to experts there are somewhere between one hundred thousand and one million Hikikomori in Japan, caused by everything from absent (always-working) fathers to over protective mothers.

There are a number of simple explanations for problems like these and most are wrong.Some people blame individualism; others point the figure at urbanisation, technology, education or even government. The reality is it’s all of these but ultimately we have nobody to blame but ourselves. We, and only we, have let this happen. And if it’s like this now what will it be like in another fifty years?

Another snippet from my forthcoming book…

The British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once observed that his biggest problem was “events”. Predicting anything is a recipe for failure and frustration but politics is almost impossible due to such events. Indeed, the only thing that you can say with any degree of certainly about politics is that if you take a long enough timeframe almost anything is possible. Predictions about the end of history now seem as ridiculous as Thomas Jefferson saying that “History, by apprising (people) of the past, will enable them to judge the future: it will avail them of experience of other times and nations”. But if this were true then why did United Nations officials decide to cover up a copy of Picasso’s Guernica, which hung outside the entrance to the UN Security Council, on the very day that Colin Powell addressed the UN about the case for war in Iraq? We are, it seems, destined to repeat past mistakes.

Did you know that I’m writing a book? It’s called Future Files and it’s out on September 3rd. If you can’t wait – or can’t get hold of it – I’ll be dripping a few bits and bobs into my blog from time to time. Here’s a few of the opening lines…

Early in 2006 a middle-aged woman called Joyce Vincent was discovered in her flat in London. She was dead. Nothing remarkable about that, except for the fact that she had been dead for more than two years and her television was still on. How could this happen? Where was everyone? The answer, of course, was that everyone was somewhere else. London, like most major cities, no longer has neighbourhoods; it has collections of individuals leading increasingly isolated, selfish and narcissistic lives. Neighbours keep to themselves and people don’t ask questions or volunteer information. In an age where everyone is increasingly connected to everyone else through the Internet nobody really knows anyone anymore.We have lots of friends but few of them dig deep to understand our hopes and fears. The general feeling is that you’ll live longer if you keep yourself to yourself.