The Future is already here
Isaac Asimov
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Jul 1, 2021
The title comes from a quote by American speculative fiction author William Gibson. In its original context, it alludes primarily to the fact that the things that will constitute the normal or every day within the lives of those living in the future already exist for some today.
It's Hard.
It is hard to clearly identify which elements of the present will become more widespread in the future. Throughout the 20th century, social transitions in the West often involved the trappings of wealth becoming more accessible to wider sections of society, such as automobility, better-quality housing, high-quality healthcare, and consumer technology. Many contemporary future scenarios present the future as a utopia of wealth and health furnished with a panoply of high-tech gadgets and permitted by continued economic growth. However, it is also possible that the future, for some or all, will involve a gradual or rapid reduction in standard of living. Thus, the future might consist of the expansion of the current lifestyles of either the rich and powerful, or the poor and oppressed.
The future is always created on uneven foundations. In order to understand how we can create futures that do not exclude, isolate, or exploit, we have to understand how the future is written in the present. More specifically, we are interested in how minority elements are, in this moment, unequally distributed; how these inequalities are likely to be reproduced or altered in the future; and how these inequalities may actually determine the future or futures at which we arrive. Through exploring how existing differences create unequal futures, we can begin to understand how to look forward in a way that is beneficial to those who are often excluded from mainstream narratives of change.
By considering 3 key domains
By considering three key domains—the social, the spatial, and the temporal—this article will briefly describe some of the ways in which we may be able to see the future as being unequally distributed in the present. It will then consider what impact these distributional inequalities have with regard to those who may play a significant role in attempting to write the future. We close by offering some possible ways of dealing with inequality that involve technologies.