What do we want from the Future?

Scientists are notoriously good at solving problems, but ironically bad at deciding which problems to solve in the first place. In history, there was often a social or natural gradient that guided the actions of scientists: polio was crippling hundreds of thousands of people per year, train tracks needed to be laid over mountains, Japan wasn’t going to surrender unless… Without external pressure, scientists aren’t going to spontaneously come up with anything we can use – they’re perfectly happy working out the details of quaternions or something. We need to give them the right problems to solve – the onus is on everyone, not just the people wearing pocket protectors.

This is relevant today because we’ve given scientists a particularly difficult problem in addressing our energy and transportation situation. We’ve really invested a lot of ourselves in the expectation of a solution to this problem, which we've defined as a problem of a purely technological nature - one that can be solved with the right combination of engineering and happy thoughts. We’ve built our homes 40 miles away from the city center in anticipation of hyper-efficient cars, boarded up our traditional main streets in favor of multilevel entertainment mega-plexes and sixteen lane interchanges between Chili’s and Applebee’s, we’ve put satellites into outer space to broadcast our coordinates to our vehicles instead of owning maps.

The scientists might pull it off; they might meet our techno-demands for The American Way of Life of the Future. When this happens - when we get our hydrogen-burning SUV’s and solar-powered mechanized parking garages, will we be satisfied? Will the 100% green-construction Target be the retail outlet of our dreams? Will we be happy to leave the comfort of our home-theatre-systems each morning, jettison the kids from the laser-guided-car at the organic daycare, then begin the 45-minute commute to the office inside the reclaimed-railway-beltline for our 9-5 jobs at Sustainable Consumer Associates?

We can ask for an alternative future. Suburbia is not a suicide pact. The fervor over our green-techno-fantasies will reach a climax and hopefully we’ll see that we were asking the wrong questions, and demanding answers of the wrong people. We’ll have to step back from the technical issue of powering our cars and gadgets and see that the real issue is much bigger and less clearly-defined. We need to redefine our transportation problems as social-organization problems, and pose them in a way such that their solutions can be dignifying and uplifting for human beings (like walkable cities of the past), instead of alienating and isolating (like the sidewalk around shapeless berm between the parking lots outside Best Buy and Bed Bath and Beyond).

If we expect and demand that technologies fulfill our dreams, we may get what we ask for – but can this satisfy us? Are such vacuous and petty dreams even worth dreaming? Is the uber-future-car problem one that we really want to solve? Some scientists and other geeks are willing to start on another path, let us know when you’re ready.