(no subject)

[guppiecat]

I have been pondering the nature of accelerating change. I am wondering if, as change accelerates an unintended side effect is that our ability to plan for the future decreases. So, I am wondering as to how far out you all think that the "foreseeable future" may be.

[Poll #1157152]

Comments

[beki.livejournal.com]

I think a lot depends on the future of what. For a specific product at work, the forseeable future might be 6 months. The forseeable future of the world is a few million years.

It's all relative. Remember when you were a little kid and an hour seemed like forever? I think a lot of it is a point of view thing, and what particular future we are relating it to.

[pauamma]

A few billion, actually, but yeah.

[guppiecat]

I think that this point of view thing is different.

When you're five, one month represents 1/60th of your life. When you're fifty, it represents 1/600th. I think that that is why we have a sense that time speeds up as we age... the individual units with which we measure time grow shorter when compared to our increasing experience.

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

It depends on context. Foreseeable future for my business, PROmote Communications? Somewhere between five months and five years. Maybe a bit longer, but certainly not 50. Foreseeable future for various national governments around the globe? Somewhere between 50 and 500 years, depending on the specific nation involved. For the cosmos? We're moving up into the thousands and hundreds of thousands there. Increased knowledge and understanding stretches the horizon in some fields, and I suspect it shortens it in others.

With the increased rate of change, our planning processes need to expect change. It needs flexibility to take good advantage of the changes that surprise us as well as those we anticipate.

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Okay, okay, millions and billions on the cosmos. :-)

[guppiecat]

I have a really hard believing that the majority of the governments will still exist in a recognizable form for 500 years. In fact, I suspect that by that time, we will have stopped dividing the world up into geographically-based factions.

I think that we'll still have factions, but due to transportation and communication changes, they will be more ideologically-based.

[kalikanzara.livejournal.com]

Context dependent - argument with an SO of 3 months about "foreseeable future" might mean, oh, a few weeks. At my job, foreseeable future is until the end of the big project plan in October.

4pm on a chase day, foreseeable future is about 2 hours. Under the supercell at 6:30, foreseeable future is about 2 minutes.

[meglimir.livejournal.com]

Three weeks.

For over two years now, I've been living with the reality that on a specific day, that is at any moment between "tomorrow" and "three weeks from today", I'll have to change the entire focus of my daily life.

This is vastly accelerated from when I first entered the workforce (expecting to move up the ranks at *a* company for 40 years and retire on pension) through the realities of high-tech business survival (average tenure: 2 years) through personal tech (How did we manage with land lines instead of cell phones/IRC/LJ, without online banking, Excel, and a paper shredder at home, when dinner and a movie was much farther away, both physically and philosophically, than the monitor in the corner?)

Oddly enough, my "forseeable future" kept getting shorter until it was a matter of months. Expectation of constancy of something under a year yet longer than the current three-week-or-less cycle seemed to be my "tipping point" - my "forseeable future" expanded again to as indefinite or infinite as it ever was and as immediate as in my late teens and early 20s (late 1970s - early '80s). I practice risk management without paranoia. I pursue certifications and learn new skills as they come into vogue, knowing "it can't hurt" no matter how volatile the market may be for those capabilities. I practice mindfulness. I gather the rosebuds while I may.

[guppiecat]

This is fascinating and almost Zen-like in how you approach the trials and tribbles of every-day life.

You have given me a lot of think about. Thank you.

[glinda-w.livejournal.com]

As others have said, which future? If technology - which tech? (oddly enough, a friend and I were talking about that last evening, about how if automobile tech had changed as radically as electronics and computers, we'd all have flying/submersible cars, that got a minimum of 200mpg.)

Personal stuff: who knows? I can't expect much change for the better - I'm on social security disability, and my copays for medications keep increasing much more than the SSDI cost-of-living increases, so I expect to keep getting further and further behind. (Thank ghods for the local food bank...)

Governments: depends on which one, and unpredictable human stupidity comes into play there as well.

Climate changes: much faster than we're expecting, I think it's gotten to a point where we can't fix it, we'll just have to ride it out. That will be costly, both nationally and individually.

Societal: Ditto. More homeless, more hopeless, more super-rich in their gated, guarded enclaves. Dystopia rather than utopia.

The universe: A long, long, time, and it doesn't give a damn about any of the above.

--g, lured here by meglimir's post, and probably a bit more pessimistic than usual, the daily migraine level is at 8. *grrrr*

[meglimir.livejournal.com]

Interesting you should mention automobiles. Driving home today, listening to the gas-price news, I suddenly wondered *why* the performance-per-dollar of transportation hasn't improved at the same pace as interpersonal communication, finance management, and entertainment. It's only over the past few months the performance-per-dollar has even *changed* at a similar rate.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you're sort of sidling towards talking about the Vinge singularity here. I don't think there's any doubt that our ability to plan for the future decreases as change accelerates.

The trouble is, "foreseeable future" is context-dependent. There are things we can predict very, very far ahead (for instance, the Sun will drop off the main sequence in about five billion years, becoming a red giant, and engulf the planet unless we've figured out a way by then to move it further out). But in terms of social and technological change, I'd say we're maybe somewhere between five and fifty years out ... if we were LOOKING. Unfortunately, most of American business never looks further ahead than the next quarter's balance-sheet numbers, and the government seldom looks further ahead than the next election cycle unless it's one major party trying to figure out how far into the future they can manage to screw the other one.

[guppiecat]

I don't really buy the "singularity", either Vinge's or Kurzweil's. It seems based on the idea that technological change is asymptotic (they say exponential, but they act like they mean asymptotic). I admit that it is increasingly accelerating, but I do not believe that it is unidirectional or immune from backslide.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

For me personally it is between 1-5 years. After that, who knows.
Everyone else has told what they think about other vantage points.

[meglimir.livejournal.com]

I think "personally" is the only context or vantage point in which the question makes any practical or pragmatic sense. Anything else is an academic exercise or speculative fiction.

[nanassi.livejournal.com]

Yeah academic exercises! Seriously, I think there's value to being reminded of how very far we can predict some things, like the life cycle of the sun.

[guppiecat]

Ah, but if you are a person and your "foreseeable future" is 5 years, and you're being told to invest for retirement in the "30 year, don't touch anything" style, the more global scale will impact your personal one.

[tesla-aldrich.livejournal.com]

Yes, what they said: context. I use the phrase regularly, and in most of my daily-use contexts, I mean somewhere between five weeks and five years. However, every time I use the phrase I laugh silently at myself because it's such an oxymoron.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Quarter turn of the galaxy and none of this matters.

B

[sraun]

As a most everyone else said - it depends. At work - a few weeks to six months. For my personal life - 5-25 years. Other stuff is shorter or longer.

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

What are you trying to forsee, and how much detail are you trying to put into it.

I can say the economy will turn around in the next five years, and probably be right. Don't ask me where the turnaround will start, or how long it will take, though. In those cases, five months is a better range.

Will electronics get smaller in the next five years? Sure! But, user interfaces won't, so who cares?

The earth will still be here in five million years. Humanity? Who knows?

And, again, I think of "The Green Marauder"...

[guppiecat]

I don't get the "Green Marauder" reference.

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

Larry Niven short story, set in the Draco Tavern.

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

I can imagine <Son> retiring from the workforce at some point in his late sixties; that's about as far out as my mind can go with any reasonable confidence. That's 50+ years away; thus my answer.

[nanassi.livejournal.com]

If you don't mind my asking, what inspired this question?

You've gotten some thoughtful / insightful responses, but I don't know if we're talking to what you were thinking about.

[guppiecat]

Answered (at excruciating length) in a new post.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"How far away is the foreseeable future?"

Depends on domain. Astronomical future is forseeable much further than the future of our species than the future of my current job.

B