 The
last 1000 years, the next 1000 years
Futurist Sohail
Inayatullah takes us on a road trip of the grand trends:
new physics, cultural creatives, action at a distance theory, microvita,
new cosmologies, genomics, artificial intelligence, space travel,
postmoderism, types of power, and decline in civilisations. What
does it all means for us and how will we create our own future?
Inayatullah stated that the normal view of the future includes
a lot of genetics, a lot of nanotechnology, a lot of space explorations
and we'll go onwards and onwards into stars, we'll have lots of
technology and in the year 3000 we'll be partly immortal and we'll
have babies in hospitals and we won't know what it means to be human.
Three things are crucial
He explained that most of futures studies is about forecasting
and people want to know about that future. Are there patterns of
reality? Are there deeper structural patterns of history? With four
of five or those patterns, the future can be projected. The future
is knowable because there are traces. One way to think about the
next and last thousand years is not in terms of what will change
but what doesn't change. Perhaps you can think about 'what you don't
know that you don't know'.
In thinking about the future, Inayatullah proposed that three
things are crucial.
File: inayatullah_1.mp3 Duration: 10:34 Size: 892K
The rise of Europe was not destined. Inayatullah explained that
there are two sides to the Western ego: the colonial, patriarchal,
racist side and the softer, spiritual side. The latter is the underside
of the Western ego, or the alter ego and was made into the 'other':
the feminine, native, opposite. According to Inayatullah, this alter
ego is about to flip and this raises the question of who will play
the role of the male, strategic or rational ego.
In a workshop with Muslim scholars, they were asked about their
aspirations and what was their vision of the future. The resulting
vision included: an alternative to world capitalism using co-operative
economics; self-reliant ecological electronically linked communities;
world governance; and gender participation in all areas. By contrast,
scientists tend to reject these kinds of discourses and Inayatullah
described a future visioning workshop with a group of scientists
in Seattle geared towards talking about the next 1000 years. While
there was no agreement among that group, some of the points of tension
(questions) which may end up marking the next 100 years are crucial.
These include: random or ethical evolution; singularity or complexity;
intensive or extensive evolution.
A map of the next 1000 years
Inayatullah asks "is there once science or many sciences?"
and introduces different theoretical ways of looking at the world
and uses those to map the next 1000 years.
File: inayatullah_2.mp3 Duration: 19:55 Size: 1.6MB
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