Again, Star Trek (this vast PR machine for technology) provides the model of tech as an enhancement to the quality of life. That is certainly my attitude toward it, reared as I was on it’s philosophy. But, it’s also in line with 20C sci-fi speculation, and here Greg Bear is the best promoter of quality-of-life technology. His future is the one I hope and expect to live in. But, as I want to say, his fiction itself is a 20C vision, and the 20C was delusional.

Before 2050, we’ll speak no more of “‘isms” and academic critics will have discredited themselves. I think Bear’s anticipation of Thinkers is spot on – becoming safe, kind, controlled, and respected authorities, on subjects which will be too complex for humans to fully master. The authority-human is too subject to bias and the whims of our genetic nature. The idea that we’d sell our souls to machines and that they’ll take over the world is an example of the mental illness of the 20C, a projection of our negative tendencies, rather than a sensible viewpoint. It reflects the 20C’s affair with violence, rather than a reasonable expectation. The 21C will recognize people as people as fundamentally good, rather than the 20C’s view that people were essentially shit. That negative view is everywhere in the ‘isms and has produced so many dogmatically angry and disagreeable people, who want to perpetuate the 20C’s cycles of violence. While the ‘isms articulated the nastiness we’re capable of, giving us a language to understand what we need to avoid in ourselves, beyond that they aren’t helpful, and we can’t expect the rest of the century to consists of more refined and better articulated views of our bastardry. I would think that the future will instead build on ‘quality of life’ and focus it’s attention on articulating the good things about life, helping us become good people, as opposed to beating us over the head with our shames.

This is much more easier to say now that it would have been a month ago, even two weeks ago, which was Christmas Day, of ‘joy to the world’ propaganda. We’re living through this historic moment of global consciousness, we’re everyone is talking about the tsunami, and rebuilding, and giving, and the distribution of wealth. The interview on The Current this past week on charity was really great and added to my sense of embarrassment over my actions on Wednesday. People do care about others, politicians do need to wake up to the sense of community among human beings. I suddenly do have a sense that 2005 will be a remarkable, even revolutionary year. The revolution may come at some later point, but historians could look to this year as its beginning. Since researching chronologies again last month, I’ve been taken with the Mayan problem – the well known fact that their long-count chronology ends in December 2012. One of the interpretations I read was that it would signal a change in human consciousness, as I don’t believe in the end of the world. I’d hate to think that there’s an asteroid out there with a Winter Solstice due date in 7 years. I’d think they’d have found that sucker by now. Of course, perhaps that’s the date of a nuclear war, and another environmental catastrophe …. an earthquake that devastates Central America?

Whatever, I’d like to think that we will find ourselves living in a kinder world in seven years, precipitated by the momentum initiated the past two weeks. 2005 is already supposed to be devoted to the reduction of poverty, as the letter from Bill Gates and Bono published last weekend in The Globe and Mail attested. The tsunami disaster has redefined the world’s problems, as did 9/11. Bush and oil and Iraq has been trivialized by a certain degree, and the global community reacts, the stirring of world government and culture are here.