10 Futurist Phrases And Terms That Are Complete Bullshit

S

Last month we told you about 20 terms every self-respecting futurist should know, but now it's time to turn our attention to the opposite. Here are 10 pseudofuturist catchphrases and concepts that need to be eliminated from your vocabulary.

Top image: Screen grab from Elysium.

S

Some futurists toss this word around in a way that's not too far removed from its religious roots. The hope is that our technologies can help us experience our existence beyond normal or physical bounds. Now, it very well may be true that we'll eventually learn how to emulate brains in a computer, but it's an open question as to whether or not we'll be able to transfer consciousness itself. In other words, the future may not for us it'll be for our copies. So it's doubtful any biological being will ever literally experience the process of transcension (just the illusion of it).

What's more, life in a "transcendent" digitized realm, while full of incredible potential, will be no walk in the park; full release, or transcendence, is not likely an achievable goal. Emulated minds, or ems, will be prone to hacking, deletion, unauthorized copying, and subsistence wages. Indeed, a so-called uploaded mind may be free from its corporeal form, but it won't be free from economic and physical realities, including the safety and reliability of the supercomputer running the ems, and the costs involved in procuring sufficient processing power and storage space.

Vernor Vinge co-opted this term from cosmology as a way to describe a blind spot in our predictive thinking, or more specifically our inability to predict what will happen after the advent of greater-than-human machine intelligence. But since that time, the Technological Singularity has degenerated to a term void of any true meaning.

In addition to its quasi-religious connotations, it has become a veritable Rorschach Test for futurists. The Singularity has been used to describe accelerating change or a future time when progress in technology occurs almost instantly. It has also be used to describe humanity's transition into a posthuman condition, mind uploads, and the advent of a utopian era. Because of all the baggage this term has accumulated, and because the peril that awaits us coming clearer into focus (e.g. the Intelligence Explosion), it's a term that needs to be put to bed, replaced by more substantive and unambiguous hypotheses.

S

I wholeheartedly agree that we should use technology to build the kind of future we want for ourselves and our descendants. Absolutely. But it's important for us to acknowledge the challenges we're sure to face in trying to do so and the unintended consequences of our efforts.

Originally posted here:
10 Futurist Phrases And Terms That Are Complete Bullshit