Category Archives: Futurist

On this weeks podcast, Drew Ogryzek talks about hiring incentives at his company. Alex Moxin put her node reading on hold, and with help from AdapTech, is solutions building an Event Store (stores events for CQRS solutions) using node.js, which so far includes creating a basic webserver. Shes installed and is learning to use Vimium so that she can use keyboard shortcuts to navigate, and is learning about http (hyper text transfer protocol) response headers.

Meetups around town Alex and Drew attended were Hackernest (hosted by Drew), TechVancouver, and DDD/CQRS/ES hosted by AdapTech.

This week, our featured guest is Nikolas Badminton! Badminton is a researcher and futurist speaker who splits his time between Canada (Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal), USA, and the UK. He provides insights into how people, communities, cities, businesses, and countries are changing with applied exponential technology. Niks primary interests in technology are in mixed reality, Internet of Things, smart cities, artificial intelligence, and renewable energy.

He studied applied psychology and computing in the UK, and specialized in artificial intelligence and linguistics along with social network theory and human-computer interaction. For over 20 years, hes been hacking his way through tech jobs in big data, analytics, advertising, and the sharing economy.

He recently interviewed Edward Snowden at the University of Waterloo, spoke to 1,500 leaders at the Premiers Forum for Natural Resources in Prince George, and you can see him at these upcoming events: Canada Futurists in Vancouver and Toronto; Our Futures Conference at Quest University in Squamish; and the 18th Annual Privacy & Security Conference. He will be leading a panel about mixed reality with innovators in that field.

You can see some of Niks featured work and speaking engagements at NikolasBadminton.com and be sure to check out his Modern Futures Podcast, which will soon rebrand to Exponential Minds. Heard here first on the Vancouver Tech Podcast, Nik will soon be launching Exponential Minds, which will be a content and event network and a worldwide superinfluencers network. He is also launching the Futurists Speakers Agency this month, so do check on http://www.futuristspeakersagency.com soon.

Welcome to the future!

If youre interested in contacting Nik you can reach him at nik@nikbadminton.com or on twitter @NikolasFuturist.

Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect

The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community.

Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes

More:
Vancouver Tech Podcast Ep.62: Nikolas Badminton, futurist - BetaKit

Three years ago, University of Minnesota professor Bin He developed a brain-controlled drone.

Engineering students across the country now build them for fun, and Hes got a brain-controlled robot arm that can be wielded through the power of thought. A student guinea pig wearing a cap outfitted with sensors tracking the brains electrical impulses need only imagine moving the arm, and the arm complies.

He describes the innovation in practiced laymans terms. Imagine you need to locate a small ship in a storm, but theres a heavy dome of bad weather over the ocean. How are you supposed to pick up the rescue signals? His challenge was to develop a technology to pinpoint the brains electrical signals so perfectly that specific commands can be decoded through the thick plates of skull and hair.

The even-keeled professor is humbly expository when he talks about his groundbreaking achievement. He only becomes flushed when he imagines its possibilities.

There are several large classes of patients whose lives could change with further development of robot limbs: people with spinal cord injuries, stroke patients whose brains require rehab, and amputees who have lost body parts to war. Hes robot arm represents the hope of regaining full ability and independence.

Hes discoveries are just the latest in a 30-year career in pushing boundaries, which began when he was a high schooler in China, reading about an MIT professors pioneering research of the brains magnetic field in Science magazine. The idea that humans could pick up a tiny magnetic signal generated by the brain blew his mind. He was convinced that exciting things were happening in the United States.

Thirty years later, He is already dreaming 30 years into the future again. Advances in thought-controlled robots have the potential to transform human ability as we know it.

A robot arm mounted on a table could help a paralyzed patient feed himself. It could also help an able-bodied person cook dinner while doing laundry, or hold a cup of coffee and a bagel for a driver with two hands on the wheel. People could think lights on and off.

A lot of things we are skeptical of now, and 30 years later it will become the reality, He says. Every project I train a team of students to tackle the cutting-edge research, to learn things by doing things that have never been done before. Its not to teach them knowledge, but really to teach them the capability to discover knowledge.

Click here to see other entries in this year's City Pages People Issue.

Read this article:
Bin He: The Futurist - City Pages

The fourth revolution is distinct from those before it due to the change in velocity, scope and system impact. This has an impact on people and their behaviour, altering the way in which people live, work and connect with one another, unlike any other revolution before it. It has an impact on businesses as well demanding better-connected experiences, transparency, open source, accessibility, agility and authenticity. Here are the five key areas which we believe are reshaping our industry.

From understanding to predicting customer journeys

Consumers dont experience the world in silos. Agencies need to understand the relationship between brands and customers across all channels and devices at the individual level. A brands ability to leverage that understanding to anticipate behaviours and produce meaningful, continuous interactions will be the greatest determinant for success. To get there, a brands data and technology strategy must be architected for mobile first, where we build everything around understanding the individual.

The right solution versus the right now solution

The proliferation of digital and technology has changed the pace at which agencies need to operate. The demands of faster product releases, rapid-fire system updates and connected customer experiences require these once distinct and disparate disciplines to work arm in arm to achieve marketing and business objectives that deliver a fl awless always-on customer experience.

Through-the-line to through-the-enterprise

This holds immense potential for businesses. The partnership between creativity and technology is what leads to new business models, product designs, service integrations, and cultural relevance to transform customer relationships with the products and services they need. To achieve this, the integration of the entire organisations intellectual capital is required. In this new world, brands need a partner who can imagine possibilities, not just optimise what is known and understood. A partner that can combine creativity and technology beyond share of market, but share of life. Not just through the line, but through the day.

Interdependence not integration

How we behave with one another is critical. It goes beyond just integration. Integration is a linear process that looks like a relay race. It results in fragmented thinking and work. And despite the different companies involved it is often inflexible. We believe in interdependence. Interdependence is about bringing the best skills together around a client problem. Its about mutual reliance with a rhythm of creative problem solving a back and forth flow that is dynamic and creates a new type of energy.

Publicis One a connected company

But for us to harness our assets fully we have had to make a big shift in the way we work.

We believe that the holding company model is dead and Publicis Groupe is brave enough to have killed it. Agencies are too inward and silo-ed looking and not suffi ciently focused on clients. It was all about individual agency excellence rather than collective innovation recognising that working together would yield new opportunities for our clients.

A connecting company does more than just manage its assets, it combines them in new ways for the benefit of its clients. A connecting company removes all artificial barriers and opens up all its resources people, tech, data, product, platforms to clients in the right combination for their needs. The Publicis One model allows us to rethink our approach for clients. A partner that not only understands the shift, but one thats leading the shift.

The author of this article is Tan Kien Eng, group CEO, Publicis One Malaysia and Leo Burnett Group Malaysia.

View post:
The Futurist: Speed, scope, systems and death - Marketing Interactive

When President Trump's advisor Kellyanne Conway used the term "alternate facts" to describe a falsehood about the inauguration turnout, a lot of people began hearing echoes of a 20th Century literary masterpiece.

George Orwell's "1984" alerted readers to the dangers of modern autocratic surveillance and "newspeak," a language that could no longer refer to opposing political ideas. Conways's comments led to a spike in demand for the book.

Now a new compilation of short stories takes Orwell's concept of "Big Brother" one step further. What happens when technological advances let us see and hear almost everything about the people around us? Will we become a society of "Little Brothers", constantly watching each other?

Science fiction writer and futurist David Brin co-edited the collection, called "Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World." Unlike most dystopian fiction, he wanted the stories to consider what happens when information floods the world, but citizens share in the power, not just government.

"If light floods everywhere, what happens to neighbors? Will we develop habits to leave people alone? Will shy people be able to even survive?" Brin said. "A lot of the stories are about fighting back."

UC San Diego literature professor Stephen Potts co-edited "Chasing Shadows." He and Brin join KPBS Midday Edition on Thursday with more on what could happen in a society without privacy.

To view PDF documents, Download Acrobat Reader.

Read the original post:
San Diego Futurist Imagines End Of Personal Privacy - KPBS

Balla took this embrace of technology one step further by tailoring Futurist clothing. In September 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, he introduced his Anti-neutral Suit, a bright orange, geometrically patterned collection of menswear, uniquely suited to the needs of the urgent and imperative great war. In 1915, alongside new recruitFortunato Depero, he announced no less than the total Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, an initiative to introduce the Futurist aesthetic into all aspects of life as a way to educate and embolden a new type of man, one capable of dealing with the ever-quickening pace of modern life.

Marinetti hoped that Italian intervention in a great war would allow the country to gain credibility in Europea notion shared by many nations in World War I. As his first manifesto claimed, We intend to glorify warthe only hygiene of the worldmilitarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists.

In fact, Marinetti actively agitated for Italy to join World War I, and he, Boccioni, and others were quick to sign up for military service. But the war didnt hold the redemption that Futurism sought. In 1916, Boccioni died in a training exercise, leaving an artistic and theoretical void in post-war Futurism. And although Italy ended up on the victorious side of the war, the country didnt receive the territory it had been promised as a result of allying with the Triple Entente (Russia, France, and the United Kingdom).

Italys losses in World War I morphed into a myth of mutilated victory in the popular imagination, creating a political climate that Benito Mussolini would later manipulate so that Italian citizens accepted two decades of Fascist dictatorship. Futurism and fascism shared many rhetorical similarities (the glorification of war and violence, the primacy of Italian identity), and under Mussolini, Marinetti opportunistically promoted Futurism as a proto-Fascist movement, hoping to gain his artists official commissions from the Fascist Party.

Read more:
What Is Futurism? - Artsy

Russian Futurism was a movement of Russian poets and artists who adopted the principles of Filippo Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto".

Russian Futurism may be said to have been born in December 1912, when the Moscow-based literary group Hylaea (Russian: [Gileya]) (initiated in 1910 by David Burlyuk and his brothers at their estate near Kherson, and quickly joined by Vasily Kamensky and Velimir Khlebnikov, with Aleksey Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovsky joining in 1911)[1] issued a manifesto entitled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Russian: ).[2] Other members included artists Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, and Olga Rozanova.[3] Although Hylaea is generally considered to be the most influential group of Russian Futurism, other groups were formed in St. Petersburg (Igor Severyanin's Ego-Futurists), Moscow (Tsentrifuga, with Boris Pasternak among its members), Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa.

Like their Italian counterparts, the Russian Futurists were fascinated with the dynamism, speed, and restlessness of modern machines and urban life. They purposely sought to arouse controversy and to gain publicity by repudiating the static art of the past. The likes of Pushkin and Dostoevsky, according to them, should be "heaved overboard from the steamship of modernity". They acknowledged no authorities whatsoever; even Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, when he arrived in Russia on a proselytizing visit in 1914, was obstructed by most Russian Futurists, who did not profess to owe him anything.

In contrast to Marinetti's circle, Russian Futurism was primarily a literary rather than a plastic philosophy. Although many poets (Mayakovsky, Burlyuk) dabbled with painting, their interests were primarily literary. However, such well-established artists as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, and Kazimir Malevich found inspiration in the refreshing imagery of Futurist poems and experimented with versification themselves. The poets and painters collaborated on such innovative productions as the Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, with music by Mikhail Matyushin, texts by Kruchenykh and sets contributed by Malevich.

Members of Hylaea elaborated the doctrine of Cubo-Futurism and assumed the name of budetlyane (from the Russian word budet 'will be'). They found significance in the shape of letters, in the arrangement of text around the page, in the details of typography. They considered that there is no substantial difference between words and material things, hence the poet should arrange words in his poems like the artist arranges colors and lines on his canvas. Grammar, syntax, and logic were often discarded; many neologisms and profane words were introduced; onomatopoeia was declared a universal texture of verse. Khlebnikov, in particular, developed "an incoherent and anarchic blend of words stripped of their meaning and used for their sound alone",[4] known as zaum.

With all this emphasis on formal experimentation, some Futurists were not indifferent to politics. In particular, Mayakovsky's poems, with their lyrical sensibility, appealed to a broad range of readers. He vehemently opposed the meaningless slaughter of World War I and hailed the Russian Revolution as the end of that traditional mode of life which he and other Futurists ridiculed so zealously.

War correspondent Arthur Ransome and five other foreigners were taken to see two of the Bolshevik propaganda trains in 1919 by their organiser, Burov. He first showed them the "Lenin", which had been painted a year and a half ago when, as fading hoardings in the streets of Moscow still testify, revolutionary art was dominated by the Futurist movement. Every carriage is decorated with most striking but not very comprehensible pictures in the brightest colours, and the proletariat was called upon to enjoy what the pre-revolutionary artistic public had for the most part failed to understand. Its pictures are art for arts sake, and can not have done more than astonish, and perhaps terrify, the peasants and the workmen of the country towns who had the luck to see them. The "Red Cossack" is quite different. As Burov put it with deep satisfaction, At first we were in the artists hands, and now the artists are in our hands (The other three trains were the "Sverdlov", the "October Revolution", and the "Red East"). Initially the Department of Proletarian Culture had delivered Burov bound hand and foot to a number of Futurists , but now the artists had been brought under proper control.[5]

After the Bolsheviks gained power, Mayakovsky's grouppatronized by Anatoly Lunacharsky, Bolshevik Commissar for Educationaspired to dominate Soviet culture. Their influence was paramount during the first years after the revolution, until their programor rather lack thereofwas subjected to scathing criticism by the authorities. By the time OBERIU attempted to revive some of the Futurist tenets during the late 1920s, the Futurist movement in Russia had already ended. The most militant Futurist poets either died (Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky) or preferred to adjust their very individual style to more conventional requirements and trends (Aseyev, Pasternak).

See the original post here:
Russian Futurism - Wikipedia

Please Sign In and use this article's on page print button to print this article.

Sep 6, 2016, 4:18pm PDT

Leia Parker Managing Editor Silicon Valley Business Journal

Leia Parker Managing Editor Silicon Valley Business Journal

Ray Kurzweil sees a future in which we can connect our brains to the cloud to augment our more

Vicki Thompson

Ray Kurzweil is a futurist, a director of engineering at Google and a co-founder of the Singularity University think tank at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. He is a nonfiction author and creator of several inventions.

Kurzweil met with the Silicon Valley Business Journal to discuss how technology's exponential progress is rapidly reshaping our future through seismic shifts in information technology and computing power, energy, nanotechnology, robotics, health and longevity.

Ray Kurzweil sees a future in which we can connect our brains to the cloud to augment our more

Vicki Thompson

This Q&A interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You've written about the potential to greatly improve humans abilities through a fusion of technology with biology. Could you describe how youre trying to motivate people to make this happen?

I've tried to articulate where I see the technology going and the underlying force behind it, which I call the law of accelerating returns, and the enormous opportunities created by exponential growth of information technology. It's not intuitive our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is, it's exponential.

Exponentials are quite seductive because they start out sub-linear. We sequenced one ten-thousandth of the human genome in 1990 and two ten-thousandths in 1991. Halfway through the genome project, 7 years into it, we had sequenced 1 percent. People said, "This is a failure. Seven years, 1 percent. It's going to take 700 years, just like we said." Seven years later it was done, because 1 percent is only seven doublings from 100 percent and it had been doubling every year. We don't think in these exponential terms. And that exponential growth has continued since the end of the genome project. These technologies are now thousands of times more powerful than they were 13 years ago, when the genome project was completed.

Most importantly, we will be able to reprogram this outdated software that runs in our bodies, through biotechnology. We're now seeing clinical implications: It's now a trickle. It'll be a flood over the next decade. We're literally going to be able to reprogram biology away from disease and away from aging.

People say, You know, my cell phone is literally billions of times more powerful per dollar than the computer I used when I was an undergraduate, but it only applies to these gadgets we carry around. Thats not the case. Its going to transform food, printing, manufacturing of housing and energy.

Solar energy is growing exponentially because we're applying nanotechnology to the construction of solar panels and energy storage. It's now 2 percent of the world's energy, so people dismiss it as: It's 2 percent. It's a nice thing to do. It's a fringe player. That's not going to solve the problem. They are ignoring the exponential growth. Two percent is only six doublings from 100 percent. We're doubling every two years. That's 12 years. We can meet all of our energy needs through solar.

When I talk about radical life extension through biotechnology and nanotechnology, you can say, "Yeah, but we're going to run out of resources." But the same technologies that are going to extend life are also going to expand resources.

Ultimately, we can produce food extremely inexpensively through vertical agriculture, and we'll be able to print out everything we need through 3D printing. It's not ready yet for prime time. We're kind of in the hype phase now.

By 2020, we'll have sub-micron resolutions. We'll be able to print out and begin a really revolutionized manufacturing. We'll be able to print out modules and snap them together, Lego style, for construction of houses and office buildings. It's already started in Asia. It's not cost-effective yet, but these technologies have a 50 percent deflation rate.

We'll be able to print out clothing for pennies per pound with 3D printing in the 2020s. And there will be an open-source market of designs that are extremely inexpensive.

How is the rapid increase in computing power democratizing access and changing our economy?

I had saved up for years from my paper route as a teenager to buy the Encyclopedia Britannica for $1,000. I thought it was fantastic. It had all these incredible articles about everything I could imagine. Well, now a kid in Africa with her $30 smartphone can access a much better encyclopedia for free, and that's one of thousands of free fantastic information resources that are at her fingertips.

This is all factored out of the economic statistics. They say, Well, economic growth is limited. That's because we put this growth in both the numerator and the denominator. This kid in Africa that spent $30 on a smartphone is walking around with a trillion dollars of computation and communication and other intellectual resources, circa 1968, and still only accounts for $30 of economic activity.

People say, Okay, these fantastic comparisons apply to this strange world of great devices. You can't eat that, you can't live in it, you can't wear it. All of that's going to change with 3D printing, with virtual reality, with all these other resources that are expanding exponentially, and they sneak up on us. When these things start out, they don't work. By the time they work, they've been around for a long time, and they kind of sneak up on us.

What is your current focus in your work at Google?

I am a director of engineering, and I'm heading up a team working on natural language understanding. Language is like our most important method of communication. All of human knowledge is embedded in language. When we expanded our neocortex two million years ago and we got these big foreheads, the first thing we did was invent language so I could take an idea in my head, which is a hierarchical set of symbols, and transmit it to your neocortex. We needed a hierarchical medium to do that communication, so we invented language.

Since then, we've invented billions of documents in language with all of our knowledge. If we could actually understand the meaning of documents, that would unlock this great world of knowledge to computation and ultimately to humans so we can have our computer programs actually understand what they're reading. And we've already made great strides in that.

What's your primary objective for your work at Google?

We're part of an effort working with other teams to move towards an actual understanding of documents. So a search would not just be looking for keywords, it would actually look for meaning, and language translation would be based on meaning. It's a long-term effort to really understand language. Google's motto is, "We organize the world's information." Well, the most important information if you write a blog post is: What are you trying to say? You're not just trying to put together an interesting collection of words. Google's not the only company working on this, but that's a grand challenge to actually understand the meaning of documents.

What occupies your mind the most right now? Is it machine learning or another area of interest?

Well, I've been very focused on artificial intelligence for 50 years. I actually met with the founders of artificial intelligence. Marvin Minsky, who became my mentor, was the father of the symbolic school of artificial intelligence. And then in '62, when I was 14, I met with Frank Rosenblatt, who's the founder of the connectionist school and neural nets. He invented the first neural net called the Perceptron, and I've been immersed in that field for more than 50 years.

At the same time, I'm a writer and a futurist, so I keep track of all the world's technologies and how they're interacting.

I've had a long-term interest in health, which comes from, for example, my father dying prematurely of heart disease. That interest just comes from being a human being with a version 1.0 biological body. But that now has become an information technology, because we've unlocked the information basis of biology, which is genes, and have the meanings of actually reprogramming this outdated software. This interest, which was not related to my interest in computer science, has become now a field of computer science.

You serve on the board of Martine Rothblatt's company, United Therapeutics. What is that company doing in this area of health?

Yes, I've been on the board since that company was founded in 1999. That's one very good example of biotechnology. I've written about this for a long time, but now it's becoming a reality. We can actually print out hearts, lungs, kidneys, and populate them with stem cells and grow out a human organ. This is being done successfully in animals. We can do it in humans now with simple organs, like tracheas and windpipes.

We can do it experimentally with animals with more complex organs, like kidneys, lungs and hearts. That will be coming to a human near you in five to 10 years, but it's happening. If you can do it in a primate, we know we can do it in a human. We have to go through the whole regulatory and safety process to perfect the technology, but it's coming.

Youve also written about the importance of brain mapping. How does that factor into technologys exponential progress?

I track brain reverse engineering very carefully. We can do noninvasive brain scanning in humans. We can actually see now single inter-neuronal connections forming in real time and firing in real time. And there are a lot of different parameters that are important: the speed with which you can do it, the bandwidth and how deeply into the brain you can go with noninvasive scanning. But all of these parameters are rapidly improving.

How important is understanding how the brain functions in order to develop better artificial intelligence?

To me, the importance of brain reverse engineering is not that we're going to copy exactly how the brain works in cell rhythms, but find out its basic principles of operation. Then we can use good engineering to create the same principles, but do it more quickly with electronics. Our neurons transmit information using electric chemical signals that travel a few hundred feet per second. Electronics are already millions of times faster than our neurons, but we need to understand the principles of how it works.

In my last book, How to Create a Mind, I talk about the evidence we already have on how our neocortex works. It organizes 300 million modules, each of which can learn and understand a pattern, and they're organized in hierarchies. We create that hierarchy with our own thinking, and there have been a lot of insights from the brain reverse engineering projects that really support this thesis.

You've given timelines for bringing on a transhuman reality, in which our capabilities are dramatically increased through the power of technology. How are we doing in keeping to those?

We're very much on schedule. Artificial intelligence itself has done remarkable things that people didn't expect to see for a long time, like drive cars, like play Go better than any human and understand language to some extent.

Jeopardy is a language game. Watson got a better score than the best two humans combined, and answered this query correct: A long, tiresome speech delivered by a frothy pie topping. It quickly said, "What is a meringue harangue?" That's pretty good. And Watson got its knowledge by reading Wikipedia and other encyclopedias. It doesn't read as well as you or I, but it reads a lot more documents. It read 200 million documents. We can't do that. It was able to combine all of its knowledge from that effort.

We're making tremendous progress on understanding the brain. I think we're very much on track to have human-level AI by 2029, which has been my consistent prediction for 20 years, and then to be able to send nanobots into the brain in the 2030s and connect our biological neocortex to synthetic neocortex in the cloud.

This is impressive by itself, but it's more impressive because it connects to the cloud. If you do speech recognition or intelligent search, it goes out to the cloud and makes itself a million times smarter. It does that without you even being aware of it. People don't even know it's happening.

We can't do that directly from our brains yet. We do it indirectly with our devices. We have to use our fingers and our eyes and so forth. Ultimately, we'll do it directly from our brain and not just do search and translation directly from our brain, but actually access synthetic neocortex. So just the way this [he holds up his smartphone] makes itself smarter by connecting to the cloud, we'll make ourselves smarter. And that's the ultimate application of artificial intelligence: to extend our mental reach. That's a 2030s scenario.

Your Singularity University co-founder Peter Diamandis has told me he believes that today, its possible for people to live long enough to live forever because of these rapid technological changes. Do you anticipate this could happen for you?

I'm planning on it. So far so good.

You're 68 years old now?

Yeah. And I could be hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow, but we're working on that, too, with self-driving cars.

What would it take to dramatically extend the lifespan of humans?

I think we're on the order of a dozen years away from a tipping point where we're adding more time through scientific progress than is going by. People say, You think you're going to live hundreds of years taking these supplements, and with your lifestyle and so on, that you describe in your book? And I say, No, the goal of that, which we call Bridge One, is just to get to Bridge Two, which is the biotechnology revolution. And a dozen years from now, we will really have arrested most disease and aging processes. Not all, but we'll reach a tipping point where we're adding more time than is going by.

And then Bridge Two will be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution: medical nanorobots that can augment our immune system and go beyond our immune system. Our immune system evolved when it was not in the interest of the human species for us to live very long, so it did not select for long life. It doesn't work on cancer for example. So we can finish the job with medical nanorobots that can basically defeat all disease and aging processes. That's 20 years away.

How would that help to bring about a period of abundance?

Well, that will enable us to live longer. Then people say, "We're going to run out of resources." That's where abundance comes in. Solar energy is doubling every two years because we're applying nanotechnology. We're only six doublings from meeting all of our energy needs through solar. We have 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to do that with. We'll have 3D printing for modules to snap together and create a house, for food, for clothing. We'll meet our physical needs through 3D printing. We'll have virtual realities, so we won't have to travel as much. So ultimately, we will have an age of abundance we won't run out of resources.

What would people do with themselves?

We'll continue to create knowledge. What do we do now? Sixty-five percent of all jobs in the United States, Europe and Asia are information jobs. It didn't exist 25 years ago. So what if people are creating art for websites or creating music?

We have 15 million college students and 15 million people that service them. That's 30 million people. It was 65,000 college students in 1870, so we're moving up Maslow's hierarchy. We're doing more gratifying things: creating knowledge of beauty, like music and art, science, technology.

Are you worried about individuals' worst impulses potentially throwing a wrench into the works?

Well I think we're getting better because I think communication has democratized the world. You could count the number of democracies in the world on the fingers of one or two hands a century ago. You could count the numbers of democracies in the world two centuries ago on the fingers of one finger.

We certainly don't live in a perfect world, but this is the most peaceful time in human history. People say, "What are you kidding? Don't you pay attention to the news? Didn't you hear about the incident yesterday and a week ago?" Well that's the point. Our information about violence and what's wrong with the world is getting exponentially better. It could be a battle that wiped out a nearby village and you wouldn't even hear about it a century ago. Now, there's an incident and we not only hear about it, we're immersed in it, we experience it. That's painful, but it's actually a good thing because it motivates us to do something about it.

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature documents an exponential decline in violence. We rightfully get upset about incidents that kill tens, hundreds, thousands of people. You don't have to go back that far in history to see incidents that killed millions tens of millions of people. It's not like this type of violence and intolerance didn't exist. We just didn't actually have very good information about it a century or two ago.

Currently, we're in the political season, and weve seen plenty of polarization. Where do you stand with respect to the U.S. presidential election and how it has developed?

Technology is a double-edged sword, and it can also spread intolerance. I'm not happy with the level of intolerance that we see expressed in some parts of the political sphere. But I do think without commenting specifically on the current presidential race there's a world consensus on tolerance, equality, democracy, liberty, and then we complain about the extent we see things that don't live up to that. We're moving in the right direction. History is always a messy process, and we have much better information about the mess now than we ever did before.

Join the conversation: Follow @SVbizjournal on Twitter, "Like" us on Facebook and sign up for our free email newsletters.

Originally posted here:
Google, Singularity University futurist Ray Kurzweil on the ...

The approach to interpreting the book of Revelation which has gained perhaps the widest exposure of all systems of interpretation in recent times is the futurist interpretation. This is a result of a number of seminaries in the recent past which have championed a literal interpretative approach to all of Scripture within a framework which understands related Old Testament passages and promises involving Israel, and which distinguishes between Israel and the Church. The futurist interpretation is the basic interpretive framework behind the hugely popular Left Behind series of novels by authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.1

Futurism derives from the consistent application of literal hermeneutics, the Golden Rule of Interpretation, across the entire body of Scripture, including the book of Revelation. Contrary to the claims of many of its critics, it is not an a priori view which is imposed on the text.2 As evidenced by the testimony of the early Church, futurism is the most natural result of a plain reading of the text and the way that most unbiased readers would understand the book on their first reading.

Futurism gets its label from its refusal to see unfulfilled passages as having been fulfilled by approximately similar events in the past. Hence, it holds that many of the events in the book of Revelation await future fulfillment:

The futurist generally believes that all of the visions from Revelation Rev. 4:1+ to the end of the book are yet to be fulfilled in the period immediately preceding and following the second advent of Christ. The reason for the view is found in the comparison of Revelation Rev. 1:1+, Rev. 1:19+ and Rev. 4:1+.3

Futurists see eschatological passages being fulfilled during a future time, primarily during the seventieth week of Daniel, at the second coming of Christ, and during the millennium. While all dispensationalists are futurists, not all futurists are dispensationalists. Futurists are also the most literal in their interpretation of prophecy passages. Dr. Tenney says: The more literal an interpretation that one adopts, the more strongly will he be construed to be a futurist.4

There are two forms of this approach, dispensationalism and what has been called classic premillennialism. Dispensationalists believe that God has brought about his plan of salvation in a series of dispensations or stages centering on his election of Israel to be his covenant people. Therefore, the church age is a parenthesis in this plan, as God turned to the Gentiles until the Jewish people find national revival (Rom. Rom. 11:1;25-32). At the end of that period, the church will be raptured, inaugurating a seven-year tribulation period in the middle of which the Antichrist will make himself known (Rev. Rev. 13:1+) and instigate the great tribulation . . . At the end of that period . . . Christ returns in judgment, followed by a literal millennium (Rev. Rev. 20:1-10+), great white throne judgment (Rev. Rev. 20:11-15+), and the beginning of eternity . . . Classical premillennialism is similar but does not hold to dispensations. Thus there is only one return of Christ, after the tribulation period (Mtt. Mat. 24:29-31; cf. Rev. Rev. 19:11-21+) and it is the whole church, not just the nation of Israel, that passes through the tribulation period.6

When Knowles deals with the next major contributorsIrenaeus (130-200) and his disciple Hippolytus (170-236)he describes their views as undoubtedly the forerunners of the modern dispensational interpreters of the Seventy Weeks. Knowles draws the following conclusion about Irenaeus and Hippolytus: . . .we may say that Irenaeus presented the seed of an idea that found its full growth in the writings of Hippolytus. In the works of these fathers, we can find most of the basic concepts of the modern futuristic view of the seventieth week of Daniel ix. That they were dependent to some extent upon earlier material is no doubt true. Certainly we can see the influence of pre-Christian Jewish exegesis at times, but, by and large, we must regard them as the founders of the school of interpretation, and in this lies their significance for the history of exegesis.9

[Justin Martyr] asserts that it teaches a literal Millennial Kingdom of the saints to be established in Jerusalem, and after the thousand years the general resurrection and judgment. . . . Irenaeus . . . finds in the book the doctrine of chiliasm, that is, of an earthly Millennial Kingdom. . . . Hippolytus is a chiliast . . . identifies . . . Antichrist, who was represented by Antiochus Epiphanes and who will come out of the tribe of Dan, will reign 3 1/2 years, persecuting the Church and putting to death the two Witnesses, the forerunners of the parousia (held to be Elijah and Enoch). . . . Victorinus . . . understands the Revelation in a literal, chiliastic, sense . . . The two witnesses are Elijah and Jeremiah; the 144,000 are Jews who in the last days will be converted by the preaching of Elijah . . . the false prophet, will cause the image of Antichrist to be set up in the temple at Jerusalem.11

Unfortunately, with the rise of allegorical interpretation and the opposition of the heresy of Montanism (which utilized an extravagant form of millennial teaching drawn from the book of Revelation),12 the futurist view fell into disfavor, not to be seen in a favorable light again for over a thousand years.13

During the Reformation, literal interpretation flourished in response to the allegorical methods employed throughout the Middle Ages by the Roman Church. However, the Reformers never fully extended literalism to prophetic passages and key Reformers did not fully appreciate the book of Revelation.

The primary fork in the road between futurism and all other systems of interpretation concerning the book of Revelation comes in the refusal of the futurist to be imprecise with the details of Gods revelation.14 For example, when a passage states that a man Rev. 13:13+), the futurist expects fulfillment to involve: (1) a man; (2) performing great signs in a similar way that great signs were performed in the OT and by Christ in the gospels; (3) who calls down literal fire from literal heaven as was done in the OT; (4) viewed by other men. He then asks the simple question: Is there any reliable historic record of such an event since the time of Johns writing? The obvious answer is, No! Hence this event awaits future fulfillment. It really is that simple!

There is a strong connection between literal interpretation and futurism: The more literal an interpretation that one adopts, the more strongly will he be construed to be a futurist.15 Literal interpretation allows the text to speak for itself:16

Critics frequently misrepresent futurism as if it places its entire emphasis on understanding the book of Revelation as applying to the future: The futurist position especially encounters the difficulty that the book would have had no significant relevance for a first-century readership. [emphasis added]17

This is a major misunderstanding of the futurist position which holds that the early chapters of the book are specifically addressed to the then-existing churches in Asia Minor and fully appreciates the historical setting and contents of these passages. Moreover, futurism concurs with Swete that the events of the book of Revelation are relevant in every age as a great source of blessing and security for persecuted believers:

In the Epistle of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, written in 177 to their brethren in Asia and Phrygia, which bears many signs of the use of the Apocalypse by the Christian societies of South Gaul during the troubles in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. . . . It is impossible to doubt that the roll which contained St Johns great letter to the parent Churches in Asia was often in the hands of the daughter Churches in Gaul, and perhaps accompanied the confessors to the prisons where they awaited the martyrs crown.18

The mistake being made is constraining the book of Revelation as if it had only a single purpose. No matter which view is taken, if one fails to understand the many purposes of the book, the interpretive result will be the lacking. Preterist Chilton remarks: No Biblical writer ever revealed the future merely for the sake of satisfying curiosity: The goal was always to direct Gods people toward right action in the present. . . . The prophets told of the future only in order to stimulate godly living. [emphasis added]19 If Chilton were correct, then there would be little reason for prophecy to be predictive. The fact is, the prophets gave prophecy for more reasons than merely the stimulation of godly living. This was indeed an important reason, but not the only reason. The many fulfilled prophecies testifying to the identity of Jesus at His First Coming provide an abundant counter example to Chiltons claim.

It is a misrepresentation of the futurist interpretation to assert that it denies the relevance of the text to the first-century readership. This is tantamount to saying that appreciating the prophetic predictions throughout Scripture essentially denies the relevance of the same passages to those who originally received them. The pattern of prophetic passages throughout Scripture is clearly one of both immediate local application and future prediction. Even in cases where there is no immediate local application by way of historical events (e.g., Isa. Isa. 53:1), the passages still contain inestimable worth to the original recipients in setting forth the will of God as well as inspirational value in the sure hope of what God will do in the future (Rom. Rom. 8:24-25). In the Apocalypse, this dual application of prophetic Scripture (both immediate/local and future/remote) is made explicit in the organizational framework set forth by Christ (Rev. Rev. 1:19+) and in the setting off of the seven epistles from the remaining material.

Other criticisms of futurism are manifestly silly. Gregg denies futurists the right to use the analogy of Scripture (Scripture interprets Scripture):

A major feature of the Tribulation expected by futurists is its seven-year duration, divided in the middle by the Antichrists violating a treaty he had made with Israel and setting up an image of himself in the rebuilt Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Yet none of these elements can be discovered from a literal interpretation of any passage in Revelation. . . . The futurist believes that Revelation Rev. 20:1+ describes a period of world peace and justice with Christ reigning on earth from Jerusalem, though no part of this description can be found in the chapter itself, taken literally. This observation does not mean that this futurist scenario cannot be true. But it must be derived by reading into the passages in Revelation features that are not plainly stated.20

Obviously, care needs to be exercised when connecting passages which seem to have related aspects, but if a good case can be made for a correlation, then the interpreter who fails in this synthesis is failing in his task before God. Chiding futurists who correlate the little horn of Daniel (Dan. Dan. 7:8), the man of sin of Paul (2Th. 2Th. 2:3), and the Beast of Revelation (Rev. Rev. 13:1+) because of obvious and intentional similarities given in Scripture, but providing no sensible or profitable synthesis in its place is a pattern frequently demonstrated by critics. This is the primary reason why futurists can offer a systematic and detailed outline of eschatological events while the other systems fail to provide anything even remotely similar. It almost seems that the critics of futurism dislike the certainty and coherence it offers in its interpretation of prophecy. But if God supernaturally gave the inspired Scriptures through a single author (the Holy Spirit), why shouldnt such coherence and correlation be expected?

To the futurist, the book of Revelation has relevancy to John, to the seven churches of Asia, to the Church throughout history, and to the saints all the way through the Second Coming of Christ and into the eternal state. Now thats relevancy!

The book of Revelation is important to us because it portrays the world as a global village. Entering the twenty-first century, no better expression describes our earth and its people. Besides a mushrooming population, other factors are pushing all humanity together, such as an interlinking economy, jet age transportation, and satellite communications.21

Notes

1 Dr. Tim LaHaye is a noted futurist theologian having published numerous works on prophecy, some of which we draw on in this work. See the bibliography.

2 We can offer our own experience in support of this claim. Having been born-again and taught for five years within a Church which embraced preterism, it was our own careful study of the details of Scripture across the entire span of books which caused us to reject preterism in favor of what we only later came to understand was called futurism.

3 Merrill C. Tenney, Interpreting Revelation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1957), 139.

4 Thomas Ice, What Is Preterism?, in Tim LaHaye and Thomas Ice, eds., The End Times Controversy (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2003), 21.

5 There is also a form of extreme futurism in which even the first three chapters of the book of Revelation are seen as yet future. [E. W. Bullinger, Commentary On Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1984, 1935)]

6 Grant R. Osborne, Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002), 20-21.

7 Alan F. Johnson, Revelation: The Expositors Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1966), 12.

8 In two places, Jerome stated clearly that John was banished under Domitian. First, in his Against Jovinianum (A.D. 393), Jerome wrote that John was a prophet, for he saw in the island of Patmos, to which he had been banished by the Emperor Domitian as a martyr for the Lord, an Apocalypse containing boundless mysteries of the future. Mark Hitchcock, The Stake in the HeartThe A.D. 95 Date of Revelation, in Tim LaHaye and Thomas Ice, eds., The End Times Controversy (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2003), 135.

9 Thomas Ice, The 70 Weeks of Daniel, in Tim LaHaye and Thomas Ice, eds., The End Times Controversy (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2003), 350.

10 The early church fathers believed in a literal, thousand-year, earthly reign of Christ because they interpreted the teachings of Revelation in a normal rather than mystical way.Larry V. Crutchfield, Revelation in the New Testament, in Mal Couch, ed., A Bible Handbook to Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2001), 25.

11 Isbon T. Beckwith, The Apocalypse of John (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001), 320.

12 The opposition to the heresy of Montanism, which made great use of the Apocalypse and gave extravagant form to its millennial teaching, caused it to be either rejected or differently interpreted.Ibid., 323.

13 This was the method employed by some of the earliest fathers (e.g., Justin, Irenaeus, Hippolytus), but with the triumph of the allegorical method . . . after Origen and of the amillennial view after Augustine and Ticonius, the futurist method (and chiliasm) was not seen again for over a thousand years.Osborne, Revelation, 20.

14 As we noted earlier, this is one reason why many who are trained in the sciences and engineering tend toward this view of Scripture. Being trained in logic and the analysis of details, we reject the approximate fulfillments and interpretations of the other systems in favor of a God Who fulfills His predictions down to the gnats eyelash.

15 Tenney, Interpreting Revelation, 142.

16 Dispensationalism is actually built on the idea of letting the Bible speak for itself with a normal, literal hermeneutic. If simple rules of grammar and observation are put into place, the Scriptures will begin to make sense, from Genesis to Revelation.Mal Couch, Why is Revelation Important?, in Mal Couch, ed., A Bible Handbook to Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2001), 41.

17 Gregory K. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 47.

18 Henry Barclay Swete, The Apocalypse of St. John (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1998, 1906), xciii.

19 David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance (Tyler, TX: Dominion Press, 1987), 27.

20 Steve Gregg, Revelation Four Views: A Parallel Commentary (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 41.

21 Couch, Why is Revelation Important?, 17.

Read more:
12.5. Futurist Interpretation Commentary - A Testimony of ...

The future is what will happen in the time after the present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently exists and will exist can be categorized as either permanent, meaning that it will exist forever, or temporary, meaning that it will end. The future and the concept of eternity have been major subjects of philosophy, religion, and science, and defining them non-controversially has consistently eluded the greatest of minds.[1] In the Occidental view, which uses a linear conception of time, the future is the portion of the projected time line that is anticipated to occur.[2] In special relativity, the future is considered absolute future, or the future light cone.[3]

In the philosophy of time, presentism is the belief that only the present exists and the future and the past are unreal. Religions consider the future when they address issues such as karma, life after death, and eschatologies that study what the end of time and the end of the world will be. Religious figures such as prophets and diviners have claimed to see into the future. Organized efforts to predict or forecast the future may have derived from observations by early man of heavenly objects.

Future studies, or futurology, is the science, art and practice of postulating possible futures. Modern practitioners stress the importance of alternative and plural futures, rather than one monolithic future, and the limitations of prediction and probability, versus the creation of possible and preferable futures.

The concept of the future has been explored extensively in cultural production, including art movements and genres devoted entirely to its elucidation, such as the 20th century movement futurism.

Forecasting is the process of estimating outcomes in uncontrolled situations. Forecasting is applied in many areas, such as weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, transport planning, and labour market planning. Due to the element of the unknown, risk and uncertainty are central to forecasting.

Statistically based forecasting employs time series with cross-sectional or longitudinal data. Econometric forecasting methods use the assumption that it is possible to identify the underlying factors that might influence the variable that is being forecast. If the causes are understood, projections of the influencing variables can be made and used in the forecast. Judgmental forecasting methods incorporate intuitive judgments, opinions and probability estimates, as in the case of the Delphi method, scenario building, and simulations.

Prediction is similar to forecasting but is used more generally, for instance to also include baseless claims on the future. Organized efforts to predict the future began with practices like astrology, haruspicy, and augury. These are all considered to be pseudoscience today, evolving from the human desire to know the future in advance.

Modern efforts such as future studies attempt to predict technological and societal trends, while more ancient practices, such as weather forecasting, have benefited from scientific and causal modelling. Despite the development of cognitive instruments for the comprehension of future, the stochastic and chaotic nature of many natural and social processes has made precise forecasting of the future elusive.

Future studies or futurology is the science, art and practice of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures and the worldviews and myths that underlie them. Futures studies seeks to understand what is likely to continue, what is likely to change, and what is novel. Part of the discipline thus seeks a systematic and pattern-based understanding of past and present, and to determine the likelihood of future events and trends. A key part of this process is understanding the potential future impact of decisions made by individuals, organisations and governments. Leaders use results of such work to assist in decision-making.

Futures is an interdisciplinary field, studying yesterday's and today's changes, and aggregating and analyzing both lay and professional strategies, and opinions with respect to tomorrow. It includes analyzing the sources, patterns, and causes of change and stability in the attempt to develop foresight and to map possible futures. Modern practitioners stress the importance of alternative and plural futures, rather than one monolithic future, and the limitations of prediction and probability, versus the creation of possible and preferable futures.

Three factors usually distinguish futures studies from the research conducted by other disciplines (although all disciplines overlap, to differing degrees). First, futures studies often examines not only possible but also probable, preferable, and "wild card" futures. Second, futures studies typically attempts to gain a holistic or systemic view based on insights from a range of different disciplines. Third, futures studies challenges and unpacks the assumptions behind dominant and contending views of the future. The future thus is not empty but fraught with hidden assumptions.

Futures studies does not generally include the work of economists who forecast movements of interest rates over the next business cycle, or of managers or investors with short-term time horizons. Most strategic planning, which develops operational plans for preferred futures with time horizons of one to three years, is also not considered futures. But plans and strategies with longer time horizons that specifically attempt to anticipate and be robust to possible future events, are part of a major subdiscipline of futures studies called strategic foresight.

The futures field also excludes those who make future predictions through professed supernatural means. At the same time, it does seek to understand the models such groups use and the interpretations they give to these models.

In physics, time is a fourth dimension. Physicists argue that space-time can be understood as a sort of stretchy fabric that bends due to forces such as gravity. In classical physics the future is just a half of the timeline, which is the same for all observers. In special relativity the flow of time is relative to the observer's frame of reference. The faster an observer is traveling away from a reference object, the slower that object seems to move through time. Hence, future is not an objective notion anymore. A more significant notion is absolute future or the future light cone. While a person can move backwards or forwards in the three spatial dimensions, many physicists argue you are only able to move forward in time.[4]

One of the outcomes of Special Relativity Theory is that a person can travel into the future (but never come back) by traveling at very high speeds. While this effect is negligible under ordinary conditions, space travel at very high speeds can change the flow of time considerably. As depicted in many science fiction stories and movies (e.g. Dj Vu), a person traveling for even a short time at near light speed will return to an Earth that is many years in the future.

Some physicists claim that by using a wormhole to connect two regions of space-time a person could theoretically travel in time. Physicist Michio Kaku points out that to power this hypothetical time machine and "punch a hole into the fabric of space-time", it would require the energy of a star. Another theory is that a person could travel in time with cosmic strings.

"The trouble with the future is that it's so much less knowable than the past."

In the philosophy of time, presentism is the belief that only the present exists, and the future and past are unreal. Past and future "entities" are construed as logical constructions or fictions. The opposite of presentism is 'eternalism', which is the belief that things in the past and things yet to come exist eternally. Another view (not held by many philosophers) is sometimes called the 'growing block' theory of timewhich postulates that the past and present exist, but the future does not.[6]

Presentism is compatible with Galilean relativity, in which time is independent of space, but is probably incompatible with Lorentzian/Einsteinian relativity in conjunction with certain other philosophical theses that many find uncontroversial. Saint Augustine proposed that the present is a knife edge between the past and the future and could not contain any extended period of time.

Contrary to Saint Augustine, some philosophers propose that conscious experience is extended in time. For instance, William James said that time is "...the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible."[citation needed] Augustine proposed that God is outside of time and present for all times, in eternity. Other early philosophers who were presentists include the Buddhists (in the tradition of Indian Buddhism). A leading scholar from the modern era on Buddhist philosophy is Stcherbatsky, who has written extensively on Buddhist presentism:

While ethologists consider animal behavior largely based on fixed action patterns or other learned traits in an animal's past[citation needed], human behavior is known to encompass anticipation of the future. Anticipatory behavior can be the result of a psychological outlook toward the future, for examples optimism, pessimism, and hope.

Optimism is an outlook on life such that one maintains a view of the world as a positive place. People would say that optimism is seeing the glass "half full" of water as opposed to half empty. It is the philosophical opposite of pessimism. Optimists generally believe that people and events are inherently good, so that most situations work out in the end for the best. Hope is a belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one's life. Hope implies a certain amount of despair, wanting, wishing, suffering or perseverance i.e., believing that a better or positive outcome is possible even when there is some evidence to the contrary. "Hopefulness" is somewhat different from optimism in that hope is an emotional state, whereas optimism is a conclusion reached through a deliberate thought pattern that leads to a positive attitude.

Pessimism as stated before is the opposite of optimism. It is the tendency to see, anticipate, or emphasize only bad or undesirable outcomes, results, or problems. The word originates in Latin from Pessimus meaning worst and Malus meaning bad.

Religions consider the future when they address issues such as karma, life after death, and eschatologies that study what the end of time and the end of the world will be. In religion, major prophets are said to have the power to change the future. Common religious figures have claimed to see into the future, such as minor prophets and diviners. The term "afterlife" refers to the continuation of existence of the soul, spirit or mind of a human (or animal) after physical death, typically in a spiritual or ghostlike afterworld. Deceased persons are usually believed to go to a specific region or plane of existence in this afterworld, often depending on the rightness of their actions during life.

Some believe the afterlife includes some form of preparation for the soul to transfer to another body (reincarnation). The major views on the afterlife derive from religion, esotericism and metaphysics. There are those who are skeptical of the existence of the afterlife, or believe that it is absolutely impossible, such as the materialist-reductionists, who believe that the topic is supernatural, therefore does not really exist or is unknowable. In metaphysical models, theists generally believe some sort of afterlife awaits people when they die. Atheists generally do not believe in a life after death. Members of some generally non-theistic religions such as Buddhism, tend to believe in an afterlife like reincarnation but without reference to God.

Agnostics generally hold the position that like the existence of God, the existence of supernatural phenomena, such as souls or life after death, is unverifiable and therefore unknowable.[8] Many religions, whether they believe in the souls existence in another world like Christianity, Islam and many pagan belief systems, or in reincarnation like many forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, believe that ones status in the afterlife is a reward or punishment for their conduct during life, with the exception of Calvinistic variants of Protestant Christianity, which believes one's status in the afterlife is a gift from God and cannot be earned during life.

Eschatology is a part of theology and philosophy concerned with the final events in the history of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humanity, commonly referred to as the end of the world. While in mysticism the phrase refers metaphorically to the end of ordinary reality and reunion with the Divine, in many traditional religions it is taught as an actual future event prophesied in sacred texts or folklore. More broadly, eschatology may encompass related concepts such as the Messiah or Messianic Age, the end time, and the end of days.

Futurism as an art movement originated in Italy at the beginning of the 20th century. It developed largely in Italy and in Russia, although it also had adherents in other countries - in England and Portugal for example. The Futurists explored every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music, architecture and even gastronomy. Futurists had a passionate loathing of ideas from the past, especially political and artistic traditions. They also espoused a love of speed, technology, and violence. Futurists dubbed the love of the past passisme. The car, the plane, and the industrial town were all legendary for the Futurists, because they represented the technological triumph of people over nature. The Futurist Manifesto of 1909 declared: "We will glorify warthe world's only hygienemilitarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman."[9] Though it owed much of its character and some of its ideas to radical political movements, it had little involvement in politics until the autumn of 1913.[10]

One[which?] of the many 20th-century classical movements in music paid homage to, included, or imitated machines. Closely identified with the central Italian Futurist movement were brother composers Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) and Antonio Russolo (1877-1942), who used instruments known as intonarumori - essentially sound boxes used to create music out of noise. Luigi Russolo's futurist manifesto, The Art of Noises, is considered[by whom?] one of the most important and influential texts in 20th century musical aesthetics. Other examples of futurist music include Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231 (1923), which imitates the sound of a steam locomotive, Prokofiev's "The Steel Step", and the experiments of Edgard Varse.

Literary futurism made its debut with F.T. Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism (1909). Futurist poetry used unexpected combinations of images and hyper-conciseness (not to be confused with the actual length of the poem). Futurist theater works have scenes a few sentences long, use nonsensical humor, and try to discredit the deep-rooted dramatic traditions with parody. Longer literature forms, such as novels, had no place in the Futurist aesthetic, which had an obsession with speed and compression.

Futurism expanded to encompass other artistic domains and ultimately included painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, theatre design, textiles, drama, literature, music and architecture. In architecture, it featured a distinctive thrust towards rationalism and modernism through the use of advanced building materials. The ideals of futurism remain as significant components of modern Western culture; the emphasis on youth, speed, power and technology finding expression in much of modern commercial cinema and commercial culture. Futurism has produced several reactions, including the 1980s-era literary genre of cyberpunk which often treated technology with a critical eye.

Science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein defined science fiction as:

More generally, one can regard science fiction as a broad genre of fiction that often involves speculations based on current or future science or technology. Science fiction is found in books, art, television, films, games, theater, and other media. Science fiction differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically established or scientifically postulated laws of nature (though some elements in a story might still be pure imaginative speculation). Settings may include the future, or alternative time-lines, and stories may depict new or speculative scientific principles (such as time travel or psionics), or new technology (such as nanotechnology, faster-than-light travel or robots). Exploring the consequences of such differences is the traditional purpose of science fiction, making it a "literature of ideas".[12]

Some science fiction authors construct a postulated history of the future called a "future history" that provides a common background for their fiction. Sometimes authors publish a timeline of events in their history, while other times the reader can reconstruct the order of the stories from information in the books. Some published works constitute "future history" in a more literal sensei.e., stories or whole books written in the style of a history book but describing events in the future. Examples include H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come (1933) - written in the form of a history book published in the year 2106 and in the manner of a real history book with numerous footnotes and references to the works of (mostly fictitious) prominent historians of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The linear view of time (common in Western thought) draws a stronger distinction between past and future than does the more common cyclic time of cultures such as India, where past and future can coalesce much more readily.[13]

See more here:
Future - Wikipedia

This paper is made available with the permission of the World Future Society, Bethesda, MD

Readers should know that Dr. Graves was not entirely satisfied with this piece as it appeared in The Futurist, though it is by far the most popular of his articles and quite readable as an introduction to the theory.

Significant portions of this article were crafted by editor Ed Cornish using Dr. Graves's basic ideas and principles. Graves was also not entirely happy with some of these depictions of levels such as GT and HU, as well as parts of the commentary added by the editor. The portions with heavy editorial involvement are indented.

Human Nature Prepares for a Momentous Leap

by Clare W. Graves

[From The Futurist, 1974, pp. 72-87. Edited with embedded comments by Edward Cornish, World Future Society.]

View Summary Table from the Article

A new psychological theory holds that human beings exist at different levels of existence. At any given level, an individual exhibits the behavior and values characteristic of people at that level; a person who is centralized at a lower level cannot even understand people who are at a higher level. In the following article, psychologist Clare Graves outlines his theory and what it suggests regarding man's future. Through history, says Graves, most people have been confined to the lower levels of existence where they were motivated by needs shared with other animals. Now, Western man appears ready to move up to a higher level of existence, a distinctly human level. When this happens there will likely be a dramatic transformation of human institutions.

For many people the prospect of the future is dimmed by what they see as a moral breakdown of our society at both the public and private level. My research, over more than 20 years as a psychologist interested in human values, indicates that something is indeed happening to human values, but it is not so much a collapse in the fiber of man as a sign of human health and intelligence. My research indicates that man is learning that values and ways of living which were good for him at one period in his development are no longer good because of the changed condition of his existence. He is recognizing that the old values are no longer appropriate, but he has not yet understood the new.

The error which most people make when they think about human values is that they assume the nature of man is fixed and there is a single set of human values by which he should live. Such an assumption does not fit with my research. My data indicate that man's nature is an open, constantly evolving system, a system which proceeds by quantum jumps from one steady state system to the next through a hierarchy of ordered systems.

Briefly, what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man's existential problems change. These systems alternate between focus upon the external world, and attempts to change it, and focus upon the inner world, and attempts to come to peace with it, with the means to each end changing in each alternatively prognostic system. Thus, man tends, normally, to change his psychology as the conditions of his existence change. Each successive state, or level of existence, is a state through which people pass on the way to other states of equilibrium. When a person is centralized in one state of existence, he has a total psychology which is particular to that state. His feelings, motivations, ethics and values, biochemistry, degree of neurological activation, learning systems, belief systems, conception of mental health, ideas as to what mental illness is and how it should be treated, preferences for and conceptions of management, education, economic and political theory and practice, etc., are all appropriate to that state.

In some cases, a person may not be genetically or constitutionally equipped to change in the normal upward direction when the conditions of his existence change. Instead, he may stabilize and live out his life at any one or a combination of levels in the hierarchy. Again, he may show the behavior of a level in a predominantly positive or negative manner, or he may, under certain circumstances, regress to a behavior system lower in the hierarchy. Thus, an adult lives in a potentially open system of needs, values and aspirations, but he often settles into what appears to be a closed system.

Human existence can be likened to a symphony with six themes. In a symphony, the composer normally begins by stating his themes in the simplest possible manner. In human existence, our species begins by stating in the simplest way those themes which will preoccupy us through thousands of variations. At this point in history, the societal effective leading edge of man in the technologically advanced nations is currently finishing the initial statement of the sixth theme of existence and is beginning again with the first theme in an entirely new and more sophisticated variation. That is, man has reached the point of finishing the first and most primitive ladder of existence: the one concerned with the emergence of the individual of the species Homo sapiens and his subsistence on this planet. The first six levels of existence, A-N through F-S, have accordingly been called Subsistence Levels. (A stands for the neurological system in the brain upon which the psychological system is based; N for the set of existential problems that the A neurological system is able to cope with. Thus, in the A-N state, one calls on the A system to solve the N problems of existence.) These six subsistence levels comprise the initial statement of man's themes in its very simplest form.

The six subsistence levels of man's existence have as their overall goal the establishment of individual survival and dignity. Once having become reasonably secure, both physically and psychologically, in his existence, the individual becomes suddenly free to experience the wonder and interdependence of all life. But he must notice at the same time that the struggle for man's emergent individuality has imperiled the very survival of that life. Thus, just as early man at the most primitive level of subsistence (A-N), had to use what power he could command to stabilize his individual life functions, so G-T man, the individual who has reached the first level of being must use what knowledge he can command to stabilize the essential functions of interdependent life. Similarly, B-O or tribal man gathered together in communities to insure his individual, physical survival, and our G-T man of the future must form communities of knowledge to insure the survival of all viable life upon this Earth. We see therefore that the six themes constantly repeat, even though man progresses from the simple statement of individual subsistence to the variation of the interdependence of life. This stately succession of themes and movements is the general pattern of the levels of existence.

In this discussion of man's present and future, the first three subsistence levels must still concern us because many people, from aborigines to newly emergent nations, are still living at these levels of existence.

Here are brief descriptions of the levels as I have come to know them through my research:

Some Characteristics of Various Levels

Automatic Existence (First Subsistence Level)

Man at the first subsistence level (A-N), the automatic state of physiological existence, seeks only the immediate satisfaction of his basic physiological needs. He has only an imperative need-based concept of time and space and no concept of cause or effect. His awareness excludes self and is limited to the presence of physiologically determined tension when it is present, and the relief of such tension when it takes place. He lives a purely physiological existence. Man the species, or man the individual, does not have to rise above this level to continue the survival of the species. He can continue the survival of the species through the purely physiological aspect of the process of procreation. He can live what is for him, at the A-N level, a productive lifetime, productive in the sense that his built-in response mechanisms are able to reduce the tensions of the imperative physiological needs and a reproductive lifetime. But this level of existence seldom is seen in the modern world except in pathological cases.

As soon as man, in his food-gathering wanderings, accrues a set of Pavlovian conditioned reflexes, which provide for the satisfaction of his imperative needs, and thus enters his 'Garden of Eden,' he slides almost imperceptibly out of this first stage into the second existential state, and established form of human existence, the tribalistic way of life.

Tribalistic Existence (Second Subsistence Level)

At the second subsistence level, the B-O autistic state of thinking, man's need is for stability. He seeks to continue a way of life that he does not understand but strongly defends. This level of man has just struggled forth from striving to exist and now has his first established way of life. This way of life is essentially without awareness, thought, or purpose, for it is based on Pavlovian classical conditioning principles. Therefore, B-O man beliefs his tribalistic way is inherent in the nature of things. As a result he holds tenaciously to it, and strives desperately to propitiate the world for its continuance.

At this level a seasonal, or naturally based concept of time prevails and space is perceived in an atomistic fashion. Causality is not yet perceived because man perceives that forces at work to be inherent. Here a form of existence based on myth and tradition arises, and being is a mystical phenomenon full of spirits, magic and superstition. Here the task of existence is simply to continue what it seems has enabled my tribe to be.

But here, more by chance than by design, some men achieve relative control of their spirit world through their non-explainable, elder-administered, tradition-based way of life a way of life which continues relatively unchanged until disturbed from within or without. When the established tribal way of life assures the continuance of the tribe with minimal energy expenditure by solving problems N by neurological means A, it creates the first of the general conditions necessary for movement to a new and different steady state of being. It produces excess energy in the system which puts the system in a state of readiness for change. But unless another factor, such as dissonance or challenge, comes into the field, the change does not move in the direction of some other state of being. Instead, it moves toward maximum entropy and its own demise, since it becomes overloaded with its accretion of more and more tradition, more and more ritual. If, however, when the state of readiness is achieved, dissonance enters, then this steady state of being is precipitated toward a different kind of change. This dissonance arises usually in youth, or in certain minds which are not troubled by memories of the past and are capable of newer and more lasting insights into the nature of man's being. Or it can come to the same capable minds when outsiders disturb the tribe's way of life.

When, at the B-O level, readiness for change occurs, it triggers man's insight into his existence as an individual being separate and distinct from other beings, and from his tribal compatriots as well. As he struggles, he perceives that others - other men, other animals, and even the spirits in his physical world - fight him back. So his need for survival comes to the fore.

With this change in consciousness, man becomes aware that he is aligned against predatory animals, a threatening physical universe, and other men who fight back for their established way of existence, or against him for the new way of existence he is striving to develop. Now he is not one-with-all, for he is alone in his struggle for his survival against the draconic forces of the universe. So he sets out in heroic fashion to build a way of being which will foster his individual survival.

Egocentric Existence (Third Subsistence Level)

At the egocentric level (C-P), raw, rugged, self-assertive individualism comes to the fore. This level might be termed 'Machiavellian,' for within it is all the author of The Prince considered the essence of being human. History suggests to us that the few who were able to gain their freedom from survival problems surged almost uncontrollably forward into a new way of being, and also dragged after them the tribal members unable to free themselves of the burden of stagnating tribalistic existence. History also suggests that the few became the authoritarians while the many became those who submitted. The many accepted the might-is-right of the few because such acceptance assured their survival. This was so in the past and it is still so today.

This Promethean (C-P) point of view is based on the prerogatives of the haves and the duties of the have-nots. Ultimately, when this way of life, based historically on the agricultural revolution, is established, life is seen as a continuous process with survival dependent on a controlled relationship. Fealty and loyalty, service and noblesse oblige become cornerstones of this way of life. Assured of their survival, through fief and vassalage, the haves base life of the right way to behave as their might dictates. A system develops in which each individual acts out in detail, in the interest of his own survival, how life is to be lived, but online a small number ever achieve any modicum of power and the remainder are left to submit.

Both the authoritarian and the submissive develop standards which they feel will insure them against threat, but these are very raw standards. The submissive person chooses to get away with what he can within the life style which is possible for him. The authoritarian chooses to do as he pleases. He spawns, as his raison d'tre, the rights of assertive individualism. These rights become, in time, the absolute rights of kings, the unassailable prerogatives of management, the inalienable rights of those who have achieved positions of power, and even the rights of the lowly hustler to all he can hustle. This is a world of the aggressive expression of man's lusts openly and unabashedly by the 'haves,' and more covertly and deviously by the 'have nots.'

Now man moves to the lasting security level of need and learns by avoidant learning. As he moves to the D-Q level he develops a way of life based on the conviction that there must be a reason for it all, a reason why the have shall possess so much in life yet be faced with death, and a reason why the have not is forced to endure a miserable existence. This search leads to the belief that the have and have not condition is a part of a directed design, a design of the forces guiding man and his destiny. Thus, the saintly way of life, based on one of the world's great religions or great philosophies, comes to be. Here man creates what he believes is a way for lasting peace in this life or everlasting life, a way which, it seems to him, will remove the pain of both the have and the have not. Here he seeks salvation.

Saintly Existence (Fourth Subsistence Level)

At the saintly level (D-Q), man develops a way of life based on 'Thou salt suffer the pangs of existence in this life to prove thyself worthy of later life.' This saintly form of existence comes from seeing that living in this world is not made for ultimate pleasure, a perception based on the previous endless struggle with unbridled lusts and a threatening universe. Here man perceives that certain rules are prescribed for each class of men and that these rules describe the proper way each class is to behave. The rules are the price man must pay for his more lasting life, for the peace which he seeks, the price of no ultimate pleasure while living. The measure of this worthiness is how much he has lived by the established rules. But, after security is achieved through these absolutistic rules, the time comes when some men question the price. When this happens, the saintly way of life is doomed to decay, since some men are bound to ask why they cannot have some pleasure in this life. Man then struggles on through another period of transition to another level, now slipping, now falling in the quest for his goal. When man casts aside the inhuman aspect of his saintly existence, he is again charged with excess energy because his security problems are solved; but this very solution has created the problems R, how to build a life that will offer pleasure here and now, which eventually he meets through the neurological means of system E.

Materialistic Existence (Fifth Subsistence Level)

At the materialistic level (E-R_, man strives to conquer the world by learning its secrets, rather than through raw, naked force as he did at the C-P level. He tarries long enough here to develop and utilize the objectivistic, positivistic, operationalistic, scientific method so as to provide the material ends for a satisfactory human existence in the here and now. But once assured of his own material satisfaction he finds he has created problems S, a new spiritual void in his being. He finds himself master of the objective physical world but a prime neophyte in the subjectivistic, humanistic world. He has achieved the satisfaction of a good life through his relative mastery of the physical universe, but it has been achieved at a price, the price of not being liked by other men for his callous use of knowledge for himself. He has become envied and even respected, but he is not liked. He has achieved his personal status and material existence at the expense of being rejected even by his use of neurological sub-system F, and begins man's move to his sixth form of existence.

Personalistic Existenence (Sixth Subsistence Level)

At the personalistic level (F-S), man becomes centrally concerned with peace with his inner self and in the relation of his self to the inner self of others. He becomes concerned with belonging, with being accepted, with knowing the inner side of self and other selves so harmony can come to be, so people as individuals can be at peace with themselves and thus with the world. And when he achieves this, he finds he must become concerned with more than self or other selves, because while he was focusing on the inner self to the exclusion of the external world, his outer world has gone to pot. So how he turns outward to life and to the whole, the total universe. As he does so he begins to see the problems of restoring the balance of life which has been torn asunder by his individualistically oriented, self-seeking climb up the first ladder of existence.

As man moves from the sixth or personalistic level, the level of being with self and other men, the seventh level, the cognitive level of existence, a chasm of unbelievable depth of meaning is crossed. The gap between the sixth level (the F-S level) and the seventh (the G-T level) is the gap between getting and giving, taking and contributing, destroying and constructing. It is the gap between deficiency or deficit motivation and growth or abundance motivation. It is the gap between similarity to animals and dissimilarity to animals, because only man is possessed of a future orientation.

Cognitive Existence (First Being Level)

Once we are able to grasp the meaning of passing from the level of being one with others to the cognitive level (G-T) of knowing and having to do so that all can be and can continue to be, it is possible to see the enormous differences between man and other animals. Here we step over the line which separates those needs that man has in common with other animals and those needs which are distinctly human.

Man, at the threshold of the seventh level, where so many political and cultural dissenters stand today, is at the threshold of being human. He is truly becoming a human being. He is no longer just another of nature's species. And we, in our times, in our ethical and general behavior, are just approaching this threshold, the line between animalism and humanism.

Experientialistic Existence (Second Being Level)

At the second being level, the experientialistic level (H-U), man will be driven by the winds of knowledge, and human, not godly, faith. The knowledge and competence acquired at the G-T level will bring him to the level of understanding, the H-U level. If every man leaps to this great beyond, there will be no bowing to suffering, no vassalage, no peonage. Man will move forth on the crests of his broadened humanness rather than vacillate and swirl in the turbulence of his animalistic needs. His problems, now that he has put the world back together, will be those of bringing stabilization to life once again. He will need to learn how to live so that the balance of nature is not again upset, so that individual man will not again set off on another self-aggrandizing binge. His values will be set not by the accumulated wisdom of the elders, as in the B-O system, but by the accumulated knowledge of the knowers. But here again, as always, this accumulating knowledge will create new problems and precipitate man to continue up just another step in his existential staircase.

Applying Gravess Theory to Management

Graves criticizes management training programs for trying, in all too many instances, to change managers' beliefs and ways of behaving so as to bring them more in line with the organization's pre-existing methods and beliefs. For instance, such programs may manage from a hierarchical to a team management.

These programs do not try to fit managerial development to the beliefs and ways of behaving that are those of the managing person," says Graves. They attempt, instead, to get the manager to change his beliefs. When organizations foster this kind of incongruency, they cast the manager into a severe value crisis, which often affects his performance adversely.

A second mistake of management, he says, is that it typically does not manage people the way they want to be managed. For instance, many persons like participation management but others do not, yet management has implicitly assumed that participation affects all persons in more or less the same way. In fact, people with an authoritarian cast of mind or with weak independence needs apparently are unaffected or even negatively affected by an opportunity to participate in decision-making.

Graves's research indicates that a worker with a closed personality normally prefers to be managed by the style congruent with his level of existence. If his personality is still open and growing, he prefers to be managed by a supervisor at the next higher level. For example, a closed personality at the D-Q level prefers a paternalistic form of management, while a worker with an open personality at the same level would like to be managed by E-R methods, which allow more freedom for individual initiative.

Personalistic Values Now Flower in America

Using this framework to approach current American society, we can easily see an efflorescence of personalistic (F-S) values in the popularity of such things as Salem, yoga, the encounter group, the humanistic psychology movement and participatory decision-making in management. By all these means and many others, personalistic (F-S) man endeavors to achieve self-harmony and harmony with others. These individuals do not, of course, see their striving for harmony with the human element as merely a stage they are going through, but as the ultimate, the permanent goal of all life. This short-range vision, which views the current goal as the ultimate goal of life, is shared by human beings at every level of existence for as long as they remain centralized in that particular level.

Using the Theory of Levels, we see that the so called generation gap of the recent past was in reality a values gap between the D-Q and the E-R and F-S levels of existence. For example, many of the parents of F-S youth subscribed to E-R values, which emphasize proving one's worth by amassing material wealth. To individuals operating at this level it was inconceivable that their children might reject competition for cooperation and seek inner self-knowledge rather than power, position and things. Worse yet to the E-R parents was the devotion of these young people to foreigners and minority groups who, according to E-R thinking, deserved their unfortunate condition because the were too weak or too stupid to fight for something better. Thus, the foreigners and minorities were characterized as lazy and irresponsible and the youth who defended them as lily-livered bleeding hearts.

In turn, F-S youth contributed to the confrontation because their civil disobedience and passive resistance offended their parents more than outright violence ever could have. These young people not only challenged Might (and therefore Right), but offered no new Might and Right to replace that which they mocked. Consequently, they were rightly (to the E-R mentality) called anarchists, and it was widely said that such permissiveness was wrecking the values which made America great. Of course, our hindsight now tells us that America was not, in fact, "wrecked," and today one can see a great many of the E-R parents who protested against anarchy getting in touch with themselves at Esalen and advocating theories of participative management.

Another outgrowth of the transition of our society from E-R to F-S values was the de-emphasis of technology. Technology was the principal means by which E-R man conquered the world. He did not, like his ancestor C-P man, use force alone, but rather he attempted to understand the natural laws in order to conquer men and nature. Because of the close historical association of technology with E-R values, the emerging F-S consciousness could not help but view technology as a weapon of conquest. Thus, along with rejecting conquest, F-S man rejected technology and in its place set up its exact opposite: Nature. In other words, the exploration of inner man and a return to nature (including all manner of idealized natural foods) replaced the exploitation of nature and other human beings in a quest for material wealth.

The idea of a future suffered a similar fate. American E-R man was always insistent that he had a great future, a manifest destiny somehow enhanced by never having lost a war. Therefore, F-S man, in his rebellion, was forced to throw the future into the same garbage heap as technology, erecting in its place the here and now.

Picture, if you will, F-S man seated in a yoga position, contemplating his inner self. He has completed the last theme of the subsistence movement of existence. There are no new deficiency motivations to rouse him from his meditations. In fact, he might well go on to contemplating his navel to the day of his death, if he only had some suitable arrangement to care for his daily needs. And it is quite possible for a few F-S individuals to live this way. But what happens when the majority of a population begins to arrive at the F-S level of existence? Who is left to care for their daily needs? Who is left to look after the elaborate technology which assures their survival? If we return to F-S man seated in his yoga position, we see that what finally disturbs him is the roof falling in on his head.

This roof can be called the T problems, the ecological crisis, the energy crisis, the population crisis, limits to growth, or any other such thing which is enough of a disturbance to awaken F-S man. Naturally enough, his first reaction will be that evil technology is taking over and that all the good feeling and greenery which made the Earth great is in the process of being wrecked forever. (We remember that attitude from the days when his father, E-R man, had much the same erroneous notion.) F-S man is correct in the sense that his entire way of life, his level of existence, is indeed breaking down: It must break down in order to free energy for the jump into the G-T state, the first level of being. This is where the leading edge of man is today.

The People that Drive Managers Crazy

Most people in organization in the western world are in the middle levels of existence (D-Q, E-R, and, increasingly, F-S). Managers are used to dealing with such people. Occasionally, however, a manager must deal with people at either a lower or higher level, and then his customary methods fail, Graves says.

People at the C-P level (Egocentric) are found frequently in very impoverished areas. These people exhibit the least capability to perform in a complex industrial world. When a job is available, they do not apply. If they get a job, they do not show up for work or they soon quit. While they are on the job, their habits are so erratic that little work is actually accomplished. Exasperated managers find such people unemployable. Society labels them hardcore unemployed.

To a Gravesian, people at the C-P level are employable, but they must be managed in a special way. The Graves theory holds that C-P people are driven primarily by the need to solve immediate survival problems. Applying the theory, a Gravesian manager would arrange the work situation so that the immediate survival needs of the worker are not threatened and would give him work that can be learned almost immediately.

The manager would also change the hiring requirements so that they do no threaten a C-P person. For instance, the Gravesian manager would simplify and speed up the processing of applications so that people know in minutes if they are hired and, if not hired, are taken immediately to some place where they might find jobs. He would make sure that C-P people are not supervised by self-righteous, do-good managers.

The hard-core unemployed person lives in a world of immediacy, says Graves. Often he must pay money down for almost everything he gets, and because of his immediate reactions to the crises he faces, he may be an absentee problem. To counteract these problems, a member of the organization might be assigned to administer an emergency fund to help the C-P person through difficult periods.

At the opposite extreme, managers must also deal with another group of people whom they find extremely troublesome, the G-T and H-U people. Ironically, these are among the most competent people. They possess knowledge needed to improve productivity in the organization, but often they are kept from improving productivity by ancient policies, inane practices, out-moded procedures and inappropriate managerial styles.

The G-T and H-U people want autonomy, the freedom to do their jobs the best way they know. When management requires such a person to procure permission to institute change when he sees change is needed, it stifles what he can contribute.

The sacred channels of communication seriously hamper the productivity of G-T people, who want to be able to decide when they know what to do. When he doesn't know, the G-T is motivated to seek guidance from those who do know. But a G-T employee's motivation becomes negative when he must waste time going through channels which require him to explain what does not need to be explained to people who do not need to have it explained to them.

The G-T worker reacts negatively when required to ask an administrator's approval for materials he needs in order to be productive. He reacts positively when he can tell his supervisor what he needs to do a job and when the supervisor considers that it is his job to do as his subordinate says. The G-T employee believes that he, not a superior, should make the decisions whenever he is competent to make it, and most G-T workers know that their supervisors are not competent to make the decision.

People who operate at the Being levels are typically competent regardless of their surroundings. Therefore, their productivity is not a function of lower-level incentives. Threat and coercion do not work with them, because they are not frightened people. Beyond a certain point, pecuniary motives do not affect them. Status and prestige symbols, such as fancy titles, flattery, office size, luxurious carpeting, etc., are not incentives to them. Many of them are not even driven by a need for social approval. What is important to them is that they be autonomous in the exercise of their competence, that they be allowed all possible freedom to do what needs to be done as best they can do it. In other words, they want their managers to let them improve productivity the way they know it can be improved. They do not want to waste their competency doing it management's way simply because things always have been done that way.

G-T people are becoming more prevalent, says Graves. They must do their own managing of their own work and of their own affairs. Their procedures must be their own, not those that tradition or group decision-making have established. When G-T employees are autonomous and are properly coupled with jobs that utilize their competence, one can expect optimum productivity from them.

An H-U employee does not resist coercion and restrictions in a flamboyant manner as does the G-T type, but he will avoid any relationship in which others try to dominate him. He must therefore be approached through what Graves calls "acceptance management" - management which takes him as he is and supports him in doing what he wants to do. It is useless, says Graves, to get an H-U employee to subordinate his desires to those of the organization. Instead, the organization must be fitted to him. If he cannot get the acceptance he wants, an H-U employee will quietly build a non-organizationally oriented world for himself and retire into it. He will do a passable but not excellent job. If there is no change in management and he cannot go elsewhere, he will surreptitiously work at what is important to him while putting up a front to management.

Human Progress Can Be Arrested

At this point it might be good to take a closer look at what happens when man changes levels of existence. The process itself is similar to some very basic phenomena in quantum mechanics and brain physiology, suggesting that it may in fact derive from the same laws of hierarchical organization. Basically, man must solve certain hierarchically ordered existential problems which are crucial to him in his existence. The solution of his current problem frees energy in his system and creates in turn new existential problems. (For instance, both the self-centering and other-awareness of the F-S state are necessary if the G-T problems of how life can survive are to be posted.) When new problems arise, higher order dynamic neurological systems are biochemically activated to solve them.

Will man inevitably progress, both as an individual and as a species, to higher levels of existence? Or can he become fixed at some level, even regress? The answer is that man can indeed become fixed at one level, and he can regress. A frightening example of cultural regression to the most primitive level of existence is that of the Ik tribe of Uganda which, after losing its lands, degenerated past any recognizable sign of humanity. (See anthropologist Colin Turnbull's book, The Mountain People.) Many tribes of American Indians at the end of the last century shared a like fate. Despite this, we must remember that the tendency for man to grow to higher states is always present, and may be likened to the force that enables a tree to crack boulders so that each year it can add another ring to its heartwood. Like the tree, man is most often stunted in his growth by external circumstance: poverty, helplessness, social disapproval and the like. Often, the full expression of the level of existence at which man finds himself is simply not possible. Few people, for instance, have the opportunity of fully indulging their E-R values by attempting to conquer man and nature. Consequently, man often is halted at this level and develops the lust for power which is so frequently believed to be universal in man.

Man, the species, must fully realize each level of existence if he is to rise to the next higher level, because only by pursuing his values to their limits can he recognize the higher-order existential problem that these particular values do not apply to. E-R man had to become powerful over nature in order to see that beyond the problem of power was the problem of knowing the inner self: the F-S level. He could not very well coerce or manipulate his neighbor into knowing himself. Therefore, his useless E-R values inevitably began to disintegrate as a way of life. Thus it seems that a moral breakdown regularly accompanies the transition from one level of existence to another. Man drops his current way of perceiving and behaving, and searches his cast-off levels for a way of behaving that will solve his new problem. In his frustration, E-R man may protest that he sacrificed for what he got (D-Q level) or make an appeal to law and order (C-P level) to end the demonstrations against him. All this will be to no avail because, naturally, no lower level behavior will solve his new higher-order problem. E-R man will be forced to take the first steps towards a new way of perceiving and behaving: the F-S system. With his first step he becomes F-S man, both because he is now understanding and respectful of the inner self of others rather than being powerful and manipulation, but because the greater part of his energy is now devoted to the problem of how to achieve community through personal and interpersonal experiencing.

We can therefore see that our time at each level of existence is divided between an embryonic period of identifying the values needed to solve the new existential problem, a period of implementing the values toward the solution of the problem, and a period of values breakdown following the successful solving of the problem. It is this final phase of break-down which causes such periodic dismay in society, but dissolution is necessary so that man can be free to recognize new existential problems. There is, in addition, an appearance of breakdown which results from the realization of the new values themselves, because these new values are so often the exact antithesis of the old. In that sense, the new values do represent the ultimate breakdown of the current basis of society, or of the individual's way of life.

Finally, there is a singular empirical fact associated with man's transitions from one level of existence to another. As our species moves up each step on each ladder of existence, it spends less and less time at each new level. It took literally millions of years for our ancestors to become tribalistic B-O man, while in the technologically advanced nations today man is moving from the E-R level through F-S to G-T in a scant twenty years. There is every reason to expect we will remain for a long time at the G-T level, then a shorter time at the H-U and other second ladder levels. At the G-T level, man will begin the task of subsistence again but in a new and higher order form (the survival of the human race), assuming, of course, that no external circumstances, such as a major war or other catastrophe, intervene to arrest our growth.

Levels of Existence

First Subsistence Level (A-N): Man at this level is motivated only by imperative periodic physiological needs. He seeks to stabilize his individual body functions. This level of existence is perfectly adequate to preserve the species, but it is seldom seen today except in rare instances, as in the Tasaday tribe, or in pathological cases.

Second Subsistence Level (B-O): At this level, man seeks social (tribal) stability. He strongly defends a life he does not understand. He believes that his tribal ways are inherent in the nature of things, and resolutely holds to them. He lives by totems and taboos.

Third Subsistence Level (C-P): Raw, self-assertive individualism comes to the fore at this level, and the term Machiavellian may be used. This is the level where might makes right thinking prevails. There is an aggressive expression of mans lusts, openly and unabashedly by the haves, more covertly and deviously by the have nots. Anyone dealing with the C-P type must resort to the threat of sheer naked force to get him to do anything.

Fourth Subsistence Level (D-Q): At this level, man perceives that living in this world does not bring ultimate pleasure, and also sees that rules are prescribed for each class of people. Obedience to these rules is the price that one must pay for more lasting life. D-Q people generally subscribe to some dogmatic system, typically a religion. These are the people who believe in 'living by the Ten Commandments,' obeying the letter of the law, etc. They work best within a rigid set of rules, such as army regulations.

Fifth Subsistence Level (E-R): People at the E-R level want to attain mastery of the world by learning its secrets rather than through brute force (as at the C-P level). They believe that the man who comes out on top in life fully deserves his good fortune, and those who fail are ordained to submit to the chosen few. E-R people tend to be somewhat dogmatic, but they are pragmatic, too, and when they find something that works better theyll change their beliefs.

Sixth Subsistence Level (F-S): Relating self to other human selves and to his inner self is central to man at the F-S level. Unlike the E-R people, F-S man cares less for material gain or power than he does for being liked by other people. He's ready to go along with whatever everyone else thinks is best. He likes being in groups; the danger is that he gets so wrapped up in group decision-making that little work gets done.

First Being Level (G-T): The first being level is tremendously different from the earlier subsistence levels, says Graves. Here as man, in his never-ending spiral, turns to focus once again on the external world and his use of power in relation to it, the compulsiveness and anxiousness of the subsistence ways of being are gone. Here man has a basic confidence that he, through a burgeoning intellect freed of the constriction of lower level anxieties, can put the world back together again. If not today, then tomorrow. Here he becomes truly a cooperative individual and ceases being a competitive one. Here he truly sees our interdependence with all things of this universe. And here he uses the knowledge garnered through his first-ladder trek in efforts to put his world together again, systemically.

Second Being Level (H-U): People operating in an H-U fashion have been rare in Graves's studies. Almost all of Gravess subjects who so behaved have been in their late fifties and beyond. What typifies them is a peculiar paradoxical exploration of their inner world. They treat it as a new toy with which to play. But even though playing with it, they are fully aware that they will never know what their inner selves are all about. Graves says this idea is best illustrated by a poem of D. H. Lawrence, Terra Incognita.

Summary Table from the Article (click for .pdf version)

Man Now Faces Most Difficult Transition

The present moment finds our society attempting to negotiate the most difficult, but at the same time the most exciting, transition the human race has faced to date. It is not merely a transition to a new level of existence but the start of a new movement in the symphony of human history. The future offers us, basically, three possibilities: (1) Most gruesome is the chance that we might fail to stabilize our world and, through successive catastrophes regress as far back as the Ik tribe has. (2) Only slightly less frightening is the vision of fixation in the D-Q/E-R/F-S societal complex. This might resemble George Orwell's 1984 with its tyrannic, manipulative government glossed over by a veneer of humanitarian sounding doublethink and moralistic rationalizations, and is a very real possibility in the next decade. (3) The last possibility is that we could emerge into the G-T level and proceed toward stabilizing our world so that all life can continue.

If we succeed in the last alternative, we will find ourselves in a very different world from what we know now and we will find ourselves thinking in a very different way. For one thing, we will no longer be living in a world of unbridled self-expression and self-indulgence or in a world of reverence for the individual, but in one whose rule is: Express self, but only so that all life can continue. It may well be a world which, in comparison to this one, is rather restrictive and authoritarian, but this will not be the authority of forcibly taken, God-given or self-serving power; rather it will be the authority of knowledge and necessity. The purpose of G-T man will be to bring the earth back to equilibrium so that life upon it can survive, and this involves learning to act within the limits inherent in the balance of life. We may find such vital human concerns as food and procreation falling under strict regulation, while in other respects society will be free not only from any form of compulsion but also from prejudice and bigotry. Almost certainly it will be a society in which renewable resources play a far greater role than they do today: wood, wind and tide may be used for energy; cotton and wool for clothing, and possibly even bicycles and horses for short trips. Yet while more naturalistic than the world we know today, at the same time the G-T world will be unimaginably more advanced technologically; for unlike F-S man, G-T man will have no fear of technology and will understand its consequences. He will truly know when to use it and when not to use it, rather than being bent on using it whenever possible as E-R man has done.

The psychological keynote of a society organized according to G-T thinking will be freedom from inner compulsiveness and rigidifying anxiety. G-T man, who exists today in ever increasing numbers, does not fear death, nor God, nor his fellow man. Magic and superstition hold no sway over him. He is not mystically minded, though he lives in the most mysterious of mystic universes. The G-T individual lives in a world of paradoxes. He knows that his personal life is absolutely unimportant, but because it is part of life there is nothing more important in the world. G-T man enjoys a good meal or good company when it is there, but doesn't miss it when it is not. He requires little, compared to his E-R ancestor, and gets more pleasure from simple things than F-S man thinks he (F-S man) gets. G-T man knows how to get what is necessary to his existence and doesn't not want to waste time getting what is superfluous. More than E-R man before him, he knows what power is, not to create and use it, but he also knows how limited is its usefulness. That which alone commands his unswerving loyalty, and in whose cause he is ruthless, is the continuance of life on this earth.

The G-T way of life will be so different from any that we have known up to now that its substance is very difficult to transmit. Possibly the following will help: G-T man will explode at what he does not like, but he will not be worked up or angry about it. He will get satisfaction out of doing well but will get no satisfaction from praise for having done so. Praise is anathema to him. He is egoless, but terribly concerned with the rightness of his own existence. He is detached from and unaffected by social realities, but has a very clear sense of their existence. In living his life he constantly takes into account his personal qualities, his social situation, his body, and his power, but they are of no great concern to him. They are not terribly important to him unless they are terribly important to you. He fights for himself but is not defensive. He has no anxiety or irrational doubt but he does feel fear; he seeks to do better, but is not ambitious. He will strive to achieve- but through submission, not domination. He enjoys the best of life, of sex, of friends, and comfort that is provided, but he is not dependent on them.

Read more:
article in The Futurist - Dr. Clare W. Graves