WHAT'S THE FUTURE?

When you read most pundits the future is not the one we signed up for. It’s currently predicted as likely to be somewhere between ‘Brave New World’ and ‘The Circle’. As Caitlin Moran observed (and what a brilliant writer she consistently is) the only people creating the future currently are Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook (and I suspect Microsoft is still in the game as is Tesla). They are the forces behind driverless cars, robotics and space travel. We have blindly given them all licence to shape our lives and control our destinies.

Whilst they are creating a future of sorts for us we are living in the present and practising mindfulness, being in the now not in the next. Recent oddities in terms of forecasting have made many people apathetic about the future. Brexit, Trump, North Korea - we’re doomed and we don’t know why or when - let’s meditate…

So there are increasingly those soaked in nostalgia, yearning for a safer past when summers were summers and climate change hadn’t been invented (but remember the Great Smog of 1952) and those in the zone, in the ‘now’ controlling (or who think they are controlling)  the present. The future party has no members apart from those in Silicon Valley.

But the future isn’t so hard.

For a start fast as disruptive change seems there’s always a reversion to the mean - what my old History Master used to call “the swing of the pendulum”. In other words despite the pundits predicting the death of books in the face of the threat of e-books, book sales in 2016 went up (specifically non-fiction and children’s books) and e-book sales went down; Justin King when he was CEO of Sainsbury's was categorically predicting the growth of out of town shopping and the demise of the High Street. Well actually wrong Justin. Everyone’s snapping up small shops now - convenience, as well as online, is the buzzword. And as for the demise of TV? Don’t be daft.  Amazon, Netflix and HBO are transforming the viewing figures.

Donald Trump and other so called business leaders often talk about doing things quickly, changing things fast; complex evolutions are expected in days not months. The future will unfold more slowly with, if we are smart and overall I think the human race is very smart indeed, the continued medical breakthroughs making us healthier, communications technology making us reach and converse with more and more people and things like driverless cars liberating the elderly and allowing them life enriching mobility and artificial intelligence making it possible for us to enhance our own learning capacity. Magnus Carlsen, Norwegian world chess champion plays against computers to improve his game. Of course.

What I do not believe is everything will be delivered by drone or that our lives will be so connected that everything we do will be controlled from our watches.

“Run the bath at my favourite temperature now.”

“No run it yourself, lazy git”

Because the future will not be stupid.