By: Charles-Edouard Bouée
April 15, 2019
Technological progress is growing exponentially and we hazard that the so-called obsolescence of the law attributed to Moore will have no consequence whatsoever on this surge. We are experiencing a tremendous cultural shift in the way we adapt to technological changes. We are pushed to turn our relation to time around and consider the future as preexisting the present. Rapid and non-linear as technological innovation is, any attempt to predict the future based on the observation of the present proves pointless. We now ought to proceed the other way around and draw up today’s priorities based on what we picture as foreseeable and desirable for the future. Imagination is now a key asset to make our way through this bewildering context. In a world where no one can predict what the future holds, the winners will be those who managed to sketch it beforehand.
The Americans understood this before all the others and it is thus hardly surprising that they emerged as the country of prime science fiction. When Isaac Asimov wrote his “laws of robotics” and applied them to all the robots filling his novels, not only did he define what would be considered possible or not but he also influenced our comprehension of the robots which are about to become part of our daily life thanks to technological progress. Even more striking is the text he published in the New York Times on the occasion of the 1964 World Fair where he described the world in 2014. Indeed, he depicted our daily life with exact details, from flat screens to smartphones or frozen food. If Asimov is no soothsayer, he enables the future by giving complete leeway to his unrestricted imagination. Imagination is a key element of the Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs’ success: they picture their final goal and then build the technologies to reach it. It is actually no accident if the epicenter of trailblazing technologies is only some 350 miles from the Dream Factory city of Hollywood.