unthinkable futures

15 years ago, Kevin Kelly (Editor of Wired magazine) and Brian Eno (ambient music guru and super-producer) published a list of “unthinkable futures” – probabilities we tend to dismiss without thinking – in the Summer, 1993  issue of Whole Earth Review.

Their intent was less to correctly predict the future (thus the silliness) and more to predict how unpredictable the actual future would be.

According to Kelly:

Improbability is still a strong bias to overcome. Much that is happening today would have been dismissed as unbelievably bad science fiction only 15 years ago. The US with secret prisons torturing Muslims? Street sweepers in India with their own cell phones? Obesity a contagious disease? A trusted encyclopedia written by anyone? Yeah, right, give me a break.

They’re interesting to ponder, and probably more so today than when they were published. And anything that Eno writes is generally worth considering.

My favorite – “A new profession, meme-inspector, comes into being.”

Would that be bloggers? Read more…