Bruce Sterling’s new nonfiction book, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years is a genial work of futurological speculation…
Sterling knows as well as anyone that it is utter folly to try to predict what the world will actually be like fifty years from now. What he does, instead, is to extrapolate from current trends in our technologically-driven culture, in order to give us a picture of the direction in which we are heading–leaving open the question of whether we will actually get there, as opposed to veering off on some unexpected tangent.
That is to say, Sterling does pretty much the same thing in Tomorrow Now that he does in his science fiction novels, only without the satirical thrust of those latter books.
What we get in Tomorrow Now is a surprisingly sane and sensible view of politics, economics, culture, and technology in the 21st century. Sterling starts the book by rejecting the roles of Dr. Pangloss and Cassandra alike. He doesn’t think that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, but neither does he prophesy apocalyptic disaster. He’s aware of the dangers of environmental destruction, and of the sort of New World Disorder we’ve gotten tastes of, recently, in places like Bosnia and Chechenya; but mostly he writes about what it will be like for us to muddle through, despite the rather extraordinary technological changes we are experiencing. Sterling rejects both the idea that there is nothing new under the sun, and that the changes we are going through are so radical as to mark an absolute break with the past.
Sterling’s discussion includes a lot of useful demystification. 21-century biotechnology will probably mean a lot of genetic redesign, as well as the engineering of bacteria to keep us ingood health, and produce all sorts of useful substances; but it won’t involve cloning and interspecies hybridization on a grand scale. Our lived environment will probably become even far more filled than it already is with pervasive computing devices, but to think that we will download our minds into silicon devices, or that future-generation artificial intelligences will leave humanity in the dust, is to misunderstand the basic nature of computing.
Most important, Sterling reminds us (if we can be reminded of the future) that, even if a Singularity, or radical discontinuity in the human condition, does occur, we shouldn’t project our own apocalyptic fantasies onto it. For “the posthuman condition is banal. It is astounding, and eschatological, and ontological, but only by human standards…. By the new, post-Singularity standards, posthumans are just as bored and frustrated as humans ever were” (297).
The book is a useful antidote, therefore, to the messianic proclamations of AI visionaries like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil, or for that matter of DNA fanatics like its co-discoverer James Watson. (OK, so Watson and Crick didn’t literally discover DNA; they figured out how it was structured, and how it worked; but you get the point).
Politically, Tomorrow Now is more mainstream-liberal, or middle of the road, than I would be. Sterling may well be right that there is no viable alternative, currently, to rampant global capitalism; and he is certainly aware of the downsides of this system, in a way that “New Economy” boosters like Kevin Kelly (whom he warmly praises, but with a grain of salt) are not. But Sterling is too American-pragmatic to have a vision of the structural violence of the world system, in the way that not only Marxists do, but non-Marxist social thinkers like Manuel Castells as well.
Beyond this, my only disappointment with this book is that in certain ways Sterling is too sensible and sane. He is right to deflate fantasies of transcendence, while at the same time reminding us that things will change, in ways that have enormous ramifications, and that we cannot imagine in advance. But I wish–because this is one of the things that I look to good science fiction writers, like Sterling, for–that he had extrapolated a bit further, taken more of a risk of making a fool of himself. Human existence is weird, as Sterling says explicitly (though I can’t seem to find the page reference at the moment): and it has been weird as long as we have been around, this weirdness isn’t just an invention of new digital technologies. But there isn’t as much of this weirdness in Tomorrow Now itself as I would have wished. I guess that’s the peril of writing as intelligently as Sterling does, about something (the future) which it really makes little sense to be intelligent about, since it is unknowable in any case.