There are fewer and fewer violent deaths, fewer accidents, fewer food poisonings, longer life expectancy, greater opportunities to connect with each other, less unattainable technological challenges, more empathy and tolerance, more equal rights, more dynamic and participatory democracy, fewer nauseating odors. , better quality food, healthier air, a sustained increase in IQ in all the countries where the mass media has been installed...
Yes, it is true that there is still a lot to improve. It is also true that the optimistic progression has its ups and downs, and also that the global financial crisis has partially slowed all these advances. But if we look back just half a century, we will see that everything previously listed has gotten better. That is the thesis of Perfect future, of Steve Johnson.
Rational optimism
Perfect future, of Steve Johnson, has come to remind us with data, statistics and a focus on how the Internet is turning individuals into a more intelligent and harmonious network or superorganism that, ultimately, things are getting better, and that the future, although distant If it is perfect, it is at least getting closer, step by step, towards perfection.
Perfect future. About Progress in the Network Age (Noema)
The arguments used by Johnson are hardly questionable, and are also endorsed by many other experts in areas as dissimilar as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, biotechnology or philosophy. But sometimes he seeks more spectacularity than rigor.. This, consequently, carries burdens, but it also produces positive effects, or at least worthy of admiration: that one can go further than anyone else, and provoke reflections that may illuminate ideas that, otherwise, would have taken decades or centuries to arrive. .
Most of the topics about the apocalypse that is looming over the planet are born, mainly, from fear of change, from the lack of perspective and the lack of readings in anthropology. Johnson also includes the birth of the Internet as the definitive technology, the one that will finally propel humanity beyond its individuality. We'll see if that's the case or not.
–
The news
Books that inspire us: 'Future Perfect' by Steven Johnson
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.