A Short Glimpse into the Near Future

"The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed."

- William Gibson

We’re definitely living in interesting times as things are changing rapidly. Nothing stays as it is; mostly in global contexts, there is a massive collateral damage (global financial crisis, global warming) and there are plenty of cracks and new, as of yet, largely unregulated areas where innovative technologies thrive. In the near future, which could be estimated as five to ten years, we will, no doubt, witness a lot of new and exciting developments in economic models, administrative bodies, production industries, data management, social networks, the climate and most importantly, medical practices. The undisputable indicators of these changes will be the shrinking of the economies, the development of a new mindset of what sustainability is, the discovery that governance and administrative systems are failing and the increased frequency of extreme weather events. And the main consequences of these changes will be the tendency to concentrate on values, attitudes and resources that make a difference in the quality of one’s life.

Through implementation of these changes, there will surely be conflicts and the plausible collisions between social classes will intensify within and across national sovereignty borders. With the collapse of democracy and neoliberalism, human rights and obligations will be reengineered collaboratively. As it is the trend as we witness today, the world is dealing with the financial euro crisis with putting the squeeze on the taxpayers that are already overtaxed and leaving the few wealthy living in overabundance and tax free, instead of restructuring their administrations, reducing costs, getting a grip on corruption and concentrating on improving the social cohesion and infrastructure.

Considering the changes we will be facing in the near future, all our information generating capabilities will only reveal the limits of knowledge and the confines of our cognitive abilities. But how should we perceive these exceptional changes? Are our demands, hopes, and desires about the future frivolous? Consulting Science Advisor at the World Trade Institute (WTI), Dr. Dannie Jost says, “Which parameters should change is not the question I would ask. It implies a deterministic approach to a deterministic world. I would invite exploration and I would include discipline in the exploration. The exploration will aid in finding the emerging temporary parameters that can be used to shape the world and create the society that we want. Techno-determinism is not the way to go. Determinism is just not the way that the Universe is built. The Universe is evolving and we are interacting with it albeit on a small scale in the grand scale of things, and in a big way in the small scope of our planet.”

As most these changes influence and reinforce each other, there will be plenty of overlap between relevant fields. Let’s have a quick look into which of these fields we’ll witness the firmest developments and how will these developments manifest. As stated in this survey, concrete drivers built around technologies and global external factors will be:

·       Connections: Ubiquitous networked sensors and computers, the Internet of Things. Everything becomes more networked, with vast implications.

·       The Data Layer: Across the world, there is a layer of data that is growing thicker and denser by the day. It is fed by our online behavior, by sensor networks, by the Internet of Things (IoT).

·       Alternative means of production: The rise of rapid prototyping, 3D printing & open-source hardware.

·       External, global factors: Economic and environmental woes & aging populations in industrialized countries increase the pressure to change, adapt and innovate. Stagnation and preserving the status quo isn’t a viable option.

And some of the key ways these drivers will manifest will be as follows:

·       Small pieces loosely joined: The network as the dominant paradigm in most fields (economy, work, organization, technology). This brings with it a trend towards smaller organizational units – freelancers, single households, startups, local food production, bottom-up innovation.

·       New interfaces, ranging from more human (gestures, etc.) to machine-readable (robots, sensors, Internet of Things).

·       The time is changing: Massive disruption across the board. Nothing stays as it was or is, ranging from economy to organization to education. “Digital” is one of the main drivers, but not the only one.

What will happen to the economies and industries?

As the global economy remains shaky at best, it is expected to go smaller, more granular. Doubtless, the globalization will still survive, even grow prevalent, as the world connects with the third world countries pulling the derailed train of economy, however the more sophisticated markets will shrink in size and concept. This will lead to the further rise of freelancers and talent networks. Innovation will blossom increasingly from the startup and other independent actors rather than huge Research & Development departments. Unable to adapt quickly to the new realities, global governance systems will fail to some degree. As trust in state institutions will be shrinking, we’ll witness a lot more self-reliant communities. One of the manifestations of these community projects is the local food movement which promotes urban gardening while shunning the mass-produced shelf food.

One of the most debated subjects of the last decade was the global shift in the content industries. In the near future, we will most certainly see a period where the product design and development industry will suffer just like the content industry did. Collaborative design processes, open source hardware and 3D printing in all its shapes and forms will uproot this whole industry in ways hard to grasp yet. Particularly the open, flat infrastructures we see evolving in 3D printing today will have profound impacts driven by hobbyists and free market demand alike.

A whole new industry focused on pre-production processes will arise, as opposed to those focused on final products. Instead of IKEA we might go to a cutting and printing place for furniture, toys or spare parts. Physical goods will face piracy in very similar terms as digital goods today when consumers can just print knock-off toys and spare parts. Intellectual property will be redefined yet again.

In the automotive industry, things look a little different as car manufacturers explore new technologies but won’t just let any hobbyist play with their software. They get support from the big tech companies like Facebook and Google. We shouldn’t be surprised as driverless cars start roaming in the near future. Again, gestural interfaces will also help control both your car and your home in more human, intuitive ways. And while we’re putting chips in our environment, let’s not forget pets and humans, either: RFID chips might make a good implant if there’s a valid, convincing use case that is so good that it tops the inherent creepiness we associate with chip implants today.

Even though these new emerging technologies herald an exciting age, I am still a little skeptic about their applicability; not just because of their reliability but the pressure groups of the syndicate corporations holding governance over traditional power supplies. We’ve witnessed to our utter disgust how new technologies using alternative power sources (the electric car, power stations running on wind and solar panels) got the hatchet in the last two decades. And the ongoing struggles to reach more oil reserves to deplete will definitely continue to invade the socio-political structures of the new future.

How will the media and networking influence the future?

The fight for control over and profit from the internet is on and mass media are entering the endgame of this second phase of the web. The established players (broadcasters, telecommunications and infrastructure providers like Time Warner, Verizon, etc.) and the new establishments (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.) will fight it out. And we can certainly expect nasty lawsuits, mergers and acquisitions and plenty of chaos. In the short term, this is likely to be at the expense of consumers. Media and content industries will have to re-invent themselves bottom-up to cope with change and harness new technologies.

Media outlets don’t have the basic understanding to see what’s going on, so how could they even begin to harness the change? It’s important to note that this is what happens at the organizational level – individuals inside the media outlets might be very well versed, yet there are internal and external factors that prevent appropriate action. In some cases the organization chart gets in the way, in others the profit margin just doesn’t easily allow major changes to the otherwise “functioning” business. Working around these organizational restrictions is a major road block. Again, size matters as smaller units are more agile.

Social media services are run by companies and thus legitimately need to earn money. The rules of their users’ consent and privacy will be put to the test. The privacy wars will be one of the big conflicts in the years to come. And there’s this snippet we should always remember when social media is concerned: if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. If you’re not paying, you’re being sold.

Networking concepts, and especially social networks, are the absolute paradigm, now more than ever. Decentralization means a redistribution of power. It also means that if you pull one string, something might unravel in unexpected places. If there’s one thing that seems certain, it’s that we’re headed for more complexity, not less. Networks help us overcome growth barriers. This holds true for the small (self-reliant or mutually supportive communities) as well as for larger societal challenges. Just to name a few: finding better solutions for outdated copyright laws and industry protection. More flexible work visa regulations for a globally mobile workforce (including tax models and pension plans) that should move with the person. While easily explained historically, the paperwork associated with moving and working internationally creates barriers that stand in the way of global talent distribution and equal chances.

On the other hand, not all things look bright. We are becoming ever more digitally connected. Yet this does not mean that we will always feel more connected on a personal level. There will be the occasional feeling of intense loneliness, as well as a demand and need for smaller, more protected social networks. Think about Google+ circles and Instagram. The group/list/circle concept is as yet only rudimentarily developed. We think that will change as social software and non-human actors grow more sophisticated.

What about the technology leading us?

We've established the dominance of the digital already. Its younger, but no less powerful sisters, are ubiquitous 3D printing and rapid prototyping as well as the Internet of Things. Overall, we expect networked technology to become even more ubiquitous and more invisible. This is right at the intersection of two notions I mentioned before: everything becomes smaller and more granular, and there’s a new data layer spanning all aspects of our lives.

We used to like our technology visible as a sign of high tech quality – we proudly displayed our TVs, stereos, and computers. That was the trend back then and it stood out. But as technology became ubiquitous, we entered a phase of humanized and intuitive technology, popularized by the likes of Minority Report and iPhones. Now we are seeing the rise of invisible technology – technology simply baked into daily life, utilized but non-intrusive.

From a design perspective, this changes a few things. A networked environment can and should be able to react more contextually and more appropriately to our needs. Interfaces should become more subtle; gestural interfaces should proliferate and turn technology even more into a true extension of ourselves. Ambient technology ranging from playful applications to more work-related tools like interactive whiteboards become more powerful, and if not more useful, then at least smarter. As the Strategy Director of Undercut, Mike Arauz says that, “The proliferation of gestural interfaces (iPhones and Android touch-screen mobile phones, iPads and other touch-screen tablets, and XBox Kinect-type motion-driven interfaces) will have a quiet, yet seismic effect on disintegrating the boundary between the technological and the human. In the more distant future when we take the integration of digital/computer with our physical and mental selves for granted, we’ll look back on these few years as one of the major milestones along that road, due in large part to how gestural interfaces contributed to making technology a true extension of ourselves.”

Consumer electronics will be better designed and much better networked then today, thanks to the open web. Once it becomes industry best practice to put APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) on our gadgets and services and we can more easily make our things talk to each other, our experience will be a league better.

(At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop.")

The rise of indie tech movements isn’t going to slow anytime soon. Add the more techy flavor of the DIY/craft (Do It Yourself) scene, physical computing and group funding and you get a pretty potent mix. This means a massive change in how we perceive physical goods. If that doesn’t replace the current system of massive, mainstream-oriented production, then at least it will complement it through small production runs and mass customization. This will definitely be the the real thing, not swapping colored pieces of plastic. Remixing will increasingly be applicable to physical goods, like toys. Today we see only the tip of the iceberg, the equivalent of the home computing movement in the 70s. Industrial production as we know it today will experience a profound disruption.

While multi-purpose devices like the iPad will grow in popularity, they will not at all kill single-purpose devices like the Kindle. This follows a rough pattern. New products will end up as features in multi-purpose devices for less demanding consumers, while power users will always favor dedicated devices. The core of adaption stays in the software and the surrounding ecosystem. As iOS and Android have shown us, functionally largely equivalent devices and services can be used to create very different types of ecosystems.

What about healthcare?

A field that will see massive change is the health and fitness sector. Over the last couple of years we’ve gotten a first glimpse at where things are going through the Quantified Self movement. There’s a lot more to come, though. What we know today as the Quantified Self (QS), the measurement of body and behavioral data for further analysis, will become more embedded in our daily lives as sensors get cheaper and network usage gets both easier and more ubiquitous. QS will get a simpler, more snappy name; seem less strange as applications are mainstreamed and become easier to use; be more hidden and embedded. The challenge will be to find more meaning and relevance in the measurements and, as boundaries between humans and technology grow ever more blurry, to make sure that the necessary privacy safeguards are in place. Non-human actors, namely bots in both the software and the hardware sense, will find lots of use in medical contexts.

3D printing has been around for a while but now it’s being applied to medicine in ways such as being able to scan the remaining leg of a patient that’s missing one from an accident. It can then build a prosthetic leg with skin and size that matches. 3D printing is integrating with the fast-moving world of stem cells and regenerative medicine with 3D ink being replaced by stem cells. In the future we’ll probably use 3D printing and stem cells to make libraries of replacement parts. It will start with simple tissues and eventually maybe we’ll be printing organs.

With the implementation of networking and crowdsourcing technologies into social health networks, we will be able to communicate online with doctors, share our individual experiences about diseases, treatments and healthcare facilities and use mobile applications utilizing artificial intelligence.

Education and Culture

More educational material than ever before is available online for free. Yet questions of how to curate and how to validate & certify knowledge acquired this way remain. Will a Harvard degree stay the most desirable standard of education? Which institutions could provide validation services?

School design, after hardly changing for the better part of the last century, is taking a sharp turn towards corporate settings. This is just one of many symptoms of the corporate influence on education. It’s a double-edged sword: on one hand, big companies step in where governments don’t provide the best education, and help get students ready for their careers. On the other hand, this kind of education is aimed primarily at streamlining corporate careers. Do we want a Google University? How would it be biased? Is it a bad influence or good for choice? As a researcher at the Faculty of Art, Brighton University, Dr. Georgina Voss says that, “Increased awareness that the ‘democratization’ of technology is still a limited process, and that people who can engage in it are still those in regions with fast broadband, access to a free/open internet, access to tablets/PCs/smartphones etc. Aiming to create inclusive processes of social/political/cultural participation, rather than privileging those who already have substantial social and technological capital. In practical terms this means keeping libraries open – maybe opening more of them – as they may be the only space where many citizens can access the internet; not shifting educational tools entirely to ‘e-books’ and online learning; recognizing that digital techs complement, not replace, paper.”

In the face of even stronger globalization, the need for cultural identity grows stronger again. What will be the primary point of cultural reference? Nation, city, block, tribe, operating system?

Cities have always been a focal point for innovation and early tech adoption. We expect urban spaces to open up to all kinds of connected things, ranging from smart screen solutions to responsive buildings and vehicles.

Cultural identity, as I mentioned above, might be provided or at least fostered on the local level. Think about urban “villages” within cities, strong tribe-like connections. These “tribes” might be defined regionally, within the city, or by shared interests, spread out across several cities.

Either way, we can expect that cities will become more responsive, both on an architectural and a transportation level. Truly interesting things won’t happen in the planned corporate cities of East Asia, but in the messy underbellies of big, organically grown cities like New York, Hong Kong, Berlin, Rio and Shanghai.

Now where does all that leave us?

The cultural and socio-economic implications of all these things are huge and there is a massive difference between our expectations and our hopes. In a nutshell, we expect culture to thrive while parts of the content industries fail. Yet, the overall global economic structures will lead to specific uncertainties that foster small, bottom-up business and innovation.

We hope that the Third Industrial Revolution (more about it on references) will provide apt solutions for the more-than-just-interesting design challenges the world faces.

We hope that designers will put their skills to use to design for a better world, and focus on values, attitudes and resources that increase quality of life.

We hope that governments invest massively in research and development to foster innovation beyond the high-risk, financially driven free market.

We hope that we will, on a global as well as local scale, be able to close the growing technology gap between rich and poor. Technology can empower and democratize, or it can be exclusive. We think that inclusion is the key.

We hope to find a balance between access and security, between convenience and control, between global and local needs. All of these dichotomies represent legitimate needs and agendas that often are highly complex. Yet this is where we, as a society, need all the smart minds we can find.

We hope that our networks, including the Web and the Internet of Things, will be free and open, as this is the basic foundation for true innovation. To harness the smarts of the tech community, we need a true read-write web.

We hope to see more mature and more valuable social networking software. More nuance and sophistication, more focus on user needs than marketers’ needs. In other words, not just iterations of Facebook or Twitter, but a different paradigm.

We see some big drivers of change as outlined in the beginning. Across the field and in all disciplines, things are getting more connected. This holds true for the global – world, country, economy, internet – as well as the super local – our homes, our gadgets, and our bodies. As I've stated earlier, the network is the absolute paradigm and if there’s one thing that seems certain, it’s that we’re headed for more complexity, not less.

Reference:

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=219YybX66MY

2. http://thirdwaveberlin.com/2011/11/the-quantified-self-in-health-and-lifestyle/

3. http://thirdwaveberlin.com/2011/12/quantified-self-data-privacy/

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_it_yourself

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_Self

6. http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/01/healthtech-2012/

7. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/

8. http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

Where is the Science Fiction?

The illuminating light of science fiction’s ‘Golden Age’ is finally dimming to leave the stage to the ambiguous darkness of ‘exhausted’ genre crossing. Most of the science fictional and the futuristic visions of the future nowadays have an inclination towards ambiguity, negativism, hopelessness, unsightliness and uncertainty – and it is for a good reason to some extent. We, as humans, have a melancholic tendency for destroying ourselves, the environment that we were supposed to co-exist with is dying at our hands, nearly eighty percent of the world’s population is ‘believing in – living according to the doctrines of’ one of the numerous dogmatic religions, and our mistrust and misuse of new technologies makes it hard to give up the past. In times like these, science fiction has always had concrete insights into the future that would shape the roadmaps for many technological improvements, sociological theories and economical behaviors. However, as science fiction writers failed to identify this culture-wide conceptual blockage of futuristic visions, we started to experience inevitable dystopic outcomes, insurmountable sense of detachment from the world, and a desperate clinging to ambiguous ‘fantastic’ as a last resort for backgrounds in today’s ‘science fiction’ (novels, short stories, movies, TV shows, etc.).

Currently, most writers of the genre no longer attempt to depict the future since the future is now considered to be out of limits. The world that we’re living in is perceived as ever-changing and any attempt to predict the future would eventually be deemed as a futile effort. However, without confronting this particular difficulty, as expected from the genre, science fiction propounds this intellectual inaccessibility of the future as a cultural event known as ‘the singularity’. The term was popularized by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge and futurist Ray Kurzweil, and it is, generally speaking, the point at which human and machine intelligences concurrently start to increase in both size and speed, resulting in a cultural change with an inclination towards the infinite. I won’t go into detail and try to explain singularity in scientific terms, since that might be a topic for another write-up and I’m just scrutinizing the fact that the genre writers are using the term as a professional dodge. As the British critic Paul Kincaid reveals, “Somewhere amidst the ruins of cyberpunk in the 1980s, we began to feel that the present was changing too rapidly for us to keep up with. And if we didn’t understand the present, what hope did we have for the future? The accelerating rate of change has inevitably affected the futures that appear in our fictions. Things happen as if by magic […] or else things are so different that there is no connection with the experiences and perceptions of our present.”

After failing to generate an encouraging insight into humanity’s future, science fiction writers responded to this issue by promoting ‘inwardness’ and turned their back on the world since they concluded it would be more fun and less risky to write about less challenging topics instead. As many critics have pointed out, science fiction’s failure to engage with the future is a direct reflection of our culture’s dilemma as a whole. We are now so utterly and indistinguishably wedded to the ideals of neoliberalism and the doctrines of capitalist democracies, it is merely impossible to imagine a future without a capitalist system. This issue was prominently evident in the aftermath of the financial mortgage crisis recently when the banks across the world began to collapse. However, lacking their own plans to replace these neoliberal democracies, political warheads just stood back and pumped millions of dollars into the global economy in hopes that the capitalist system would find its right course again.

However, the writers of the genre never bothered to inquire about the facts that led to this socio-economic and cultural exhaustion. Instead, as I’ve stated before, they turned inwards and started producing materials depicting an ironic detachment from the world. The ‘fantastical’ and ‘metaphysical’ backgrounds were deemed necessary as the genre writers were intentionally blurring the boundaries of science-fiction and fantasy-fiction. As Kincaid writes, “This is a notion that has clearly taken root with today’s writers since they consistently appropriate the attire of fantasy for what is ostensibly far-future science fiction, even to the extent of referring ‘un-ironically’ to wizards and spells and the like.”

This intentional melting of different genres in a pot, this criss-crossing of different genres with different origins, this ambiguity, this fogginess is called the “New Weird”, which began in the 1990’s and developed as a subgenre or continuation of the speculative ‘weird fiction’. After giving a break to science fiction for more than ten years, I decided to return to the genre with contemporary writers and award winners and started reading China Miéville, Peter F. Hamilton, N. K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor. And what struck me most was the ambiguity of socio-economic structures of the fictional worlds created in most of the novels of these writers, the feeling of detachment from the world, the inescapable inclination towards dystopic futures and the moral fogginess materializing on the face of total post-apocalyptic scenarios. At first I thought that might just be a coincidence on my part for choosing those writers and after a brief search I found some articles tackling with the blurring of the traditional boundaries of the genres. In one of these essays, author Michael Cisco writes, "The “New Weird,” as I’ve said, is a topic for critics and not so much for writers. Nothing could be more unenlightening or useless than a New Weird manifesto. What strikes the observer is precisely the spontenaiety with which so many different writers, pursuing such obviously disparate literary styles, should vaguely intersect in this way. Instead of a set of general aims, we have a great proliferation of correspondences on a more intimate level, like a sprawling coincidence of idiosyncratic choices.”

When asked, author Cisco explains that the New Weird does not promote ideology and purpose but is actually about relationships and influences. Which writer read what before they started writing and who influenced whom? Which writer used that really cool twist in my story before? The genre is under constant danger with the sterile notions and writing techniques stripped out of context. And according to Mark Fisher, this purging of the genre, and therefore the culture, of both history and politics is a by-product of capitalism. He then goes on to explain that, “The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence; which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts.”

(Mark Fisher on our current cultural malaise, recorded at the DIY Conference, 2012)

As it’s not that hard to guess, literature isn't the only medium that is plagued with this ambiguity. This exhausted charade can be experienced through most of the TV shows and movies that are deemed as science-fiction. I won’t go into too much detail explaining why these productions lack the sincerity to claim a ‘sci-fi’ tag attached to their titles, however I’ll just notify the most obtrusive aspects of them. In the critically acclaimed and criticized Alien prequel ‘Prometheus’, a subversive creation myth is introduced in the subtext of the movie, however most of the provoking questions were left unanswered since the writers could not bring the themes together in a comprehensible way. In the TV series ‘Fringe’, our agents are working for a special unit called the ‘fringe department’ and that term couldn’t be used more fittingly since particularly after the second season of the TV show, the audience is bombarded with ambiguous notions about parallel worlds and paranormal speculations about alien technologies. ‘Dramatization’ is a huge part of these shows, however getting the aid of fantastical to account for the phenomena presented there just adds salt to the wound that is blurring of the genres – especially when the show claims to be a serious speculative fiction about science. To exemplify, TV shows like ‘Lost’, ‘Alcatraz’ and ‘Terra Nova’ and movies like ‘Signs’, ‘The Fountain’ and ‘Knowing’ (and I’m deliberately omitting Marvel and DC Universe adaptations) are all either creating distinctive detachment from the world or choosing the fantastical or mystical over scientific facts to explain phenomena or both. In most of these productions, the science fiction theme could safely be removed from the background and they could be replaced within a fantastical or historical setting.

One other deficiency of the contemporary science fiction I witnessed, though this is experienced largely on novels and short stories, is that the genre writers are lacking the urge to generate reasonable productivity and insight for solving real life problems. Instead, some of the writers of the genre create alternative timelines and history for the Western societies to get a chance to adopt a fictional past without the white liberal guilt. We actually had a glimpse of this sub-genre with the Steampunk tradition prominently in the 1980’s. Let’s have another look at the definition of this sub-genre for argument’s sake and move on from there: Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery, especially in a setting inspired by industrialized Western civilization during the 19th century, or a post-apocalyptic environment. Therefore, steampunk works are often set in an alternate history of the 19th century's British Victorian era or American "Wild West", in a post-apocalyptic future during which steam power has regained mainstream usage, or in a fantasy world that similarly employs steam power. Steampunk perhaps most recognizably features anachronistic technologies or retro-futuristic inventions as people in the 19th century might have envisioned them, and is likewise rooted in the era's perspective on fashion, culture, architectural style, and art. Such technology may include fictional machines like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or the modern authors Philip Pullman, Scott Westerfeld, and China Mieville. Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history-style presentations of such technology as lighter-than-air airships, analog computers, or such digital mechanical computers as Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace's Analytical Engine.

This lack of historical truth and foundation of the Steampunk is what makes it alluring in the first place, since it offers the Western societies a way out of their guilt trip. These fictional pasts offered by the sub-genre give the readers a chance to distance themselves from their real colonial past, and thus the racism, sexism, homophobia and social prejudice and inequality. And according to me, while these writers are re-writing the past and replacing the irritating truths with fictional myths of the new age, they’re just imposing a postmodern and ironic detachment from both the historical record and political realities of our era.

Some might ponder whether I’m against the escapism generated by this sub-genre and I wouldn't hesitate to imply that I’m a daunt supporter of fantasy-fiction and furthermore, am still working on another write-up about that specific genre. However, as I've stated before, this article is mainly about blurring of the genres to create an ambiguous movement that is detached from the world, unable to create meaningful insight into the future. And contemporary science fiction writers are facing a challenge to widen the cracks of the fractured polish of capitalism, peer into the future and write insightful fiction that would excite the reader. And these futures, although fictional, should get their feedback from our age, since creating a future is not necessarily enough – science fiction writers ‘must’ envision futures that is currently thought of as unimaginable.

As governments, economies and financial enterprises are stumbling on the brink of devastation and the elite are acquiring riches beyond measure, the Western dream is shattering. Deprived of new ideas and concepts and horrified by the responsibility of having to keep the decaying system alive, the Western political elite are bringing back the feudal hierarchy by creating artificial enemies and forcing armies to fight outsiders. Having been stripped of their identity, culture, solidarity, unity and dignity, the Westerners have dutifully ignored the warning signs and carried on with buying more useless stuff. What we need right now is interpretations of the future rooted from our present, since the future is not what just lies ahead; it is what we’re making with every thought and action of our living each day. The science fiction genre should definitely think in new terms, interpret the future by looking from different angles and try innovative ways to project insightful scenarios.

Reference:

1. http://tonkafran.deviantart.com/art/science-fiction-125289025

2. http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=904&fulltext=1

3. http://ruthlessculture.com/2012/10/03/cowardice-laziness-and-irony-how-science-fiction-lost-the-future/

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw9dyGEVYUA&feature=channel&list=UL

5. http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/10/the-future-is-not-a-land-of-enchantment-on-sfs-exhaustion/

6. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/mievilles-anticlimaxes/

7. http://www.nerds-feather.com/2012/10/interview-paul-kincaid-is-sf-exhausted.html

8. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/11/2512.html

9. http://elflands2ndcousin.com/2012/11/06/what-is-science-fiction-for/

10. http://darusha.ca/blog/where-is-the-serious-sf/

11. http://davidbrin.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/has-21st-century-science-fiction-gone-cowardly-or-worse-nostalgic/

Why Are We Happy?

First of all, let us delve into the definition of happiness. Happiness is thought of as the good life, flourishing, well-being, joy, prosperity, pleasure and freedom from suffering. The pursuit of happiness is deemed as a fundamental right in almost all societies. But what do we actually know about happiness? Are we born with it? Can we study it? Why are we happy and how can we be happier? What makes us happy? What makes us unhappy?

We want to be happy, and we can say whether we are or not, but can happiness actually be defined, studied and measured? Psychologists say yes as an answer to this question. Positive psychology is “the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.” These researchers’ work includes studying strengths, positive emotions, resilience, and happiness. According to these researchers, only studying psychological disorders gives us just part of the picture of mental health. We will learn more about well-being by studying our strengths and what makes us happy. The hope is that by better understanding human strengths, we can learn new ways to recover from or prevent disorders, and may even learn to become happier.

Since happiness is so subjective, can it really be measured and studied scientifically? Researchers say yes. They believe that we can reliably and honestly self-report our state of happiness and increases and decreases in happiness. After all, isn’t our own perception of happiness what matters? And if we can report it, scientists can measure it. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert compares this to optometry: “Optometry is another one of those sciences that is built entirely on people's reports of subjective experience. The one and only way for an optometrist to know what your visual experience is like is to ask you, ‘Does it look clearer like this or (changing the view) like this?’

Why are we happy?

Happier people are more likely to live longer and tend to be healthier, more successful, and more socially engaged than people who describe themselves as less happy. But what are the causes for happiness? And can we directly alter how happy we are?

Researchers have explored three basic sources of happiness: genetics, including temperament and personality; life circumstances, such as wealth and health; and our own choices. We tend to overestimate the importance of life circumstances in how happy we are.  We think if only we had more money, or a better job, or fell in love, that we would be happier. And we sometimes underestimate how much control we have over our own happiness. Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, in her book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want, analyzed studies and reports that 50% of our happiness is set by our genes, 10% by life circumstances beyond our control, and 40% by our own actions.

Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has done research demonstrating the positive effects of experiencing emotions that cause us to be happier on a regular basis. Fredrickson demonstrated that positive emotions “undo” some of the physical effects of stress, such as increased heart rate. Study subjects who experienced a positive emotion returned to a normal resting heart rate more quickly after experiencing stress than subjects who had not experienced a positive emotion.

The broaden-and-build theory describes how positive emotions broaden our outlook on life and help us build skills for stressful times. Fredrickson points out that, negative emotions—anger and fear, for instance—evolved to narrow our focus and help us get out of a threatening situation safely. Positive emotions, on the other hand—like kindness, amusement, interest, and gratitude—put us in a frame of mind to explore the world around us and build a larger repertoire of actions that we can draw on in stressful times. Fredrickson sees a parallel in the animal kingdom. Think, for instance, of how a cat playing with a toy is “practicing” to catch prey. People playing and laughing over a game of softball may be strengthening social ties, increasing their physical health, sharpening reflexes, and increasing their confidence. 

Positive emotions are the “fuel” for resilience. They help people find meaning in ordinary and difficult events. Finding meaning in life events leads to more positive emotion, which in turn leads to a greater ability to find meaning and purpose. Fredrickson calls this an “upward spiral” of greater well-being.

Fredrickson and her colleagues have analyzed people’s ratio of positive to negative emotions in various situations, including individuals, marriages and work teams, and found that a ratio of three to one positive emotions to negative emotions is the point at which people tend to flourish and thrive. So while there are strong influences on our happiness—genetics and temperament and, to some extent, life circumstances—there are actions and choices we can make with the other 40% to cultivate positive emotions daily and greater happiness over our lifetime.

Why are we ‘not’ happy?

Most of us have a mental list of what would make us happier. Our culture celebrates the pursuit of money, fame, good looks, material possessions, health, love and power. Yet we’re often disappointed—even when we do get what we want. Research confirms that some of the things we think will make us happy don’t, and researchers are learning more and more about why that is.

Having enough income to meet basic needs and live above the poverty level is very important to happiness. Beyond that, however, research suggests that more wealth does not translate to greater happiness. Why is this? Research suggests that we’re good at adapting; we’re bad at predicting; our brains are wired for negative emotions; and we’re looking in the wrong places. As Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says:

“We should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. But when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk. When our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded, we're prudent; we're cautious; we're thoughtful. When our fears are unchecked and overblown, we're reckless, and we're cowardly. The lesson I want to leave you with from these data is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience.”

‘Natural’ or ‘synthetic’ happiness?

What are these terms? Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted. And in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind. Why do we have that belief? Well, it's very simple. What kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it?

According to Gilbert, happiness can be synthesized and synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you get when you get exactly what you were aiming for. Synthetic happiness acts like our psychological immune system.  It works to keep us happy.  It’s a system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change our views of the world so we can feel better about the worlds we find ourselves in.  It works best when we’re totally stuck, when we are trapped.  This is the difference between dating and marriage.  In dating, you look to get what you want, in marriage, you find a way to like what you've got.

(In his TED2004 talk, Dan Gilbert, author of "Stumbling on Happiness," explains his idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want and our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.)

Psychologist Ed Diener has a finding and he says, “The frequency of your positive experiences is a much better predictor of your happiness than is the intensity of your positive experiences.” When we think about what would make us happy, we tend to think of intense events—going on a date with a movie star, winning a Pulitzer, buying a yacht. But Diener and his colleagues have shown that how good your experiences are doesn't matter nearly as much as how many good experiences you have. Somebody who has a dozen mildly nice things happen each day is likely to be happier than somebody who has a single truly amazing thing happen. So wear comfortable shoes, give your wife a big kiss, sneak a french fry. It sounds like small stuff, and it is. But the small stuff matters. It helps explain why it’s so hard for us to forecast our effective states. We imagine that one or two big things will have a profound effect. But it looks like happiness is the sum of hundreds of small things.

The happiest person in the world

Let’s meet Matthieu Ricard, the happiest person in the world. He is a Buddhist monk, an author, translator, and photographer. He has lived, studied, and worked in the Himalayan region for over forty years. Matthieu Ricard was a volunteer subject in a study performed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison's on happiness, scoring significantly beyond the average obtained after testing hundreds of other volunteers.

According to Ricard, “Happiness can’t be reduced to a few agreeable sensations. Rather, it is a way of being and of experiencing the world—a profound fulfillment that suffuses every moment and endures despite inevitable setbacks. The paths we take in search of happiness often lead us to frustration and suffering instead. We try to create outer conditions that we believe will make us happy. But it is the mind itself that translates outer conditions into happiness or suffering. This is why we can be deeply unhappy even though we “have it all”—wealth, power, health, a good family, etc.—and, conversely, we can remain strong and serene in the face of hardship.”

(What is happiness, and how can we all get some? Biochemist turned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard says we can train our minds in habits of well-being, to generate a true sense of serenity and fulfillment in his talk in TED2004)

When people experience “moments of grace”, or “magical moments” in daily life, while walking in the snow under the stars or spending a beautiful moment with dear friends by the seaside, what is really happening? All of a sudden, they have left their burden of inner conflicts behind. They feel in harmony with others, with themselves, with the world. It is wonderful to fully enjoy such magical moments, but it is also revealing to understand why they feel so good: pacification of inner conflicts; a better sense of interdependence with everything rather than fragmenting reality; and a respite from the mental toxins of aggression and obsession. All these qualities can be cultivated through developing wisdom and inner freedom. This will lead not just to a few moments of grace but to a lasting state of well-being that we may call genuine happiness.

Reference:

1. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

2. http://sourcesofinsight.com/synthetic-happiness/

3.http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/sustainable-happiness/this-is-your-brain-on-bliss

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthieu_Ricard

5.http://www.ted.com/talks/matthieu_ricard_on_the_habits_of_happiness.html