Футуризм от Нассима Талеба

Нассим Николас Талеб, научивший мир видеть разницу между закономерностями и случайными последовательностями, которые выглядят как закономерности, опубликовал свое мнение о футуризме (это отрывок из его новой книги). Большинство футуристов, публикующие прогнозы уже не первое тысячелетие, страдают от неомании – желания предсказать чего-то нового ради чего-то нового. Хотя в реальности мы до сих пор пользуемся изобретениями, которым сотни и тысячи лет:

Tonight I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least 25 centuries). I will be walking there wearing shoes hardly different from those worn 5,300 years ago by the mummified man discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps. At the restaurant, I will be using silverware, a Mesopotamian technology, which qualifies as a “killer application” given what it allows me to do to the leg of lamb, such as tear it apart while sparing my fingers from burns. I will be drinking wine, a liquid that has been in use for at least six millennia. The wine will be poured into glasses, an innovation claimed by my Lebanese compatriots to come from their Phoenician ancestors, and if you disagree about the source, we can say that glass objects have been sold by them as trinkets for at least twenty-nine hundred years. After the main course, I will have a somewhat younger technology, artisanal cheese, paying higher prices for those that have not changed in their preparation for several centuries.

Закавыка, по его мнению состоит, в нашем видении сегодняшнего мира как стартовой точки, к которой мы приплюсовываем различные штучки, которые, по нашему мнению, будут окружать человека будущего. Типа вместо одежды на нас будет какой-то космический костюм будущего, вместо машины какой-то сверхзвуковой самоуправляемый мотоцикл, и т.д. Между тем, успешные технологические достижения последних лет характерны тем, что не приплюсовывают к нашей жизни новые объекты, а минусуют их:

Technology is at its best when it is invisible. I am convinced that technology is of greatest benefit when it displaces the deleterious, unnatural, alienating, and, most of all, inherently fragile preceding technology. Many of the modern applications that have managed to survive today came to disrupt the deleterious effect of the philistinism of modernity, particularly the 20th century: the large multinational bureaucratic corporation with “empty suits” at the top; the isolated family (nuclear) in a one-way relationship with the television set, even more isolated thanks to car-designed suburban society; the dominance of the state, particularly the militaristic nation-state, with border controls; the destructive dictatorship on thought and culture by the established media; the tight control on publication and dissemination of economic ideas by the charlatanic economics establishment; large corporations that tend to control their markets now threatened by the Internet; pseudo-rigor that has been busted by the Web; and many others. You no longer have to “press 1 for English” or wait in line for a rude operator to make bookings for your honeymoon in Cyprus. In many respects, as unnatural as it is, the Internet removed some of the even more unnatural elements around us. For instance, the absence of paperwork makes bureaucracy — something modernistic — more palatable than it was in the days of paper files.

Технологический прогресс характеризируется не только торжеством технологий над каким-то процессом, который до этого был нетехнологичен, но и заменой плохих технологических нововведений:

The shoe industry, after spending decades “engineering” the perfect walking and running shoe, with all manner of “support” mechanisms and material for cushioning, is now selling us shoes that replicate being barefoot — they want to be so unobtrusive that their only claimed function is to protect our feet from the elements, not to dictate how we walk as the more modernistic mission was. In a way they are selling us the calloused feet of a hunter-gatherer that we can put on, use, and then remove upon returning to civilization.

…

And the great use of the tablet computer (notably the iPad) is that it allows us to return to Babylonian and Phoenician roots of writing and take notes on a tablet (which is how it started). One can now jot down handwritten, or rather fingerwritten, notes — it is much more soothing to write longhand, instead of having to go through the agency of a keyboard.

Футуризм от Нассима Талеба