When I was young, my picture of the future was like that of many Boomers. Shaped by the art of Chesley Bonestell and others, we imagined flying cars, space stations, roads built like conveyor belts and people living on the moon and Mars. The machines were gleaming, stylish creations. Buildings were huge and proud. Guys in jet packs would weld the pieces together, our problems would be solved and new horizons opened up.
I now realize there was an implied assumption about the future that was not apparent in my youth: We would be smart in the future. We would analyze the problems facing us and apply rational decision-making to the alternatives. The people of the future would engineer optimal designs and develop the technologies to implement them. When one project was finished, we would dive into the next opportunity. We would be a smart society and a smart civilization.
The future certainly didn’t turn out the way any of us pictured it. There are no flying cars. But even worse, it turns out that we aren’t smart in the future. There are many smart individuals, but we are collectively stupid. We know how to solve the big problems but we choose not to do it. We know how to develop solutions to difficult problems, but we are choosing not to do it. The capability of our technology has progressed remarkably since my childhood. We know more about chemistry and physics than ever before. Our command of materials and processes and engineering has never been greater. But we aren’t exploiting it. We’re not using our smarts and our capabilities. Even worse, we have people who actively reject expertise and intellect and authority, to our detriment. There are groups of people who claim the big problems facing civilization don’t even exist. Companies who profit from the status quo use their market power to prevent the development of solutions. We can’t begin to properly consider the tradeoffs of solutions when some people won’t agree to the definition of the problem.