Neuromantic risk management

For those of you who recall the shock of reading ‘Neuromancer’ and who think that the future can be predicted with some measure of certainty, here’s a bit of a wake-up call from William Gibson:

> We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of [as] technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it’s going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that – we have no idea at all now where we are going.

> Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilisation collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That’s a possibility too.

> You can see it in corporate futurism as easily as you can see it in science fiction. In corporate futurism they are really winging it – it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.

[emphasis added] That’s really quite scary. That the pace of change is so vertiginous and so sudden that business is changing before our very eyes.