André Telles - Re-designing the smart future

The future has always fascinated man. Even before the awakening of civilization as we know it, shamans and tribal leaders performed sorcery, rites and spiritual practices in which they sought clues and answers about the future. At that time, they wanted to know more about climatic conditions, the supply of natural resources, and the propensity for success in places where they settled down.

But the fact is, man has always thought about the future.

This condition is perhaps what really separates us from animals and other beings. They also think about the future, but as species we do it as individuals. We want to improve our lives and enhance our own knowledge in the generation we live in, not just in order to ensure the survival of the generations to come.

Man looks to the future to thus seek success in the present.

This is something that has not changed... until the turn of the last millennium. Never, in all the history of mankind, has the future been so confused with the present. However, before we turn to the way in which new technologies and future perspectives affect todays society, it is perhaps best to go through the exercise of looking ahead to other times of the contemporary world.

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The beginning of the twentieth century was one of the most interesting periods of modern society. European and North American scientists (and even Asians, although we do not know much about their history in the West) left their garages and poorly lit laboratories to conquer the world.

Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, Alfred Nobel, Thomas Edison, Louis Pasteur... hundreds of their inventions, although accompanied by thousands of unsuccessful experiments, drew the outline of the entire twentieth-century society.

Appliances, automobiles and motor vehicles, telecommunication systems, vaccines and modern medical treatments and warlike artifacts are just a few notable items. A small group of perhaps a few dozen people has completely modified the future for at least a century.

Unfortunately, for most of them, concrete results of their inventions and experiments have only occurred generations after their deaths. For example, wireless transmission concepts idealized by Tesla would only become viable almost 100 years after the period in which he lived.

Pasteur succeeded in life, but his real impact on medicine would only be felt decades after his death and mankind would still face dozens of epidemics that would take millions of lives.

Graham Bell watched a few monarchs and millionaires use his invention as a cute curiosity, but he would have to have lived another hundred years to get to know the cell phone.

Alfred Nobel has given the name, up to this date, to the most acclaimed award to the world scientific community, but he may have been depressed when he saw the results from the invention of dynamite.

In the period between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this select group of people saw possibilities that were dozens or even hundreds of years ahead of them. However, technology, resources, and the disposition of society in their time did not enable them to establish in a present form that, which in their minds, seemed completely viable.

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The two world wars have created the mistaken impression that conflict is the only way to create and promote scientific and technological advancement. It is true that both wars, as well as the period between them, have opened up a volume of financial and material resources never previously seen in the scientific community.