A journalist recently asked me to comment as a futurist on the supposed disaster that some foresee for 2012.
In the Drake Magazine article “The Sky Is Falling” (under Features) I am quoted as saying:
Not everyone reading into the Mayan calendar sees the end of the world. Josh Calder …. doesn’t think anything will happen. To him, the Mayan-calendar madness is just another in a long line of end of the world theories. As a futurist, Calder’s job is to predict the future for corporations and government agencies. When examining trends in consumer behavior or national security, the 2012 date has never come up in his work. “Full destruction might be achieved by an astronomical event or a physics accident, but both of these seem a very low probability,” he says.
Calder believes worrying about 2012 is a waste of time and energy. “There has never been any solid evidence of magical foreknowledge of the future,” he says. “It is illogical to think that this will suddenly change.” Astronomically, he says the end of the world is set for billions of years in the future and, though he knows of a few ways we could be in trouble, Calder doesn’t seem too worried. “With luck, we will avoid them,” he says.
The new British version of Wired included a comment from me on genetics.
“We expect that this price will continue to drop, making some form of genetic analysis accessible to large numbers of people within the next decade,” [Linda Avey] says. Tamar Kasriel likens sequencing to a “Damocletian threat”, but Josh Calder disagrees. “The list of things we can partially prevent or prepare for is going to grow long enough that we’re going to want to do it.”
I’m not actually disagreeing with Kasriel: some ways that we could pursue genetic knowledge and biotech are indeed deeply threatening. I just suspect that collectively we are going to want to use that knowledge to prevent suffering, and that will almost inevitably blur into improvements (even if we don’t go as far as Gattaca), with different people and cultures disagreeing about the desirable and permissible boundaries of this use of genetics.
In futurist movies, the US has often fallen under some kind of tyrannical government — see, for instance, The Handmaid’s Tale.
Americans see themselves as deeply attached to freedom, but polling data consistently reveals a minority with at least some authoritarian inclinations.
Only 31% of Americans think that torture is never justified; 42% say that it is often or sometimes justified. Sixty-five percent of Republicans say that torture is often or sometimes justified.
Half of all Americans think that government wiretaps of suspected terrorists without court approval is “generally right;” 74% of Republicans say this.
These opinions are based on fear of attack; what more would be deemed allowable in more extreme circumstances?
“Never Let Me Go is about to start filming, with Keira Knightly in the lead role.
It is based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel by the same name, and if it retains half of the book’s seriousness, it may be the first solid cloning movie since The Boys from Brazil.
The topic has typically been dealt with at the level of pure sensationalism, as in The Sixth Day, or obscured with a quasi-mystical veneer, as in The Island.
Image courtesy Bosslyn (Flickr) — usable with attribution
Seemingly taking a cue from Futuristmovies.com’s rating system, the London Times has created a list of the 50 best movie robots, rated by plausibility, coolness, dangerousness, and comedic value.
A journalist recently asked me to comment as a futurist on the supposed disaster that some foresee for 2012.
The new British version of 
“Never Let Me Go is about to start filming, with Keira Knightly in the lead role.