10-22-2018, 12:45 PM
(10-22-2018, 07:33 AM)sbarrera Wrote: Thanks for joining WinterStorm, and for the reply.
To address some of your points-
1. We are moving into the post-paper age. I agree that we have reduced the need for and use of paper, but I'm not sure we're post-paper. I still use cash, still print things out, even fax sometimes. I will say that in the workplace paper use is out, but part of that is because there are now "clean desk" policies that discourage ever making a printout if it can be avoided.
2. Fossil fuels will continue to slowly decline. Sorry, but this is just not the case. Global fossil fuel consumption keeps rising with the rising population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
3. Autonomous cars will be the wave of the future. The far future, IMO. We will not achieve Level 5 automation by the start of the next saeculum.
4.The digital revolution. I liked your points about Agile, which has definitely been transformative. Also agree that the tech giants are the new Ford/GM. The ones that grew out of the "dot com" era to become the dominators today are the winners of the Millennial saeculum. And we are still figuring out just how much power they have and how they will shape the new saeculum which is only a decade away.
(Well I have to go push bits at the office now so I will have to reply more later).
I agree with Winterstorm's points. We do live in a post-industrial, digital age, and that is shaping the future. A lot of what you mentioned, Winterstorm, is not limited to the dictates of technology, however. It also reflects the hope that greater awareness and optimism of human needs and desires, helped along by a high-tech economy, will be unstoppable in the long run. That certainly includes the awareness of the ecological effects of the industrial age, and the need to gear our new technology toward protecting our biosphere. So I disagree with Barrera that fossil fuels are not on the way out; they are.
The only question now is how fast the change happens. Right now, it is being resisted tooth and nail in the USA, and somewhat in other countries as well. There is also a trend back towards tyranny, which harkens back even to the agricultural ages. If the Trumpists get their way and hold off the trends which winterstorm mentioned, and thus keep us tied down to an industrial oil/coal-based economy, then the future could be crushed even though it might seem inevitable. Probably what will happen is that this Trumpist resistance to the future will spur the regeneracy in this 4T, which will rise up to defeat the Trumpists so we can go forward-- just like in the last 4T, when the last ditch effort to suppress a democratic western world order by the fascists was defeated. I hope it happens, but it will not be easy in Trump/Kavanaugh's America, and the right-wingers should not be underestimated.
Right now, Trump and the right-wing have realized that increased Latin and other immigration into the USA has increased the Democratic vote in some states, and so they are repressing it. The older Republicans, mostly Silents and Boomers, grew up in a society which was made more uniformly white back in the early 1920s by the eugenics movement and suppression of immigration. This was at the same time that the USA refused to join the League of Nations. The older whites are used to this world they grew up in, and are disturbed by the resumption of immigration that began in the sixties under JFK and LBJ. The older Republicans are resisting the irresistible trend toward a world society that came upon us in the 1880s and 1890s, when the statue of liberty was erected with Emma Lazarus' poem at its base and Ellis Island opened. This eugenics/anti-immigration movement is erupting again in the USA now, because the 1920's artificial delay in the advent of a world society in the USA was ended in the sixties, and so we once again have to face the postponed arrival of the world society that is replacing a world of racial/ethnic nationalities within protected nation states. There's something to be said for managing a world society so local needs are not overwhelmed by a corporate world authority and by the tides of huddled masses yearning to live in the first world, but it won't be built simply by putting up walls against the rest of the globe. In our post-industrial world, the walls are crumbling.