There remains a vacuum in authority and leadership. Governments, banks, markets, religions, countries – they all seem to be wallowing in unrest or unwinding the past. Even Blair and the unions seem to be re-appearing from the dead. Major technology companies seem pre-occupied with daily patent litigation on past products rather than focusing on future innovation.
It’s not just the recent memorial and reflection on the horror of September 11th, but a wider realisation that technological progress seems questionable and may have peaked decades ago.
We now have no Concorde, Space Shuttle or Moon launch capability. Nuclear energy is being shut down. Energy futures and resources look horrid. Climate concerns remain. China has significant pollution and water scarcity. Globalisation, materialist consumption, and principles of capitalism look strained. Even Steve Jobs has resigned.
All the best minds may well have disappeared into some Randesq Atlas Shrugged valley – a Silicon Valley of temporal dotcom ideas, internet fads, social networks, that leaves the masses absorbed and wasting time on social media, modern day Sudoku, or outsourcing their thinking to media consumption, Wikipedia’s and Googles of today.
What then must we do?
I venture that we need the best minds working in science, in engineering and building new technology, not just coding/programming and business model fads. We need to start thinking and developing true innovation.
But more significantly, we need a revolution in science and paradigm shift in physics.
If you look back over the century, it was not just the wars and unrest which transformed the world, but everything in today’s technology from semi-conductors and computing to energy was triggered by the Special Relativity and Quantum Physics shifts at the start of the last century.
It’s been massively productive, but we are overdue such a science correction, an axiomatic shift, that corrects or completes the weaknesses in these models. Transforms our view of the world, history and the future.
Until this happens we may very well remain on a roller coaster going fast but going nowhere.
In the end, the solution and leap is simple, just a small gap in space and time, it will fit on a T-shirt. When Physics changes we will have our road map for the century, our future, a new authority.
All the concepts and dreams of a new world, environment, science fiction, of Arthur C Clarke and Ian M. Banks, Artificial Intelligence and Singularity, space and engineering will become closer. We might all become more connected, share goals and even understand a bit more about what makes us human.
