The Future

I just read a Reason magazine interview of Bruce Sterling (mentioned on SlashDot) that really got me thinking. The pessimistic chord in me rang to Sterling saying “Socially, policy makers have made a series of choices very similar to what preceded the collapse into World War I.”. And the optimist in me (in this week of hype over the CES) vibrated when he said “I think the real revolution is in industrial production. It’s about manipulating factory processes, it’s about mass customization, it’s about a revolution in industry that gets the toxins out of the air and is more efficient by, say, a factor of four than what we had. When that happens we’ll have a genuinely new world. Playing movies off handhelds, that’s not really that big of a deal.”

Is the glass half-full? Or half-empty?