The Future acccording to Carl Sagan

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I enjoyed the Cosmos series Carl Sagan produced for PBS back in the early 80s when I still was intrigued by science and technology.  He was very good at popularizing scientific concepts for the masses and had a kinnd of homespun "friendly genius" persona on the tube.  In later years I found the stuff kind of simplistic, but I enjoyed it at the time.

Carl is now revered for his contrbutions as a science popularizer, though as a scientist himself he made no major contributions I'm aware of.  Now he's being lauded for his prediction of the Future, from his vantage point back in 1995:

"I have a foreboding of America in my children's or grandchildren's time–when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all of the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; with our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."

A very accurate description of Amerika circa 2025, but not really much of a prediction.  Why not?  Because all of the above was ALREADY TRUE in 1995.  Certainly, it's worse now, but in 1995 factories were already moved to China and Mexico and Silicon Valley Tech Entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Apples were falling from the trees in Steve Jobs backyard and Google was conceived  by Sergei Brin & Larry Page, though it didn't go public until 2003.

This was also precisely the time I turned my back to the world and retreated to a solitary existence as an OTR Trucker.  I had quit teaching, completely disillusioned with the education system and the hopelessly under-educated Junior High and HS I was supposed to be teaching Science & Math to, but who had graduated the 6th grade unable to multiply and divide single digit numbers without a calculator or write a coherent sentence without a half dozen spelling errors.  This was in a middle class LI suburb, not NYC Public Schools.  Not only hadn't they learned much in the first 6 years of school, they weren't much interested in learning anything in the future either.  Of course it wasn't EVERY kid, but in a classroom with 30 kids, if I got 3 (10%) interested kids with an attention span longer than 5 minutes I was doing good.  Regardless, I had to teach down to the lowest common denominator, which was really low.  It was a frustrating waste of time.  I quit after 3 years.

I was overqualified for entry level jobs and too old for companies seeking recent graduates for management track positions.  More than that though, as I perused the Want Ads, I couldn't find anything I thought would be worthwhile and interesting to do.  When I saw an ad for Free Training for a CDL in return for a 1 year commitment to drive for the company (Schneider National, the largest LTL carrier at the time), I figured at least I wouldn't have to go to an office in a monkey suit and be told what to do by some middle aged middle manager or go to office picnics.  Once I got the hang of how to manipulate my hours and log book to only show as many hours as I actually wanted to drive, the dispatchers couldn't push me around.  I didn't have a wife, kids or bills, so I wasn't worried about how much money I made.  Eventually it got old and after 911 freight was real slow, so after 7 years I quit.

I'm not sure when our society became a hopeless habitat of drones, but it was well before 1995.  I think we were already well on the road when Malvina Reynolds wrote "Little Boxes" in the 60s.

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I still go with Zager & Evans In the Year 2525. 

https://www.jpost.com/omg/article-809380

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