Homo Deus

It has been a long time since I could read a book with an original vision on the future, far from the stereotype mainstream visions you can find in the social media. Prof. Yuval Noah Harari sketches an imminent transition from humankind to “Homo Deus”, a new species that is superior to our 'mankind', a species that has found the ‘divine’ key to immortality.

Our species Homo Sapiens was still relatively unimportant before a few million years, but due to technology, it could now create a species that is much smarter than its creator. Artificial Intelligence and genetic engineering will play a role in this creation, and I think the author is right in his expectation that, despite the moral objections, Homo Sapiens/ Homo Deus will engineer his future as soon as the advantages seem to outweigh the disadvantages.

The author points out that Homo Sapiens was not superior to other animals because of his consciousness, but rather because of his ability to mobilise his peers around ideas and stories. If homo sapiens now creates a new species, how will the new species treat homo sapiens? There is an interesting analogy with how homo sapiens treats other animals. The author made me aware that the question is not only how we kill animals, but also how we let them live their life, which is often equally cruel. See my earlier blog: “Animal Harm at Animal Farm”.

Science teaches us that the soul and the free will don’t exist, as they are the simple consequence of biochemical reactions in our brain. I don’t fully agree with these statements. It is true that science has revealed that there is no ‘supernatural’ substance like soul or free will, and indeed, our thoughts and feelings ARE the biochemical reactions and vice versa. But that doesn’t mean that soul and free will don’t exist as abstract notions and even as coherent sets of experienced sensations. The biochemical reactions are the only physical carrier in which the soul ‘resides’, but to say that the soul is just “chemical reactions” comes down to a reduction of the soul (pars pro toto). It denies the higher order coherence of these reactions. In my Dutch blog: “Ziel en lichaam”, I compare the body with computer hardware. The soul is the computer software. Does it make sense to say the software doesn’t exist? I would say no, unless you want to make clear there is no other natural or supernatural substance, which is a relatively recent insight I must admit.

Homo Sapiens embraces a religion of "humanism", meaning that our purpose resides in our own happiness. The “Meaning of Life” or “religion” of Homo Deus on the contrary would reside in the acquisition of data and knowledge, the author calls this new religion "dataïsm". His book suggests that my blog is already a small contribution to the vast and unstoppable ocean of data that is being created on the altar of this new religion.

An interesting note about history was that it makes you understand the past, but also that it can liberate you from your past. But this book is more about the future than about the past. It has the potential to become the futurism cult-book of the decade, very much like “Future Shock” in the seventies. 

A Sea of Change

Call me old-fashioned, but I still embrace the idea of progress. It is self-evident that the world is changing. The problem is that nowadays, people tend to be cynical; few people seem to believe the world could also be progressing? This time, I’m no longer writing about material progress, like more mobile phones or faster internet. This may be important, but I’m now writing about human progress. For me human progress is the deliberation of some sort of evil or the construction of something better, with reasonable hope that the change is fundamental, robust and lasting. I’m looking for something that makes us happy or least, something that gives us hope humanity is on the right track.

I’m 52,5 years old now and I have been witness of some real changes:

1.  I remember I was at the age of 11 and the teacher asked us to make a presentation about communism, capitalism and the nuclear arms race. The fall of the Iron Curtain 13 years later was real progress in Europe. We didn’t need to fear for a nuclear war anymore and freedom did its entrance in Eastern Europe.
2.  When I was a child, every good family party ended under a thick layer of cigar and cigarette smoke. We could not imagine anything else. Our social habits have changed since. One may regret the loss of a certain ‘atmosphere’, but everybody will agree we evolved to a healthier way of celebrating Christmas.
3.  When I was a child, the rivers were open sewers, full of dirt, and you could smell it. Now, there is again fish in the rivers. We now have water purification stations between our sewers and the rivers.
4.  When I was a child, South-Europe was still considered to be poor. The countries had regular currency devaluations and you always had to get rid in time from Liras, Drachmas and Pesetas because 5 years later, you had to add a 0 at the right of all prices. Italy, Spain and Greece may still have economic problems, but today we would no longer consider the population as 'poor'. In South Italy, the Mafia is losing its grip on society and there is justified hope that the Mafia will disappear to the history books of feodality.
5.  One of the most remarkable changes in the last decade is the increased transparency. You may argue the contrary is true. But look at all recent revelations of manager salaries and paradise papers. It is becoming increasingly difficult to hide money. Thanks to better computer interconnections, public authorities are starting to exchange information. You may regret this, but I’m convinced this will lead someday to a fairer world.

So you see there is a Sea of Real Change rolling over us. You may argue it is going completely wrong with other things, like the heating of the atmosphere, but I haven’t lost hope yet we can solve this too, if we manage to -really- want it, hopefully when it is not too late.

Other blogs about change were: “Future Shock”, “Globalisation” and “Beschleunigung”.

The Siren Songs of Simplicity

In Greek mythology, the Sirens were believed to be beautiful women who attracted ships with their singing to the coastline. Once the sailors got fascinated by the Sirens, they could not resist steering their ship onto the deadly cliffs. The Sirens constitute an appropriate cultural metaphor for the ease with which people can be tempted to listen to simple messages and choose for their own destruction. Masses tend to behave in a very simplistic way. Anyone who has been giving speeches on festive occasions, knows that crowds of people only react on simple basic jokes (crude subjects like alcohol and sex) and very rarely on delicate intellectual jokes. The same preference for basic simplicity explains recent voting behaviour in a number of countries.

Why are masses so attracted to simplicity? Essentially because it liberates them from the painful duty to think and to doubt. In the midst of dangerous ship manoeuvres, the easy shortcut is always more attractive than the long, difficult route, which raises unbearable tensions among the crew. Sometimes the certainty of destruction is more attractive than the agony of continuous debate. Populist politicians know this instinctively. On the other hand, I hesitate using the word populist here, because the word is losing its meaning due to the overuse by politically correct writers.

In times of chaos, humble and patient leaders often give the impression of being weak leaders. They think a lot about consequences and ethics. They negotiate and talk. Pretentious impatient leaders can then easily lead the people astray with simple, basic slogans or messages, nowadays mostly packed as tweets, less than 140 characters long. Black or white messages are easier to understand than grey, nuanced messages, which require more time to generate and to digest. But the black and white messages may lead us to the cliffs.

Good captains don’t listen to Sirens, even if the crew starts listening to them. Ulysses ordered his men to tie him to the mast of his ship, so that he could not be seduced to act according to the godly sound of the Sirens. Good captains are often wrong in the short term; they may get right in the long term. The problem with our democracy is that the election terms are too short; the long term never happens without coalition change. Our political system kicks out the good captains and replaces them regularly by simplistic ones. Let us blame it on the Sirens.

Other blogs related to group behaviour are: “Tulip Mania”, "Mainstream versus Democracy" and “Senatores boni viri”.

The geographical Matthew Effect

We have seen in our blog about the Matthew effect that water always flows to the sea. This old Dutch proverb is meant to indicate something about people. The rich tend to get richer and the poor tend to get poorer. The proverb is however also true in a geographical sense: rich regions tend to get richer and poor regions tend to get poorer. This is in a certain way obvious: the wealth of a region is determined by the wealth of its people, therefore if the Matthew effect is applicable to people, it must also be applicable to regions. Perhaps we could call it the Matera effect, referring to the South Italian town of Matera, a town that once almost got deserted because of its poverty.

And indeed, we see this on a small scale, in towns, when some quarters flourish and others decay. In one end of town, crime rate goes up and real estate value goes down, in the other quarter, it is the opposite. We see, within the same country, regions that go extremely well, and others that go backwards. In the last presidential elections in the U.S., we have seen the envy of the Mid-West states against the pride of California and New York. In Europe, we see countries like Luxembourg that attract highly qualified people from neighbour countries. The best proof that being small is not a disadvantage for a country. On the other hand, we still see regions in the former Easter Europe that struggle to survive. In some villages, only older people are living; all younger people with talent have left the place for the more successful cities. 

Very often regional welfare differences within the same national state lead to independence aspirations for the stronger region. In times of crisis, the intuitive fear for a negative Matera effect (being sucked down by weaker neighbour regions) reinforces the pro-independence voices.

The geographical Matthew effect has such adverse effects nowadays because of the extremely high mobility of people, capital and goods. At times where the economy needed to be more local, the effect was modest because every region needed to have a minimum of self-sustainability. In times of globalisation, like this time, people, capital and goods are so volatile that some countries and continents are completely “out-of-economic-game”. This leads to numerous conflicts and refugee crises. By charging a fair price for our mobility, including a fee for the environmental cost of transport, we could re-invest money in areas that are being hit by the Matera effect.

I also refer to my blog "Poverty: Source of all Trouble"

Picture: the tanneries of the town of Fes in Morocco.

Telemedicine

Telemedicine is one of the most beautiful applications of satellite communication. In general terms, telemedicine can be defined as the application of information and communication technology to provide clinical health care from a distance. Telemedicine can make use of traditional terrestrial telecommunication technologies (telephone, GSM, cable, optical fibre) but it can also make use of satellite telecommunication to allow for health care in very remote places. In this way, patients and doctors in remote places can consult more specialised doctors in larger centres where all required expertise is available.

To give an example, millions of people live in the vast delta of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra river, mostly in boats along the shores of small islands. Hospital ships can sail around in a particular area to provide the local people with hospital services. These hospital ships are usually manned by a limited staff of doctors and nurses. It is impossible for these hospital ships to have a specialist on board for every possible medical problem. Therefore these ships are now being equipped with parabolic antennas and satellite modems so that ship doctors can get in touch with other doctors, hundreds of kilometres away. More advanced telemedicine also allows for robotic surgery from a distance, as well as consulting of learning systems based on large databases of processed patient records.

On September 26^th, the church commemorates Cosmas and Damian, twin brothers and doctors in the Middle East in the second century. They  became famous in their time, taking care of the poor and refusing all payment for their services. Even if this is only a typical Christian legend, it is a nice image. Nothing is more noble than taking care of the impaired fellow human being. Today, this care requires more than ever collaboration between doctors and engineers. Cosmas and Damian can rightfully be considered patron saints of medicine and telemedicine.

See also this SES blog and the Satmed web site. I also refer to my blog: “the digitalDivide”.

Ode to Aviation

Aviation is only a century old and yet we can hardly imagine the world being without it. The evolution in technology and scale of deployment has been quite amazing. Even if today, novelties are not so easily  accepted anymore unless they have proven their safety and reliability, a lot of novelties are being worked out today and I will highlight the ones that relate to my own work in satellite communication and navigation. This is an overview blog and you would need to surf through the hyperlinks to get a complete picture.

• The introduction of GNSS satellite navigation inposition determination and trajectory prediction of planes has advanced a lot since 2012. Meanwhile we have EGNOS supported landing in many airports. Unmanned flying (RPAS) based on Satellite Navigation is already applied in the military world.
• The use of GNSS in Search and Rescue operations.
• The use of Space-based ADS-B to localise planes above oceans. This area has received a lot of interest since the loss of flight MH370.
• The introduction of internet aboard of planes is ongoing. Even if there are concerns about the use of laptop computers on board, we will see more of this in the coming years.

There are a number of problems with aviation. We fly too much and pay too little. The reason is that the passenger doesn’t pay the environmental cost. The cost is mainly paid by the people living in the vicinity of the airports and to a lesser extent, by the tax payer. More about this in my Dutch blog: Waarom vliegen duur moet zijn.  Why flying needs to be expensive.

We have become so used of flying that we hardly look up when a plane passes over. I remember how much I liked spotting planes at the airport while waiting for a family member to arrive. The beauty of planes still fulfils me with awe and wonder. I refer to my earlier blog: Gute Technik ist immer schön.

Picture 1: taken at Air and Space Smithsonian Museum Washington, DC (August 1986)
Picture 2: taken at Belem, Lisbon: Fairey 17, first plane to cross South Atlantic Ocean (August 2016)

The Matthew Effect

There is an old Dutch proverb: “Water always flows to the sea”. The proverb indicates that money often goes to the rich, who need it least. The consequence of the rich getting richer, is also that the poor are getting poorer. This observation is made several times in the Gospel of Matthew, and is therefore called the Matthew Effect. “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.” It seems like a kind of natural inequality. If you have a lot of something, you will get more of the same. The winner takes it all. Although it is clear that the observation relates to possession (so-called ‘talents’), Jesus applies it also to “knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven”. It needs to be stressed though, that the Matthew effect is an observation, not a command to act in a selfish way. On the contrary, the observation contains an implicit warning: you should do your utmost to belong  to the happy few who deserve to be in the kingdom of heaven.

The Matthew effect has become a topic of increasing interest since 2008. Economists like Thomas Piketty have observed an increasing revenue inequality since the outbreak of the economic crisis. There is an increasing pressure for revenue transparency towards politicians and top managers. Basic income for all is on the table. The Matthew Effect also relates to the 80-20 Pareto rule: 20% of the world population is consuming 80% of the world resources and 80% of the world population only consumes 20%. The Matthew Effect can also be observed in the acquisition of power and fame. There is even a Matthew Effect in misery and feelings of misery: if you have a lot of misery (e.g. health problems or lack of confidence), you will acquire even more misery (more of the same).

The Matthew Effect term was originally coined by Robert Merton, who already observed that eminent scientists will often get more credit than comparatively unknown scientists. Later, the “Matilda Effect” pointed out that female research work tends to be ignored more often than male research work. Even if the Matthew Effect may not be well-known by name, we all have an intuitive knowledge about it. I believe the Matthew effect explains why we all do our utmost to belong to the so-called upper classes (as far as you can cynically measure it by bank account status), even up to the point of neurotic behaviour. We are simply too well aware of the consequences of entering the lower class' vicious circles. It also explains why we are so afraid to show more generosity.

I also refer to my Dutch blog: “Kwellende rijkdom” and to “Economics of Good and Evil”.

Picture: Saint Matthew and the Angel by Rembrandt van Rijn. This is a freely licensed work, as explained in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.

Asteroid Day

Today is Asteroid Day. This is a world-wide event and a great day to promote astronomy in general. You can follow it on the Asteroid Day Live webcast. Earlier today there was an interesting ESA conference in Darmstadt.

Predicting impact from asteroids on earth is becoming possible. Astronomy observation techniques from ground telescopes and from space telescopes are becoming more sophisticated. Avoiding impact like in the famous movie Armageddon may become possible in the future if we learn to detect potential impact very early. (The practical deviation methods may be very different from the one in the movie.)

It is no use to cultivate doom scenarios. But very much like in all sustainability issues, the principle of precaution should prevail. We should take care of our own providence like a good paterfamilias.

I refer to my earlier blog Death by Black Hole and to my dutch blog Dies Irae.

Foto: European Space Agency (Rosetta mission) –  license text can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/igo/

Ode to Systems Engineering

This blog is about society, not about engineering. It even contains a message for politicians. Our society faces numerous problems that are too difficult to solve with improvisation and “gut feeling”. Take one of the worst problems in society: mobility. This is a complicated problem. In fact, it is too complicated to have it solved by small party circles and commune politics. A city may decide to ban cars from the city centre and cause a terrible mess elsewhere, because people look for alternative routes.

Politicians don’t understand it would be easy to cut traffic jams in towns by 50% by moderately adapting traffic lights to cell phone movements. When you say this, some politicians believe the use of the cell phone movements are a threat to privacy, but they don’t understand how feasible and obvious it is to prevent this. Politicians still don’t understand sufficiently how detrimental company car policies are for our mobility, our environment and our economy. This is because they can’t assess sufficiently the impact of their decisions.

But wat is systems engineering then? To put it simply, you enter the complexity of a coherent piece of real life into a box and you call it a black box. You can study many things about this box: the inputs, the outputs, how it behaves and interacts with other boxes. Systems Engineering forces you to make a detailed map of the interactions between systems. You start understanding how measures taken on one system may influence others. You also start understanding feedback mechanisms. You notice that more of A does not always lead to more of B. We need more systems engineers in politics and we need more politicians who believe in systems engineering. INCOSE is an organisation that tries to standardise terminology and methodology in systems engineering.

It is not true that systems engineering is totally unknown outside engineering faculties. In fact, systems engineering is often used in a false and perverse way in social media.  A typical example appeared recently: do you know what would happen if everybody stopped eating meat? Then the Facebook entry sketches the most absurd short term consequences, obviously with the implicit message: we should not stop eating meat. The question whether we could perhaps start by eating less meat is not even raised. Similarly, non-believers in climate change like to sketch absurd images of what would happen if we stopped driving cars. I hate this nonsense on Facebook and Twitter.

I hope to see some real systems engineering in politics, press and social media. It all starts with intellectual honesty and integrity. I also refer to my dutch blog: “Intellectuele integriteit in het Industrieel Beleid”.

About meditation – Die schöne Kunst des Innehaltens

What is meditation? It is one of the most essential activities in life, and yet we get little in education. Meditation is a spiritual activity that drives the human spirit away from fear of the future and anger about the past. It brings the human soul to more gratitude for the “here and now”, to acceptance, compassion and happiness. If you have a religious education, meditation resembles praying and contemplation, but in meditation, we don’t need to talk and in a certain way, we don’t even need to think, we prefer silence. Just like sports, it is good for body and soul, but it also requires time and regular practice. Meditation is becoming popular and there are plenty of methods and courses offered.

A near colleague of mine offered me this excellent book from Christophe André (the original title is ‘Méditer, jour après jour’). This book is really a work of art. Every chapter shows a beautiful painting, perfectly chosen to describe a state of mind. The author guides the reader’s attentiveness through the details of the paintings to bring him to a new awareness about an important matter in life, such as accepting, letting go or loving. I learned about the difference between “Aufmerksamkeit” (focused, analytical attention) and “Achtsamkeit” (wide attention for the environment, attentiveness, mindfulness).

The book also contains two audio CD’s with meditation guidance. The refined finish of the book is a joy in itself. You can open it at any chapter and start reading; the order in which you read the chapters is not so important. This book will find a fixed spot in my mental living room.

In these borderline times, where traffic and computers offer a thousand opportunities to get upset, meditation may be a good prevention of illness, despair, addiction or dependence. It shows that beautiful things invented thousands of years ago, always come back, no matter how we ignore them in daily life.

Pressure on kids

Pressure on kids must be the worst injustice tolerated in society today. Even more than tolerated, it is cultivated. Fear of the future makes parents choose for a complex path of training towards ‘high performance’. The rat race starts at birth. Life is a steep climb to the top.

It is good to motivate and stimulate kids to reach something in life. But what if the basic talents are simply not there? Or what if the talents are there, but the kids suffer under the pressure exercised upon them? Very often, failure anxiety destroys all talent.

Nowadays, studying for a degree is not even enough, you have to acquire a whole bunch of skills on top. You have to play sports, music, golf and practice Japanese martial arts. You have to learn to dance. You need social skills, learn to organise events and develop leadership. You have to acquire experience. You have to do an internship at Google and Apple. By the time you’re 25, you should have travelled to New York, Mumbai, Shanghai and Singapore.

I don’t mean to say the development of talents is not important. We don't want children with the complacency of Rip Van Winkle. But we need to be realistic. The virtue of patience is required, as well as true motivation and curiosity. Some kids are under too much pressure and disappointment is lurking when they get older. Another problem is that some other kids are not participating in this mad rat race. They may stay behind because they were born in the wrong household. They risk to bully their better fellow class mates and drive their teachers to a burn-out. Most of them will never really be fit for modern office life.

People don’t realise sufficiently that talent development is only part of your full personal development. What strikes me, is that people have become very demanding in terms of performance, but in return, as if it were some kind of compensation, they stay extremely permissive in terms of attitude. The reason is that our society is based on meritocracy. In terms of discipline, style, politeness and friendliness, we have lowered the standards considerably and nobody seems to mind.

I refer to my blog “Raising kids in the 21st century”.

Ode to the Internet

In my blogs I like to highlight things we take too easily for granted. I like to stand in awe for so many achievements of science and technology, even if these have become daily commodities. Today is a good day to stand in awe for the Internet.

The fourth of April, the Roman Catholic church celebrates Isidore of Sevilla, who is the patron saint of the Internet, the computer users and the programmers. The reason is that Saint Isidore created his “Etymologiae” (Origins of words) a complete encyclopaedia of all knowledge of his time. This encyclopaedia reminds us very much of Wikipedia and the entire Internet, reason why Saint Isidore was appointed patron saint of something that only came up when the saints were -unfairly- being consigned to oblivion.

As we all like to complain, we often point out the dangers of the Internet: the spam, the numerous security threats, the attacks on our privacy as well as the risk of addiction and alienation from the people who surround us. Another major remaining problem with the Internet is the digital divide. The Internet is still not available everywhere at an acceptable data rate.

And yet we forget so quickly how the world looked like before the Internet. You had to write letters by hand and bring them to a post office. Later, you got the luxury you could push it through a fax machine. You had to call a friend or walk to a library to look up everything you didn’t know. Today’s students have immediate access to all world information through the Internet. (And yet they have to discover painfully that information is no knowledge yet. You still need time and patience to acquire knowledge.)

Another advantage we tend to forget is that we can now quickly send messages to several people at the same time without disrupting them in their daily activities. This was not possible 40 years ago. It has now become much more easy to cooperate from a distance, which allows various associations and groups of common interest to work together. The Internet, including the social media services, offers you a fast and cheap way to make yourself known and to express your opinion. Considering the flood of opinions, you may get the impression your opinion doesn't matter much. But it does! The Internet is a bad thing for dictators and a good thing for the freedom of speech.

And much more Internet is yet  to come! Not only will we connect the most remote places on earth, also cars, ships, trains and planes will be connected. Moreover, we will move to an Internet of Things.

On Saint Isidore’s web site, you can find the following prayer, which I could recommend. I pray it this 4th of April to safeguard my soul J

“we beseech Thee, that, through the intercession of Saint Isidore, bishop and doctor, during our journeys through the internet we will direct our hands and eyes only to that which is pleasing to Thee and treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter.”

See my earlier blog Ode to Joy 2.0 , in which I highlight more specifically the pleasures and inconveniences of social media. 

Picture taken in Seville Cathedral.

Finding Exoplanets

The search for exoplanets, planets outside of our solar system, is really gaining some momentum now. I refer to this recent article. Why is the search for exoplanets so important?

Of course the existence of exoplanets and particularly habitable exoplanets is a scientific question that appeals to our curiosity. It would be great to know how rare habitable planets like Earth could be. We would also like to know how rare life is, and what types of extraterrestrial life could exist.

These scientific questions are important to us. As the famous astronomer Carl Sagan pointed out: we are star stuff contemplating the stars. As human beings, we are interested in our origins and in our destiny. We are looking for the meaning of life; this is the nature of human life. During this endless search, we would like to know whether we are alone or whether the cosmos is actually full of life.

Our earth will once come to an end and it is already at risk. I know it is not realistic today to travel like captain Kirk to a nearby star, even as close as four light years away. But how realistic is it to stay here, in the long term? We should start by building autonomous shelters on earth like Biosphere, then we should build the shelters in space and travel to Mars and beyond. At some point in time, humanity or some new earthly species will try to survive without Earth. The chance it succeeds is small, but it should be tried.

I also refer to my earlier blogs: "SETI", "Sustainability Engineering" and "Death by Black Hole".

Why my Home Town Leuven is Worth a Visit

This is a blog for globetrotters, colleagues from other countries and other planets. I just want to give you a few reasons to visit my home town Leuven. Leuven is around 25 kilometers east from Brussels. It is internationally well-known through its university to students and researchers, but as a touristic destination, it is still a little underrated. I’m not chauvinistic, only proud in the good sense. Let me know when you are coming.

The most convincing place of interest is probably our town hall, which I already compared with the Brussels town hall in a previous blog.

Next to it, the Saint Peter's church, built around the same time, has a marvellous interior and contains some treasures of art, like 'the last Supper' painting by Dirk Bouts.

Our Grand Beguinage is a favourite place to stay for professors and students.

One of my favourites is Saint Michael's church in the Naamsestraat, a rare perfect example of Jesuit baroque style.

Next to it, you will find the Premonstratensian college where professor Georges Lemaître, the 'creator-inventor' of the concept of the Big Bang, used to have his office.

The university library was already shown in a previous blog.

The university is a blessing for the town, as it created excellent hospitals and research centres. I also refer to Leuven Mindgate.

There are many more things to see in and around Leuven, and you will certainly see some of them in my future blogs, as I regularly use self-made pictures to illustrate my texts.

Future Shock

Who remembers this book? Future Shock by Alvin Toffler was published in 1970 and became a world-wide bestseller. My father's copy dates from August 1981 and I read it a few years later, around the time I finished secondary school.

The pocket edition counts 490 pages. The English is well-written. The table of contents is nice to read: it counts many well-chosen subtitles, like "Flamenco in Sweden", "The Paper Wedding Gown" and "The Mournful Movers".

The book is not a utopian description of how the future should be, but  rather a futurist description of how it will be. The title Future Shock refers to an illness: "Just as the body cracks under the strain of environmental overstimulation, the 'mind' and its decision processes behave erratically when overloaded. By indiscriminately racing the engines of change, we may be undermining not merely the health of those least able to adapt, but their very ability to act rationally on their own behalf".

Alvin Toffler's vision on economists is still very relevant today: "The year 2000 is closer to us (in 1970!) than the Great Depression, yet the world's economists, traumatised by that historic disaster, remain frozen in the attitudes of the past....If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2025, it would look very much like that of 1970-only more so."

Many family tendencies like gay marriage are already anticipated in this book. Toffler also writes: "Men and women today are often torn in a conflict between a commitment to career and a commitment to children."

Concerning politics, Toffler writes: "We are rushing toward a fateful breakdown of the entire system of political representation. If legislatures are to survive at all, they will need new links with their constituencies, new ties with tomorrow."

The odd thing is that this book doesn't mention mobile phones and internet. In those days, the fax was the emerging communication technology! Nevertheless, Alvin Toffler imagines a machine called OLIVER, read the extract below and compare with our Internet.

We can conclude that most of today's general tendencies were already emerging long ago, longer ago than we tend to believe today. On the other hand, the specific technical developments and especially the order in which they spread over the world, seemed much harder to predict.

The Virtue of Patience and the 10000 Hour Rule

Patience is an underrated virtue. In our age, everything seems to be within reach. As a consequence, we live in a time of hyperactivity and continuous tantalising. And yet, as Maria Popova points out in her marvellous blog 10Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings, “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” What could be really worthwhile? I would consider education, acquiring knowledge and skills, but also: good human relationships and peace.

Concerning education and the acquisition of knowledge and skills, many students and young graduates suffer from a lack of patience rather than a lack of talent. Malcolm Gladwell mentions in his book  Outliers the 10,000 hour rule: you need to collect around 10,000 hours of practice if you really want to be good at something. The rule is certainly valid for hardware and software developers, but also for practitioners of the higher arts like musicians and painters.

There are two serious issues with patience. The first one is that not all stakeholders may show the same patience for the same purpose. As a result, your project can be cancelled, not because you didn’t have enough patience, but rather because someone else didn’t have enough patience (e.g. your teacher or your manager). This is also the case in peace negotiations: if one party doesn’t have enough patience, the peace process stops and war restarts. War is always a consequence of a lack of patience.

A second serious issue with patience is that you can’t really possess it. It is not a permanent character trait or virtue. You don’t have patience, you practice it in given circumstances for a given purpose. One moment of weakness, a moment of impatience, can jeopardise an entire project or venture. One can also be very patient in reaching one goal and very impatient in reaching another goal.  

The good news about patience is that it can bring us to things of real value. To reach a such a ‘higher’ goal, we will always need dedicated time and we will need to overcome anxieties. To overcome the time, we need patience; to overcome the anxieties, we need courage. Patience and courage go well together in any achievement we aim for. And in essence, our admiration for people is essentially based on virtues like patience and courage, not on achievements. The actual achievements will be surpassed by newcomers, but the virtues will remain. 

I refer to my earlier blogs: "Ode to Industry","Virtues and Virtutes" and "You are your time"

Ode to Generosity

In this new year 2017, you may be looking for inspiration for a New Year's resolution.

In this blog, I would like to recommend Generosity. You may suspect me promoting something that is in my own interest. This may very well be the case, but in return for your 2017 generosity, I am making the same resolution. I will therefore write this resolution in the "we (us)" person.

1. Let us be generous with money. Let us be generous with gifts and presents. 
2. For the entrepreneurs, let us be generous with investments.
3. Let us be generous with time and attention. Let us take time to listen.
4. Let us be generous with our work and our devotion to work.
5. Let us be generous with help and assistance. Let us find friends to help.
6. Let us be generous with hospitality. Let us send out lots of invitations.
7. Let us be generous with our knowledge and our wisdom. Let us be generous with questions.
8. Let us be generous with ourselves, our internal state-of-minds. Let us be open about ourselves and let us shut up about others.
9. Let us be generous with compliments, greetings, blessings and thank-you's.
10. Let us be generous with social media likes and comments.

Have faith in the human spirit.

Have faith in your own spirit. 

Have faith in the spirit of your fellow human being.

And truly connect.

I refer to my earlier blog: "Generosity, the ultimate cure for a sick economy".