Today I re-read a book by William Halal, “Technology’s Promise”, and was impressed that many of his futuring concepts can conceptually be reduced into a form of answers to present-day needs. Many of us are huge fans of science fiction and maintain a train of thought that travels well into the next decade. However, we typically won’t have a clue as to the next social paradigm shift. For instance, in 1879, the administrators of the five boroughs of New York City were hugely concerned that within another ten years the city streets would be covered in twenty-foot piles of horse manure. Of course, good German engineering resulted in the internal combustion engine and that concern conveniently went by the wayside.
On page 22 of “Technology’s Promise” there’s a blurb concerning an increasing need for desalination, and this might turn out to be a non-event in the future. Already, I’ve toured a desalination plant in Kuwait City that supplies all the water needs for the entire nation. This is done by way of a large-scale, low-tech process of heating water from the Arabian Gulf and then collecting and condensing the steam. Of course, fuel in Kuwait City costs the equivalent of 20 cents per gallon, but what if we altered the process slightly and used solar heating instead? What if we heated the water by way of a particular FM radio frequency that boiled the water at almost no cost? Often, real breakthroughs are accomplished by combining technologies that no one had imagined belonging together.
The way for us to slay society’s dragons might actually be more straightforward than we had imagined. What if people turned off their diversions for a few hours per week and worked together in virtual communities of interest? Would that be the participative society we want?
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