The Chaos Point [antikvár]

Forewordby Sir Arthur C. ClarkeAnyone who attempts to write about the future should take warning from all the failures of the past. Even in the restricted field of technology, which is the only one where any kind of forecasting is possible, success has been very limited. And in geopolitical matters, it has been virtually nonexistent: Did anyone predict the events of the last decade in Europe?So in this book, Ervin Laszlo, scientist, and founder and president of the Club of Budapest, makes a vital point: The future is not to be forecast, but created. What we do today will decide the shape of things tomorrow. Especially the way we perceive the challenges that await us, and the vision we develop for coping with them. His book furnishes essential guidelines for creating a positive scenario for our common future: for the new thinking and acting that this calls for.I leave until later Laszlo's ideas, insights, and injunctions. I want to briefly address questions of technological hardware, the area closest to my interests. Here, too, some of the warnings issued by Laszlo are relevant: for example, against obeying the technological imperative. Not all things that can be produced should, evidently, actually be produced. But there are many fascinating things that we can, and probably will, producethese deserve our careful attention.The failures of people to forecast future developments fall into two categories: the hopelessly pessimistic and the overly optimistic. This may be because our logical processes are linear, whereas the real world obeys nonlinear