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 Subscribe Sign in 🔮🤖🚫 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,' a quarter century later

 The landmark Wired magazine essay shows there's nothing new about Down Wing decelerationism, even in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately. 

 James Pethokoukis Apr 14, 2024 14 2 Share Quote of the Issue 

 “The twenty-first century will be different. The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems of need, if not desire, and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a post-biological future. … The result will be far greater transformations in the first two decades of the twenty-first century than we saw in the entire twentieth century.” - Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence 

 The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised 

 "James Pethokoukis' The Conservative Futurist is essential reading on what made America great, how we lost it, and how we might reachieve it once again. Students of history, technology, economics, and the American dream should all read this compelling vision of our possible future."- Tyler Cowen, economist, George Mason University 

 The Essay 

 🚫 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,' a quarter century later 

 The goal of my conservative futurism is to nudge America into becoming a more perfect Up Wing society. Full stop.

 (Interregnum: Up Wing thinking emphasizes rapid economic growth and technological advance to solve big problems and to enhance prosperity and opportunity. The arch-nemesis: Down Wing perspectives that focus on the risks and limitations of innovation. Better safe than sorry. Up Wingers like me advocate for embracing calculated risks and creatively destructive innovation as crucial for human progress. That, while also promoting an optimistic vision centered on human creativity and potential.)

 We’ve done it before, you know. As I write in  The Conservative Futurist , Up Wing 1.0 was the period of historical techno-optimism that stretched from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s: the Space Age, Atomic Age,  Star Trek , and a powerful productivity boom. I mark Up Wing 1.0 as decisively and statistically ending in 1973 with the Great Downshift in labor productivity growth, as seen in this chart: 

 As you can also see in the above chart, the long pause in productivity growth temporarily ended in the mid-1990s, then resumed in the mid-2000s. Still, I date Up Wing 2.0 as only lasting through 2000. 

 Here’s why: Up Wing is about more than productivit

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