The following is a wordy quote about society.
Skip if busy.
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>From Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's 1995 book, Millennium
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684825368/newsscancom/
Futurology is a fashion. The approach of the end of the
current millennium has stimulated it. But it looks like a
fashion in decline. It seems to have peaked when public
interest in the future was enlivened by debate between
scientific perfectibilians and apocalyptic visionaries. The
optimists predicted a world made easy by progress, lives
prolonged by medical wizardry, wealth made universal by the
alchemy of economic growth, society rectified by the
egalitarianism of technologically prolonged leisure. The
pessimists foresaw nuclear immolation or population explosion
or a purgative world revolution-a cosmic struggle reminiscent
of the millennium of Christian prophetic tradition -- which
would either save or enslave mankind.
No one gets excited by such visions today. Scientific
progress has been, at best, disappointing -- encumbering us
with apparently insoluble social and moral problems, or else,
at worst, alarming -- threatening us with the mastery of
artificially intelligent machines or genetically engineered
human mutants. Economic growth has become the bogey of the
ecologically anxious. Meanwhile, world revolution and the
nuclear holocaust have been postponed, and apocalyptic
prophecy has resorted to forebodings -- variously
unconvincing or uncompelling -- about ecological cataclysms.
Proliferation of nuclear weapons and the discovery that even
peaceful nuclear installations can poison great parts of the
world has, in some ways, made disaster impend more darkly;
but lingering extinction and little local nuclear holocausts
seem to lack, in public esteem the glamour of a sudden and
comprehensive armageddon. The future has become depressing
rather than dramatic, and futurology has lost allure."
