Is Innovation a War Between the “DoIts” and the “ShouldWes”?

Once upon a time, there were two types of humans…

Most Things Depicted Didn’t Come

As a futurist, I was always a big fan of depictions of the future — movies like Things To Come, where we’d fly everywhere and even Metropolis, with its legions of shift workers punching in and out — both positive and negative depictions of the future were cool for me because I knew that it was science fiction — that it would be our own decisions and actions that would take us from one future to another.

As a teenager, (yes, futurism was my hobby even back in high school, of course, back then it was being a geek or a nerd because not only did I like to read sci-fi, I like to think about what kind of future we would and could have) I postulated that based on the current level of technology and medical advancement, and this was back in the early 1980s, that by the time the year 2000 rolled around, we’d have cracked the code on aging and figured out how to stop it. Of course I thought, damn that would mean that I’d be that age forever after that, so I secretly hoped that they’d come up with some kind of youngification drug as well.

So what happened? 2000 came and went and not only did nothing major happen around the Y2K bug, nothing happened on the age front. So I thought — what gives…