Joanna Eberts

A couple of weeks ago, I woke up and realized that I’ve spent the last four years at RIT not thinking about the future. This realization is scary, because I’m graduating in two months, and now I’m behind schedule. Oh sure, I’ve been trying to make up for it. Hastily (yet thoughtfully) written resume? Check. Brand new interview suit? Check. Attendance at the Career Fair? Check.

Have I really started thinking about the future, though? No, I’m still stuck in the present. I postponed thinking about my post-college life for so long that it’s almost here. The ‘after RIT’ era is nigh, and now I’m forced to think about it in the lightning-quick real-time instead of pondering it all in slow motion. I’m addressing questions like Where will I be living in 2009? and What sort of company do I want to work for? and Do I really need quality health insurance at age 22?. When I dream about ten, five, or even two years down the line, everything gets hazier. The future doesn’t terrify me in quite the same manner as death does, but it still constructs several mental barriers in my brain. It scares me, and I find I have trouble facing it.

How do futurists like Ray Kurzweil do it? That man isn’t scared at all. He’s excited. Hearing him rattle off his many inventions, both past and future, is like listening to an ADD-ridden boyscout at camp; he’s got, ‘like, a million!’ merit badges and is so proud of all he’s learned from each and every one. To inventors like him, the future is a playground. Creativity and innovation aren’t just buzzwords. They’re a lifestyle.

So how does he do it? Anyone who attended his lecture in September knows it well: Kurzweil makes a lot of graphs. Seriously. He must have dozens, if not hundreds, of graphs that he uses to predict the technological and scientific future of the human race. In the end, they all show the same thing: A neat flow of human innovation, predicting not a linear but an exponential growth in human potential. Kurzweil thinks we can foresee the future in this manner, and claims to have already done so himself. He predicted the success of the Human Genome Project and the explosive power of the internet.

It’s tempting to believe him without question. Creativity and innovation at RIT seem to focus so heavily on combining folks from different disciplines, as if scientists and engineers (like myself) can’t have an original thought to save their lives. I hear that there’s increased pressure on engineering programs around RIT these days to loosen up their curriculum in support of the new flagship slogan of the Institute, and yet here’s proof that rigid disciplines don’t always promote rigid thought. We can predict the future with graphical analysis of data trends. How incredibly cool.

It’s a bit harder than that though, isn’t it? For starters, you need to realize that those graphs can be sketched, or, more broadly, that the future is not only worthwhile to think about, but can also display all the grace and logic of the exponential curve. This is a concept that I struggle with, because there is no shortage of possible outcomes. Sitting down and pondering the possibilities, then, becomes a daunting and frightening task.

If you believe Kurzweil’s graphs, it’s only going to get harder. Human innovation will reach a near-asymptotic rate of growth, which means that we’ll need to be creating and innovating while bear ing in mind not the current state of affairs but the affairs of a laughably foreign tomor row. Think of the difference between the muskets of the American Revolution and the M-16s of the Iraq War. Now picture that same differential occurring in a six-month time span. The mind boggles.

It’s only going to get harder, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. After all, we won’t be alone. The tools of tomorrow will help us predict tomorrow’s tomorrow. All that’s required of us is the foresight to create those tools. Human ingenuity will guide us with the rest. However scared it makes us, we merely need to take the time out to think.

And I’ll spend that time, too. Just as soon as I land a job and graduate. I have to think about my future, after all.

The opinions expressed in the Views section are solely those of the author.