It genuinely bothers me when people say "the future is scary." (re: human shortsightedness, Google Buzz)

You're waking up to an Internet a-Buzz with talk about Google's new social sharing experiment. Opinions are mixed, but mainly concern the current version of Buzz. So here's our thought experiment about its future. It's scary.

via fastcompany.com - "Google Buzz: 'Are you at work? How about a Big Mac from McDonalds?'"

No, the future is not scary.

Human shortsightedness is scary.

But that's always been the case. It's something that exists today. The future is just another iteration of that.

The future isn't scary, the present is scary. Also, the past is scary. I wouldn't be so bothered if people accepted that and instead said "the world is scary and I'm scared of it."

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Posted by Kyle Cameron Studstill

Feb 10, 2010

Simone said...

I think people say the future is scary when what really frightens us is the uncertainty and unfamiliarity that the future brings.
Once we're able to separate our discomfort with change and ambiguity from the benefits of awesome innovations, the future doesn't seem so scary at all.

Kyle Cameron Studstill said...

So there's the uncertainty, yeah. And also there's the concept of invested ideas. The concept being that we invest time/money/effort into objects/ideas, and these things all live in the past and the present. Nothing too profound here obviously, but from that perspective meaning lives purely in the past and the present, and on some level things will never get better.

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