TOMORROW’S PEOPLE
By Susan Greenfield
Penguin. 284 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978-0-14100-888-2
I’m so not a tomorrow’s person. I’m hardly a today’s person; this book came out six years ago, and I’ve just got round to reading it! However, I am glad I did.
Baroness Greenfield, Director of the British Institute, neuroscientist and glamorous media don, sets out in Tomorrow’s People to follow the trajectory of today’s technological advances and imagine how our grandchildren will not only live but, more importantly, how they will think and feel.
Passive Hedonism
The beginning of the book has all the Tomorrow’s World (remember from the 1980s?) features — clothes which contain bacteria to eat away dirt, home appliances you can talk to, wallpaper which changes colour to suit your mood — but Greenfield uses this material to introduce her central fear, the fear of passive hedonism taking root in the human psyche. In subsequent chapters this idea is developed as Greenfield explores the ramifications of technological progress for reproduction, sexuality, education, work and terrorism. She foresees a world which is context-free (we are all linked with each other and so space and time have little significance), information rich, but understanding poor, and in which our moods and emotions can be controlled by drugs or virtual experience — real relationships will matter little. Human nature, she believes, will have been changed irrevocably by this world; above all else we will have lost our notion of individuality.
It must be my conviction of the God-created human nature that makes me more optimistic than the Baroness. I do feel that, however much some people will love Facebook and virtual reality games, direct human contact will always be preferable to the majority. And, yet, at the same time I feel more pessimistic, because I believe that our human nature is fallen. Baroness Greenfield’s answer to these grave potential problems is for our culture to be wise to what science is capable of, and plan together to use it responsibly. This seems hopelessly na?ve, with no room for the realities of evil, which through history has exploited technology.
It isn’t a breeze
There is far more in Tomorrow’s People than I can discuss properly here. Despite it being described by a scientist friend as ‘accessible’, it isn’t a breeze to read, but I would definitely recommend it, particularly to teachers and preachers. The Christian community needs to work out how to reach a generation growing up as ‘people of the screen’.
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