IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2022 - 3

President's Message
Fifty Years Hence
Clinton J. Andrews
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901 USA
 The Ieee SocIeTy on Social Implications of
Technology (SSIT) is celebrating its 50th anniversary
this year by revisiting its accomplishments and the
people behind them. Look on the SSIT website for
timelines with key milestones and a set of oral histories.
Attend our conferences and chapter meetings
to participate in sessions on anniversary topics. As
we reflect on our rich past, this is also a perfect time
to think about the future.
Predicting the distant future is a fool's errand, but
discussing it is both fun and absolutely necessary.
From informed projections, speculative fiction, and
the historical record, we already know some of the
influential forces and historical human responses.
Let us browse a few such writings from a prior tumultuous
time starting a century ago, just after World
War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, and some 50
years before the founding of SSIT.
The novelist Wells [1] imagines a possible better
future society governed by the principles of privacy,
free movement, unlimited knowledge, truthfulness,
and free discussion. Scientific research flourishes,
and sectarian religion and politics have withered
away. In this realized anarchy, " our education is
our government " [1, p. 32]. This is one of the string
of utopian books by Wells that imagines distant
futures in which the world seems to be heading
toward catastrophe until people find a better path,
usually " directed by middle-class scientists and
engineers " [2].
Historian and politician Churchill [3] is an avid
reader of Wells, but not utopian. Churchill [3]
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2022.3173345
Date of current version: 14 June 2022.
June 2022
anticipates the widespread adoption of telecommuting,
synthetic
food,
robots,
genetic
editing,
commodified
energy, and nuclear weapons, while
despairing our ability to govern humanely through
such changes. " We have the spectacle of the powers
and weapons of man far outstripping the march
of his intelligence; we have the march of his intelligence
proceeding far more rapidly than the development
of his nobility " [3, p. 67]. He doubts the
strength of man's character and the efficacy of his
institutions [3].
Writer and philosopher Huxley [4] deals with
similar issues when imagining a future with a genetically
manipulated and, therefore, highly hierarchal
human society. He intends Brave New World to be
a sardonic retort to the longstanding techno-optimism
of Wells [5]. Wells responds, in 1933, with the
even more hopeful The Shape of Things to Come
that has the distinction of accurately predicting the
start of World War II within four months [6]. Punditry
and fiction blend seamlessly in this debate
[7]. Essayist Chesterton [8] frames the debate as a
reasonable " revolt against utopia " given then-failing
economies and political systems, but adds that
" something better has not collapsed, " that being basic
human decency.
Then World War II starts. Huxley's one-time student
Orwell [9] writes that " a crude book like The
Iron Heel [Jack London's 1908 novel imagining a
dystopian America], ... is a truer prophecy of the
future than either Brave New World or The Shape
of Things to Come. " Millions die in Europe, and
atomic bombs explode over Japan by 1945. British
India undergoes a bloody partition on the route to
independence in 1947, Gandhi is assassinated in
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2022

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