Beyond The Quo
Posted on December 5, 2010 | posted by:
Last week, some friends and I took up an invitation to hear Ray Kurzweil keynote the World Technology Awards. When I first read his book Age of Spiritual Machines in college, it completely blew my mind, as both a detailed vision of the future and a stock of the stepping stones needed to get there. It was science meets fiction, yet oddly real. His ideas have developed over time and unsurprisingly, the full spectrum of analysis has followed ranging from praise to scholarly debate to outright disbelief…
I’m not quite in a position to comment on the accuracy of the hard science of it all. What fascinates me is Ray’s ability to state propositions and imagine scenarios, as if the future were a large ball of string and reaching it requires unfurling it and tracing its path.
It seemed Ray was well aware of his critics, as he addressed them with almost every point he made. As I listened to Ray refer to these back and forth debates, I drew an interesting parallel: our difficulty in surmounting the mental barriers of envisioning the future is similar to the difficulty motorcycle riders face when trying to avoid easily avoidable obstacles.
I first learned of this strange phenomenon called target fixation years ago when reading an account of a tragic and perplexing accident of a rider named Karen Miller. Karen’s friend, riding directly behind her, watched helplessly as Karen fixated and crashed into an oncoming truck, even though she had a clear path to avoid it. It’s hard to imagine target fixation, until you watch some perplexing videos:
Karen’s story has had a lasting effect on me. Although I don’t know much about the psychology behind it, I see this phenomenon affecting not just motorcycle riders, but all of us in similar ways: It’s as if our vision often cannot take us beyond the wall of the status quo, and the very wall itself is one we instinctively create and perpetuate. Ray’s predictions of accelerating returns and the resulting paradigm shifts are hard to grasp because we are naturally creatures of habit. Life-altering change worries us. Though it may be difficult, the best chance we have of clearing the walls of the status quo could be as simple as looking where we wish to go, instead at what we wish to avoid.