Future Echo

I wrote this article because a friend was railing on about a Cashless Society, Do-it-Yourself Tills and AI, which she was claiming was 'All quite 1984'. The problem is many of her claims were totally inaccurate. A few were relevant, but this mixture of complete nonsence, partial truth and occasional concern didn't do justice to the issues that are real concern. And because it was muddled, it would mean people would reject the things that are real concerns because of the ridiculous claims that were mixed in. Cashless Society Early man used to barter. ‘Will you do this for me if I do that for you?’ ‘Will you swap a bag of potatoes for a chicken?’  About 2,500 years ago coins started being used. Possibly the invention of the Lydians, related to the Greeks but living in what is modern day Turkey. So by Jesus times coins were well established but still the ‘talent’ quoted in the Gospels was a bag of about 45kg of gold! During the Song Dynasty in what is modern day China had a pr...

It wasn’t manufacturing that the world abdicated to China. It wasn’t international security that the world abdicated to America. And it wasn’t thinking that the world abdicated to Artificial Intelligence. What was abdicated was futurology.   For some people, especially thinkers from an older generation the future which once looked full of hope now looks bleak. Two people I know — both world shapers in their day — now sometimes talk about longing for death to embrace them.   So what does the future hold? Years ago I remember predicting the bursting of the dot com bubble and the change to what we now call Internet 2.0. There are things in the future that feel like being on the tip of my tongue but difficult to express. Nevertheless, I will try… War Though the dealmaker longs to be known as the peacemaker and win a Nobel prize, I think the near future holds war. I expect to see at least one tactical nuclear weapon used within the next five years, possibly within 6 months. There w...

On 10 September 2025 Charlie Kirk was shot dead. I saw it on my news feed and wondered who this Charlie Kirk was. So I Googled, and it appeared to me he was just another American conservative media personality. How wrong I was! The number of posts I saw about his murder kept increasing. I then saw an article on the Sojourners website basically saying that even if one disagreed with his politics the person as a person mattered...  ' however reprehensible a figure he was, however harmful his positions may have been, celebrating his death cannot be justified—certainly not from a Christian perspective. There is nothing to celebrate in the loss of a human life. Every person, even those who harm us, bears an inherent dignity that can never be erased. ' At the time, this appeared to me to be exactly the right tone, so I posted a link to this on my Facebook timeline. I didn't expect much reaction. Immediately, the culture chasm opened up: ' Charlie Kirk was not reprehensible.  ...

I posed a question... It is argued that the British culture that I grew up in was one of honour-and-shame. Cricket was not just a game but an attitude to life, a moral code. Something that ‘wasn’t cricket’ was against the moral code we grew up with. Honour and shame have always been driving forces in my life.  It’s argued that Jewish culture is more righteousness-and-guilt than honour-and-shame. These two cultures are radically different though it could be argued that shame is the result of personal guilt. But what does one feel, guilt or shame?  Both these two systems create a community culture of morality that binds it together, albeit from a radically different basis.  Is working class culture, was it one of those two cultures or something different still? Were you more driven by righteousness-and-guilt or honour-and-shame? But then I realised it was more complex than that and needed an explanation to be able to even ask the question. I knew in my mind what I meant by ...

(FIRST DRAFT - WILL BE REVISED AND APPENDED) In a previous post, I wrote about the Impending Economic Tsunami and laid out some of the history of economic theory and why Doughnut Economics might be the way forward. That post was long and a bit complicated. It also focussed on resource limitation and shortfall, which though critical is not the only potentially existential issue facing a large percentage of the world population in the next generation or possibly two.   Resource limitation/overshoot Resource shortfall Population plateau Termination of world expansionism Initiation of new world order The Road Ahead was a book by Bill Gates. One of the most significant quotes from that book is that  ' people often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in the next ten '. It is too easy to dismiss the challenges facing us globally because we are thinking 'nothing will happen in the next two years' while not addressing those i...

This is a difficult post to write, so please bear with me. I am honoured to consider Ethan Gutmann a friend and I hope this post honours that friendship. Until earlier this year I thought Ethan and I had very a different lineage. Then I discovered I am a distant descendant of Rebecca of Flanders who was a crypto-Jewess and of the Khazar Jews of Eastern Europe who married into the Scottish royal family from which I am descended. Then I found that my great-great-grandmother was a Messianic-Jewess. But that was emotionally as far as it went. Decades ago I walked through the gas chambers of Auschwitz and I felt a sickness. Almost more so when I saw the punishment cell just 1m x 1m for four prisoners. I met survivors in Poland. Christians who claimed almost as many Christians as Jews were killed there, though I could not verify that claim. It was a memory burned into my psyche. Block 11  and  (left)  the "death wall", Auschwitz I, 2000 photo by  Anneli Salo Then 7 Oct...