# The Future That Never Arrived | David Graeber

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Sustainable Human
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F00vBZsuHY

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F00vBZsuHY) Segment 1 (00:00 - 03:00)

What happened to the second half of the 20th century? If you're growing up in say 1900 and you're reading HG Wells and you're imagining what the world would be like 50 years later, well, you basically got it right. There were flying machines and submarines and rockets and talking boxes and TV, radio, so forth and so on. You know, some didn't get the time machine, but a lot of the basic gamut of inventions they expected to happen did in fact happen. Now, here's me growing up in the '60s, um, sort of imagining what the world is going to be like, and we all kind of knew what was going to happen, too. There was a similar list of stuff. There were going to be anti-gravity sleds and teleportation devices and Mars bases and robot androids that could do chores for you and immortality drugs and, you know, there's a basic standard list. And, you know, I don't think any of us expected we'd get all of that stuff within our own lives. But, I don't think it occurred to any of us that we wouldn't get any of them. And the thing that fascinated me is that I know that everybody who grew up then thought this stuff was going to happen. If you were growing up at that time, it wasn't just fantasy. It was, you know, authoritative voices. You go to the planetarium, you read National Geographic, watch those TV science shows, all your elders who were supposed to know about this stuff were assuring you this is what was going to happen. That we actually believed that these things were going to happen has been wiped away as an embarrassment in our memory. So, okay, the question for me became why? It was a kind of a ruling class freak out. It was a reaction to the unrest of the 60s. We're saying, you know, all this unrest, imagine what it's going to be like when the entire working class is replaced by robots are all going to turn into hippies and dropouts and it's going to be chaos. There's this idea that technological change is happening too quickly. All this space age stuff is endangering the social order. And around that time there was indeed a shift in the direction of technological investment away from all that sort of space age stuff towards investment essentially in information technology in medical technology and military technology and that's where all the money's been ever since. First thought you have is all right. If they've been pouring money into that stuff, we still don't have a cure for cancer. Still don't have the immortality drugs. I mean, we got Rolin and Prozac and all this stuff that's useful for social control, but the really good stuff we never got even there. And even military technology, where's Clatu? You know, where's the giant killer robot shooting death rays? We know they've been working on that. But even that stuff, they really haven't got, you know, they got these model airplanes that can blow people up. Whoopdedoo. If you want to maximize possibility, unexpected breakthroughs, it's pretty obvious what the best policy is. You get a bunch of creative people, you give them the resources they need for a certain amount of time, but basically you leave them alone, and most of them are going to end up not coming up with anything at all, but a few of them will probably come up with something that'll even surprise themselves. If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, take those same people and then tell them they're not going to get any resources at all unless they spend the majority of their time competing with one another to prove to you they already know what they're going to create. Well, that's the system we have and it's incredibly effective in stifling any possibility of innovation.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/42545*