Yesterday one of my teenaged sons cleaned the bedroom he shares with one of his brothers.  He removed from the nine by twelve room two lawn and leaf bags full not of trash but of dirty laundry, including sheets and blankets he had conveniently lost in the mess under his bed.  This morning, one of the cats was in the room, looking entirely confused.

  I know how she feels.  Things are constantly changing in our world.  I hear that one of the web sites I frequent (not Gaming Outpost) is considering closing down, as the site operators believe that the future of Internet discussion will be in weblogs and wikis, not in the forums and articles which constitute its format.  Personally, I find weblogs inconvenient and wikis suspicious, and I don’t visit either more than once a month combined, so if that’s where discussion is going it is going to have to go without me.

  I’m terribly resistant to change.  I don’t like it.  I particularly don’t like it because most change is introduced as being good merely for being different.  That’s an error.  What is new and different is not thereby better.  It might be better, but that remains to be seen.  What is gained from the new must be weighed against what is lost of the old.  So few people do this, as they embrace the latest trends without giving true consideration to the costs.

  You might think I’m rigid because I’m old.  It’s not true.  First, I’ll always be Young; apart from that, I was somewhat rigid a long time before anyone would have thought me particularly aged.  I was still in college when I recognized an inherent value in being conservative.  The world is changing; it changes rapidly, too rapidly for many to keep pace, and certainly too rapidly for anyone to assess intelligently.  By the time we understand the advantages and disadvantages of that which is new, it has been relabeled as old and so has been displaced by the next wave.  The old is lost, the new floods over and destroys it.  Then the new becomes the old, and is in turn washed away by that which comes after it.  There is no hope to stop this, no chance to preserve what is as it rapidly becomes what was.  Progress must progress, it seems.  All for which a conservative can hope is to stem the tide, to slow the flood enough that we can see where the waves are carrying us before we are swept forward on them.

  You might as easily think I’m against change itself.  I am not.  I have embraced change many times, even as I have grown older.  As time is the medium of change, so, too, change is the driver of time.  Were there no change, it is doubtful whether there could be time, or it could be measured.  I recognize that change is valuable.  Indeed, I am quite aware that I would not like to have lived in an earlier time, any age which although simpler from many viewpoints was in terms of physical work much harder.  Change is good; without it, things would not be as they now are.  What I oppose is the pressure to change merely because something new is possible.  I want to be sold on the future before I go there.  I want someone to have done a cost-benefit analysis on the changes, and I want at least to be assured that these changes are worth that cost.

  I am not going to get that.  No one is going to examine the future and provide me with a reliable cost-benefit analysis.  I am going to have to rely on my own hastily-formed judgments to make sense of what is good and what is of dubious value, and sometimes these are going to be wrong.  However, the choice still remains as to how I will be wrong.  There is one error in failing to embrace that which would have been good while holding that which is good enough; there is another in giving up the good for something potentially dreadful.  Thus if the cost-benefit analysis has not been done, there is wisdom in staying with what demonstrably works rather than moving to the untested.

  Alvin Toffler was right.  In his book Future Shock he asserted that change is coming too fast for most people, and that the rate of change will continue to accelerate.  He likens this experience to moving to a new culture, but that as we move to the future we are unable to return to the past.  Each day there are advances in technology, and old, in technological terms, is becoming chronologically younger every day.  Already it is said that your new cutting-edge computer will be obsolete by the time you get it out of the carton.  The advanced cellular phones we use in America have none of the features that have become available and even common on their Japanese counterparts, such as real-time television, Internet access, and global satellite positioning.  By the time those have reached us, what will the Japanese have?  It is difficult to imagine, but you can be sure that engineers in Japan are already imagining.

  Our science fiction worlds need to take a lesson from this.  Our aversion to change and resistance to future shock causes us to see our world and all worlds as static entities.  We know in theory that the world is changing, but at any given moment we expect that tomorrow will be much the same as today.  It won’t.  As day leads on to day, each will be less like the day before.  The day may come when each morning we rise to find that technology has once again outstripped us, and we must catch up with the new systems before we can be effective in our daily tasks.  Too often science fiction tells us how it will be, that is, how it is at a specific point in the future, and fails to consider that it will not stay this way very long.

  On the other hand, predicting change is a challenge beyond the ken of most of us.  Half a decade ago someone asked an Internet business list whether it was important to prepare for the next millennium.  My answer was republished at Paul Siegel’s Learning Fountain site under the title The Future.  A quick scan of the latter half of the twentieth century demonstrates that our expectations for the beginning of the twenty-first century were not met–no space colonies or flying cars or fully computerized robotic homes–and yet most of the defining technologies of our age were not expected–the Internet, cellular phones, personal computers.  The world will change, but always in unexpected ways and at an unanticipated rate.  The things we want today will not be defining of the things we have tomorrow.  Accidental discoveries combine with changing values to produce the unexpected.  Preparing for the long-term future is if not impossible at least counter-productive.  We know it will be different, and not merely in terms of advanced technology.  We know it will be in flux, even more so than our present.  We know that it will have its own problems which we have not yet recognized, and that solutions will have to emerge out of the values and options available then.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.