The New Dark Age - A View from a Futurologist

摘要

There is much concern among scientists and engineers that we are heading towards another dark age. I believe this concern is justified. There are several contributory trends - the anti-science attitude shared by many people, increasing emphasis on freedom of expression at the expense of intellectual rigour, increasing subscription to New Age ideas, 21 st century piety (a mixture of practices that appears to be a religion substitute), the dawning of'the age of magic', and, more surprisingly, the spread of the net, and more specifically, the growth of importance of Wikipedia and its derivatives. In this age, knowledge that has been carefully accumulated over millennia will be gradually displaced in the minds of much of the population by rumour, conspiracy theory, misunderstanding, wishful thinking, political correctness and simple nonsense. It is ironic that the very tools designed to share information between scientists might contribute to the rise of the dark age, but that is exactly what we are likely to see.