challenge for futurology (and for all of us) is to see beyond the hype and past the oversimplifications to the full import of these new sociotechnical formations.
Two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus, assuming that human society and agricultural technology developed on separate paths, predicted that society was growing so fast that it would starve itself to death, the so-called Malthusian trap.
A hundred years later, H.G. Wells similarly assumed that society and technology were developing independently. Like many people today, Wells saw the advance of technology outstripping the evolution of society, leading him to predict that technology's relentless juggernaut would unfeelingly crush society. Like Joy, both Malthus and Wells issued important warnings, alerting society to the dangers it faced. But by their actions, Malthus and Wells helped prevent the very future they were so certain would come about.
These self-unfulfilling prophecies failed to see that, once warned, society could galvanize itself into action. Of course, this social action in the face of threats showed that Malthus and Wells were most at fault in their initial assumption. Social and technological systems do not develop independently; the two evolve together in complex feedback loops, wherein each drives, restrains and accelerates change in the other. Malthus and Wells - and now Joy - are, indeed, critical parts of these complex loops. Each knew when and how to sound the alarm. But each thought little about how to respond to that alarm.
Once the social system is factored back into the equation like this, the road ahead becomes harder to navigate. Ultimately we should be grateful to Joy for saying, at the least, that there could be trouble ahead when so many of his fellow digerati will only tell us complacently that the road is clear.
John Seely Brown is chief scientist at Xerox and the director of Xerox PARC. Paul Duguid is a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley. They are coauthors of The Social Life of Information, published in March by Harvard Business School Press.
