While across Europe the proportion of those who expect their lives to get worse is almost equal to those who expect them to improve, in Malta the proportion of optimists is more than double those who are pessimistic about the future.  It seems that the demoralisation campaign that has been waged in the Western world over the last five decades has not yet reached our shores.

What I am referring to is the ongoing effort by the media, governments, think tanks, non-profit organisations, civil society activists, politicians, and even corporate executives who have advanced a climate of doom inspired by doubts about the sustainability of current policies, the ‘Precautionary Principle’, trust and safety, risk management, and the ‘limits of growth’ – but really, one could say they are anti-progress, against technology, and against life.

In his book The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised published last year, James Pethokoukis, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, dated what he calls “the Great Downshift” in technological progress and economic growth, and a popular culture “fixated on catastrophe”, back to the early 1970s.

At around that time America started becoming a less future-oriented, less optimistic society.   Europe followed some time later.  Pethokopukis puts the blame on the growing environmental movement, which (in his view) became “utterly hostile to technological progress, economic growth, and market capitalism.” The outcome was a dystopian picture of the future and our ability to make it better.

The engineer and futurist J. Storrs Hall, in his 2021 book Where Is My Flying Car?, also fingered the 1970s as the beginning of economic stagnation enabled by a countercultural hostility to progress, born of an opposition to almost any form of energy use.  

The conservative observers are joined by none other than New York Times columnist Ezra Klein who has been calling for “a liberalism that builds”.  Klein believes that rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often stymie urban density and green energy projects.  One could say this of certain EU Commission policies, actually.

It is not a coincidence that a lot of popular science fiction since the 1970s has depicted dark futures: environmental collapse, staggering inequality, corporate domination, people enslaved by technology, even the collapse of civilisation — all have become our default visions.  Earlier I mentioned the reported higher optimism of the Maltese, but this does not preclude a similar developing critique of whether a higher GDP really constitutes ‘progress’.

After all, didn’t the film Blade Runner provide a template for subsequent movies, television programmes, videogames, and novels dominated by what the historian and journalist Jill Lepore calls a “radical pessimism”?  In the film   ̶   only forty years from now   ̶   we see a horrible electronic slum where a retrograde future is treated as a given, a foregone conclusion which we cannot turn around.  In a similar vein, the Dutch historian and sociologist Fred Polak, in his 1973 book The Image of the Future, claims that our images of the future are nihilistic and full of despair.

However, some prominent sci-fi authors   ̶   among them Cory Doctorow and Kim Stanley Robinson   ̶    are now militating for futuristic fiction that offers an inspiring outlook about our ability to shape the future.  Even if they did, would readers find the stories credible, given current trends?  The question is legitimate, because, for example, the climate emergency   ̶   long predicted by often-derided and dismissed environmental ‘doomists’ since the 1970s   ̶  has undeniably now begun.  Ferocious heat over four continents has recently likely contributed to hundreds if not thousands of deaths, while this summer could become the hottest in 2,000 years.

Dystopias are typically regarded as warnings about what could happen. But the fears expressed in sci-fi five decades ago have turned from predictions into reality precisely because we did not heed their concerns. It is no wonder, then, that we are caught in a paradoxical malaise, where living standards have risen by leaps and bounds and yet more of us feel distrustful of the future.

Many of us feel impotent in the face of technological progress such as the accelerating entry of AI.  Just like the Luddites   ̶   the 19th-century English textile workers who opposed the use of machinery   ̶   many of us fear for our future, imagining that we will be enslaved by it.  Authorities and governments everywhere are concerned that they will lose control over a contemporary industrial capitalism whose strongest proponents seem hostile to recognising any limits, be they political, social, or environmental.  And so do millions of workers, who have been warned that they stand to lose their jobs.

In researching for this piece, I found a six-minute clip in the series Tomorrow’s World in the BBC Archive, where a class of teenagers in 1966 attempted to predict what life would be like in the year 2000. It is fascinating for anyone interested in futurology. The children of 1966 were a profoundly gloomy lot. Pessimists outnumbered optimists by six to one. The miserabilists were principally worried about a nuclear apocalypse, which several regarded as inevitable. Overpopulation was mentioned repeatedly, as was unemployment caused by automation and computers.  A boy argued that orbiting satellites would interfere with the weather and cause sea levels to rise by 300-600 feet. 

The Tomorrow’s World children seem serious and articulate, but their speculation mirrors only the stock dismal concerns of the day.  As for the children’s predictions proving accurate, I am afraid I do not agree. Concerns about automation and its effect on jobs may seem unusually prescient.  An important book in 1966 was the University of Massachusetts economist Ben Seligman’s Most Notorious Victory: Man in an Age of Automation.  Among its chapter headings: ‘Work Without Men’ and ‘The Trauma We Await’.  The dire predictions fell flat.

For me, the Tomorrow’s World clip highlights how we should be wary of basing prognostication on what is currently fashionable. Modish concerns rarely turn out to be on the money. The late Adrian Berry, a British science writer and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Royal Geographical Society and the British Interplanetary Society, went so far as to argue that humans fret over imaginary dangers, and that the degree of panic tends to be in inverse proportion to real peril.

My nomination, then, for the leading misplaced fear of 2024 is artificial intelligence, which has dominated the future-gazing agenda for the past year. There are many reasons for believing AI will not turn out be the monster so many fear.  Without meaning to be flippant, a good reason for not giving today’s popular concern about AI much credence is precisely that it is a popular concern. If you are predicting what will really trouble us in the future, I commend you to look elsewhere.

I do not, for one moment, belittle the risks, but I think that our thinkers should stop encouraging us to fear the future.  Rather, they should persuade us that we have a place in it and that it is up to each one of us to build it.  As Ezra Klein has written: “Treating so much of society with such withering contempt will not speed up a better future. It will turn people against the politics and policies of growth, just as it did before. Trust is the most essential technology of all.”

Main photo: Getty