By coincidence, my bedtime and subway reading material these days is a pair of dystopian novels that cast today’s technology forward in time to some pretty scary places. Don DeLillo’s Zero K looks slightly ahead to a day when the wealthy have themselves and their loved ones frozen, in the expectation medical knowledge will advance to the stage that future physicians can help them live forever. Arcadia by Iain Pears imagines a future world where “the idiots of the early period of exploration had filled near space with so much debris that they had created a new asteroid belt, all but impossible to get through.”
The results are a multinational bunch of unhappy billionaires, and an anti-Arcadia where “there are 35 billion people in the world,” unable to escape to other planets, who live “miserable and pointless” lives under the totalitarian rule of a scientific elite.
A different sort of elite was on view May 18 at The Washington Post. The newspaper bought by Amazon founder and Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos was inaugurating the conference center at its newly completed headquarters in downtown Washington with a public symposium on “transformers”—individuals working in science, engineering and business who are pointing the way toward the future, which seems to be arriving at an exponentially accelerating pace.
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