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40 Years in the Future Reading


Each of these readings points out the danger that our current state of living may guide us towards.  The first represents this with a shocking story of the distant future. The second looks at how we are damaging our future by ignoring the problems of our present. Finally, a touching letter from a grandfather to his grandchildren apologizes for the reckless consumption that defines our generation and the ones before.
              “The Machine Stops” by EM Forster looks far into the future. This futuristic world is created greatly from the imagination of the writer, but it holds elements that were relevant when the piece was written in 1909 and continue to drive our society today.  Considering the age of this piece, it is surprisingly prophetic to our world today. It takes place in a society formed underground due to the presumably uninhabitable conditions of the surface of the Earth. It is run by something called the machine. This machine seems to do everything for the people. It provides them most vital elements of living such as food, lodging, air, entertainment, transportation, and communication. The only reading people seem to have is the book of the machine; they treat it as religious texts are often treated. While it is available to them, people rarely travel; they attend conferences while sitting in something that seems to resemble the virtual reality we have today that is in every room that each individual lives in.
              Eventually, a character ends up escaping to the surface of the Earth. While the air is harsh to breathe, he finds humans living there. He is shunned for his high athleticism and curiosity that led him to this discovery. Eventually, as certain functions of the machine start to disappear, he realizes that it is soon to fail. No one heeds his warning, and eventually they are left with no food, water, or way of telling how to fix the machine. They had so long ago destroyed the concept of original ideas that when they relied upon new concepts to save their civilization, they failed entirely, destroying this entire underground world.  Nevertheless, in his last breaths, the character points out that those on the surface of the Earth will live and thrive where this “perfect” society had failed.
              Today, there are many functions that we require technology to perform. This blind reliance on technology has begun to allow people to forget things such as how to read a map or a compass, how to spell, and how to perform basic mathematics, and that is just naming a few. While we use technology to ease our lives and create more time for different activities, we are forgetting skills we would need were these machines to fail. We are also pursuing technologies that is directly destroying our world, such as emissions from cars. Our reliance on this technology and blindness to its effects on our safety has a strong correlation to the machine of the story.  In her piece “This Changes Everything”, Naomi Klein calls desperately for everyone to recognize this danger against our planet and humanity as a whole. Just as the man in the machine, her voice needs to be amplified in the crowd. She demands for a movement just for the environment. She claims that if voices such as hers are left unheard, our world could face a similar fate as the underground society.
              The last piece is an apology for the world that we continue to blindly contribute to. In “50 Years from Now, What Will the World Be Like”, Chip Ward writes an extensive apology for our rapid development and consumption of new technology and how it will lead to great world problems far beyond what we will live to see.  He points out the destructive habits, such as our obsession with oil and the high consequences of mass production that was introduced with Ford manufacturing. He hopes for a future of solutions that we have not taken the time to find yet.
            Overall, each piece considers that throughout history, humanity tends to amplify its destructive qualities. As technology develops, the imagination is left with infinite ways in which our blind consumption may lead to a painful destruction for our planet and our race. It is here that dystopias began to consume the stories of society, such as that of the machine. But, in the end, these fictional futures mirror the fears of where our current habits will take us.

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