By Mark Devlin, IEN Staff

Imagine yourself in the 1950s, or even the 1960s. Or, if you’re old enough, remember...

Remember what it was like to tune-up your first car; the points, distributor cap, rotor; the timing light and ever so carefully nudging the distributor. Remember the damned choke always sticking. Remember what it was like to be tethered to a corded, rotary-dial phone. Remember what it was like to play in mud or hurl yourself into a pond or river without worrying about germs or the potential of ending up in an ambulance. Remember what it was like to play Cowboys and Indians. Remember the plastic (and sometimes metal) guns and holsters, the BB guns, the slingshots—all before Columbine and Homeland Security. Remember what it was like sitting on the porch with your parents—or, as a parent—talking with neighbors as the hot summer’s day wound down and the breeze was met, if you were lucky, with a swig of Coke-a-Cola  from that hefty, substantial glass bottle that just felt right. Remember barber shops, corner drug stores, maybe even the huge Five-and-Dime intermingled amongst several Mom-n-Pop stores.

Yeah, the times were simple. The devices were simple. From that perspective, it wasn’t difficult to envision a distributor-less engine. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that something was going to come along to automatically adjust the ignition timing of that engine. It wasn’t difficult to imagine cordless phones. It wasn’t even difficult to imagine shopping malls. We could—and did—extrapolate, then, from a very simple perspective. Predicting the future (except for flying cars, about which every pundit has thus far been wrong. Now, with the infrastructure crumbling, we could really use ‘em) wasn’t all that difficult—from that simple framework.

Today, predicting the future is easier, short-term. Why? The short-term future-as-present is already here.

We’re cordless, we’re wireless, we’re connected; we’re all desktopped, laptopped, Mac’d, Window’d, cell phoned, RSS-fed, iPodded, Apple tv’d, internetted, game systemed, security-tagged, text-messaged, scanned, x-rayed, RFID’d, GPS’d, entertainment-centered, traction-controlled and fuel-injected, with pancake-shape whirring around vacuuming our floors—all while the cashless society and, arguably, Big Brother, are happening before our very eyes.

We’re overloaded, confused, scattered, multitasking giants of our own little worlds (who most often take pride in our ability to exhibit all of the signs of Attention Deficit Disorder), interconnected to those across the planet who, too, are in their own little worlds. Maybe those connections make the world bigger. Or, have they made it smaller? Has thinking outside the box actually put us into a new, bigger, more impenetrable box? Has getting on the same page distracted us from the page we’re supposed to be on? Has creating a new paradigm prevented us from knowing the existing one? Hey, as long as our new box has a satellite dish, we’re good.

How can one see 5, 10, 15, or 25 years down the road when we’re blinded by the light of existing and real and everyday technologies (that are pretty much taken for granted)?

There’s too much technological noise to do that, today. Dreaming is no longer considered acceptable. Reaching for the skies is considered a pipedream when it’s so much easier to escape in Guitar Hero than in calm thought.

Instant communications distort. In the ‘60s or ‘70s, we didn’t have any idea what was happening behind the closed doors of the Science or Engineering labs of nearby colleges and universities—unless you were actually working in one. Our dreams and visions weren’t distorted by the realities of minute-by-minute coverage of human existence—be it on YouTube, MySpace, or CNN.

It gets worse. Every PR machine on the planet has cranked up to warp speed, while security cameras watch and record not only your and my every move in the Wal-Mart, but also the "spies" entering the above R&D  labs. They don’t catch the cell phone cameras clicking away not only to feed wikis and other websites, but also other institutions and competitive businesses. Privacy is all too quickly, sadly and dramatically becoming a thing of the past—across the board—and we’re just A-okay with that, as long as we're stopping the evil doers.

Our hope, in this case, may not be with youth. It’s youth in general, after all, who are arguably deeper into the noise than we are—and they’ll soon be up to their ears in it. if they’re not already.

It may not be with engineers, as it’s the engineers who design, build, use, and improve upon the many tools of our existence. Engineers may just be too close to the situation—too close to their work—to see very far into the future. An interesting quote by Peter Drucker may apply to engineers: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” Engineers are already creating our future, and their own.

Great thinkers are required to have even a minuscule chance of going beyond that engineered future-as-present. That’s not to say that engineers aren’t great thinkers. I’m talking Aristotle and Plato. We have brilliant minds like that of Stephen Hawking, for instance, but they don’t get out much. Our country’s forefathers were great thinkers but, well, we can see how the great thinking of politicians has gone down the tubes with a deafening bah-whoosh. Religious leaders? Please. Along with politicians, most are tightly stretch-wrapped in scandals; not really a good jumping-off point for the visionary, unless we’re talking depth charges.

With youth, engineers, philosophers, scientists, statesmen, politicians, and religious leaders off the list of Great Thinkers, to whom do we turn for a glimpse of the far-future?

Writers. It’s the writers. (Not including yours truly; I can’t match my socks.) Not the writers of self-help books, or catchy novels (‘cept maybe for Michael Crichton, or at least someone Crichtonesque). Lord knows we don’t need another best-seller about a legal trial, murder investigation, or medical mystery.

It’s the sci-fi writers. It’s the Jules Vernes and Isaac Asimovs and Ray Bradburys and Robert Heinleins and Orson Scott Cards and Philip K. Dicks of the world—and those who tread boldly in their footsteps—who have the unique ability to dream, then organize and chronicle those dreams, thus enabling a glimpse of our faraway futures. To them, perhaps today’s noisy, complex, sometimes frustrating reality is of a simplicity that we, too, understood—decades ago.

Taken another step, it’s the screenwriters and directors and special effects geniuses that take such important yet relatively obscure visions and present them in a form of reality that we can all see, become immersed in—and, ultimately, understand.

Hooray for Hollywood...and onward to IEN’s 75th Anniversary Predictions....