Pompe's Journal

Someone - I don't remember who - said something like "at the core of all well founded belief lies unfounded belief". That's probably true, especially when it comes to the difficult questions of what this world is really like or what the future will be like. And to be fair, it's a feature of everyone's beliefs, including my own.

As an example, I reject Singularian transhumanism as nonsense based on unfounded belief. That's not because I don't believe in progress, I simply believe that the Singularian junk at the core is unfounded belief in a certain near-inevitable type of progress. It's like Marxism. I certainly do agree with bits of Marxist analysis, but the inevitability of future history is based on unfounded belief. These people - like myself - look for "evidence" supporting a world view they've already decided to embrace, and that of course doesn't help the validity of their conclusions. "Confirmation Bias", I believe it is called.

My world view is based on spatial patterns and S-curves, likely because I was trained as a geographer and before that studied biology. I believe in processes without goals and feedbacks without purpose. I reject both the Singularity and Gaia as ways to assign goals and higher purposes to processes and patterns which do not have goals and purposes of that kind. That doesn't mean that our lives have no meaning, it simply means that it's up to us to give them meaning, because there is no Predetermined Great Plan which our lives are a tiny little cogwheel in. (Strictly speaking I do believe in predetermination of sorts, but I don't think there is a Plan or a Goal).

But this is all ultimately unfounded belief. I don't know if the Singularians or the Gaians are wrong, because at the heart of my world view lies the unfounded belief that the patterns I'm familliar with and have chosen to emphasize - confirmation bias - are applicable to something they very well may not. (Well, I'm pretty darn sure the Strong Gaians are wrong and that the Weak Gaians are so diffuse they can't be evaluated, and the same would go for the Transhumanists)

So when I see the newspaper having the cell phone corps talk about hardware not evolving as quickly as in the 90's, my confirmation bias immediately kick in and tell me this is another sign of the deceleration, the S-curve I believe is there.

I think it was by reading Hobsbawm I first heard of Kondratiev's waves. I doubt it is serious economy and timing the waves must be rather contested, but the wave pattern appealed to me - it has been argued the pattern is part of why cities grow as they do, as an example.

What I gather is that we're in Kondratiev-5, the fifth wave. Information technology/economy. And we likely should be in a stage where progress have some sort of crisis and stagnation, just past the peak, and in what, 10-15 years we'll be in Real Trouble. (This little recession is not the big one which would usher in Kondratiev-6). But our wave is starting to break and I think Kondratiev himself, before Stalin got rid of him, described how the waves seemed to coincide with bad things. Wars and such.

So here's my questions and ideas. Is there any SF out there based on Kondratiev Wave patterns? Which actually predict a shift from 5 to 6 with wars and bad things somewhere in the 2020's? And if so, are all the predictions for Kondratiev-6 some nanotechnological, biotechnological or artificial-intelligence based tech, essentially gadgeteering, or do we have macroeconomical and structural focus?

Because I think we can make more interesting predictions for the sixth wave than HAL, Gray Goo or cat people. And perhaps for the seventh wave too at the turn of the century.