Will the future be that chaotic?

A premise that today's greatest futurists tend to always raise in their most inspiring presentations is that of a certain general chaotic fluidity of tomorrow, diametrically opposed to the linear straightness of current thinking.

It is not uncommon to find in bold letters the affirmation of a “non-linear, unpredictable, multidisciplinary and connected” future, in contrast to a “linear, segmented, repetitive and predictable” present.

You see, none of this is clearly right or wrong, and all of these nouns do qualify an immense possibility of a future mindset, but some things need to be scrutinized even in order for us to get deeper into that thought.

Will the future be that chaotic? Or just a more precise, multiple and organized assembly line?

I know that these terms are headlines, necessary decoys to deepen the discussions. The problem is when they become mantras, there no longer the experts, but their followers, who categorically affirm what they were told as an option of probability as absolute truth.

There are some contradictions in this line of thinking when contrasted with different filters of reality.

For example: when we talk about a CONNECTED future, we need to understand that the connection is, in many ways and by its very nature, the end of chaos and unpredictability. Connection requires labeling: there is an intensification of more and more specific labels and micro-labels in a notoriously more precise and punctual “production line” of thinking, which can mean the intensification and not the inverse of the so-called “linear thinking”. Let's take the thought of sexuality as a big part of the human mentality.

See, if it were possible to travel to imperial Rome or even ancient Greece, it would be very complicated to understand sexuality from a contemporary point of view, this is no secret. To point someone as "gay" or as "straight" would be a very strange thing, because although there was a certain notion it would not be enough to classify people in social niches according to their sexuality. When Tiberius asked Caligula if he preferred (you see, implying that it would be common to "prove" both) the "nymphs or fauns" - men or women - the answer would have been "Dont we all need both to keep our health up to date? ”. This is for sure a fluid and somewhat unpredictable point of view.

There were few sexual labels in Rome - most of them more directed at the social role and relations of class and power, than at any kind of sexual morality remotely related to the modern one.

In the same way, it would be strange to question a Roman regarding the standards considered inclusive today: are you bisexual? Is it pansexual? Asexual? Demisexual? Ceterosexual? The poor Roman might end up understanding everything, but he would certainly be very confused beforehand.

Industrial thinking, industrial mentality, it needed to facilitate the confinement of people, styles, thoughts and all other human and social items in niches that could be absolutely parameterized with what was technology and market in its time, which resulted in two possibilities of sexuality and also of gender. It was necessary to simplify because the technology did not allow complexity and the market did not have time to waste with specificities beyond the macro-niches.

Today's understanding is no different, we only have more technology for labeling, but the market and therefore more niche possibilities.

Even though the exact choice for a sexual outfit is less and less an important factor for young people, that is, “whatever comes”, this characteristic already gains a label, no longer because it needs to be factory, but because it needs to be algorithmic .

When Rohit Bhargava, a bestseller with “Non-Obvious”, a book that brings countless trend projections, brought - or pointed out - the term “ungendering” as a gender-fluid behavior, for example, he was exposing yet another label , plus another tag, plus an algorithm “gene”.

Of course, on the other hand, there is such a large volume of possible connections that this can be seen as non-linear (or multilinear?) but something that is very evident is that the future mentality model will tend to emulate algorithms for itself so that it can work .

If we thought about the Ford line until yesterday, today we will tend towards more algorithmic synapses and the algorithm requires such a high level of predictability that today we may be calling it “unpredictability”, but in many ways it is the exact opposite:

we are moving towards a mentality where all predictability is possible.