The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem published a stimulating dystopia where human feelings are manipulated in the future. In the Futurological Congress (1971), the demographic explosion was discussed to the point that, due to it, there was such an excess of futurologists that they almost didn't fit in the congress. The congress was marked by demonstrations, riots, and social violence against the government while an eight-hundred-story flying building was presented with maternity wards, kindergartens, schools, shops, museums, zoos, theaters, cinemas, crematories, and, of course, forty of its own television channels. The demographic explosion proposed to "persuasively and policedly discourage, de-eroticize, institute celibacy, onanism…". Even one of the professors suggested that the next phase of civilization was cannibalism.
Reading Lem's work allows us to delve into seeing our future as if we were speakers at a futurology congress. The first thing we can say with enthusiasm is that we are a few years away from vacationing in space, on a satellite or in a ship orbiting the earth. Some architects will propose, as is already done in Chicago's city hall, to create balanced urban planning regarding bacteria control. Video games will consolidate as a parallel 3D reality as some experts currently suggest. Medicine will draw a future where our life expectancy will rise from the current average of 82.5 years in Spain to 120 years.
The futurologists would begin the congress announcing a better world far removed from Lem's catastrophic vision. They would be futurologists that we could call techno-optimists, by outlining a future without contradictions. On the opposite side, a large group of techno-pessimists would argue that the future, in its different technological drifts, will negatively change the human condition. The doomsayers, resistant not so much to changes as to unbridled technological euphoria, would raise the problems of an aging Europe, unable to care for its elderly, with such low democratic quality that it would affect freedom of expression and the movement of people. They would denounce the situation of helplessness of citizens before the large communication corporations that will traffic with their personal data and past. Robotics, sensors, drones, and surveillance through our mobile phones will be seen as limitations of freedoms and not as an improvement in security.
The futurology congress would be divided between the position of those in favor and that of the critics; between resistors and collaborators. As already happened with the scientific and technological optimism of the late 19th century, the techno-optimists will have to coexist with those who believe in spirits, like those who used photography to capture the aura. The difference is that back then it was still possible to redirect the evils of a bad technological application, by affecting a small number of people. Whereas now a successful invention reaches everyone anywhere in the world. The congress should ask itself if the reduction of the need for human labor in the face of the evolution of robotics will mean more social inequality, or how the welfare state will be financed, where social networks will fail, where privacy begins and where it ends, what it will imply that we no longer control our data, how it will manage to limit the monopoly of knowledge, establish the ethical limits of genetic manipulation, who will control financial flows, who will control conflicts and, consequently, what value diplomacy will have to solve them. Currently, a futurology congress would be very different from the humorous, incendiary, and provocative future that Lem narrates in his book, but in one aspect it would coincide: in the fact that thousands of people would demonstrate at its doors demanding that men be capable of facing the present before defining the future.