In two years' time, the annual growth of the web will be equivalent to all the documents ever written in human history. In the foreseeable future, that same amount of information is likely to be added in a matter of days.
The future is here. The pace of the technological development that we imagine lies in the future is with us right now and changes our lives from year to year, sometimes from month to month. We live the future every day. The problems of the future impinge on the present as only history once did and has a profound impact on the way people think of their own time and their own lives.
The gap between our technical ingenuity and our political and moral capacities to deal with the issues of today is large. One key problem is that we are working with a model of democracy founded before industrialisation when the population of the world was less than 1 billion in total.
We must update our institutions so that there is formal, publicised, long-term advice, which will educate politicians and the public. Education is vital, not just about the menace of an overheated, overpopulated world, but about greed and the selfishness that is integral to current ideas of success.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/27/henry-porter-saving-planet
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