The Secret of Hindsight

I like to imagine the future and from there, look back at the present with the benefit of imagined hindsight.

I left school at the end of the 60s, in the days when we used to do peace signs and mean them. After a couple of halcyon years, I realised that my father was right and that having a job oiled the wheels of life.

I liked Rock’n’Roll so I started off as a roadie putting up the lights. I used to tell the bands that we should do to the shows what Busby Berkeley did to the movies in the 1930s and eventually, completely untrained, I became a stage designer.

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I could imagine wild extravaganzas, but at that time Rock’n’Roll didn’t want that and the technology didn’t exist to create it.

So I bided my time, imagining how it could be, and always trying to do more.

Eventually the Rock’n’Roll spectacle came of age and I was there designing some of the great shows.

People ask me today “Don’t you miss showbusiness?” And of course I say, “I’m still in it.”

The best way to invent the future is to predict it.

Alan Kay, father of the laptop computer

Linda McCartney said, “Why would you want to eat something that had a face?”

And I think that when mankind looks back at us 100 years hence, they will see meat eaters (including me) as barbaric.

Food production will be revolutionised during that time so that the taste and textures of grown food will be more desirable than eating animals and thus will come the change.

  • Take Away

    Imagined hindsight

  • A system called “commuting” was once prevalent where workers travelled from their sleeping homes to their working homes every day!

  • It was once believed that telepathy was a supernatural phenomenon, in the days before mind-mail replaced e-mail.

  • When hundreds of millions of people were starving, people still fought against GM food delaying the food revolution of today.

  • The invention of ART (automatic real-time language translation) was the single most important factor in the elimination of war.

  • As recently as the 21st century, people shopped in supermarkets where odd-shaped boxes were packed in plastic bags and carried home.