No true prophets

Humans will not decide the future

There are no true prophets. Only people who can see into the future but don’t know that they can, and would never claim to be what they are - deep thinkers who solve puzzles. Anyone who claims to be a prophet is only a liar with grandiose delusions. Soothsayers and visionaries are both created by their environments, and those environments are created by the past and the present blending. For the rare thinker, the swirling current of past and present blending lead to prescience about possible futures.

Stanislaw Lem was a Polish visionary created, primarily, by living through World War II. Other factors influenced Lem, of course. His mind explored a wide variety of topics and he wrote those explorations down, publishing a plethora of books and essays during his long life. The prognosticator of the future, as I think of him, spent a great deal of time thinking about technology and how it impacts the human mind and influences human cultures.

In his 1964 book Summae Technologiae, Lem explore…