Bryant Cruse
I am fortunate to be having a very interesting career. I mean career the verb: “to move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction.” For me, beginning with my early love of science fiction, the direction has always been towards a vision of a future that is quite different than the world we live in today. As far as “uncontrolled” – it may seem that way, it is certainly has not followed a linear track.
I have been a Naval Aviator, a spacecraft engineer, a researcher in Artificial Intelligence and a serial entrepreneur. But that’s only half the story.
I decided early on (I was 16) that I needed a personal perspective; a “philosophy of life” that would anchor me against life’s disruptions.
I could have searched for one I could adopt but, with the typical arrogance of youth, I set out to construct my own. I had only two guiding principles, a confidence in the scientific method and the idea as expressed by John Muir, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
Over time the aim of this project has transformed to be less a search for a personal philosophy and more of a conscious effort to “reverse-engineer” human nature. How can we understand where we are and where we are going if we don’t understand what we are and how we came to be that way?
In this project I have had many mentors, too many to recite here. I have drawn not only on the hard sciences, but also on evolutionary and archetypal psychology, anthropology, history and mythology. It has been a rewarding journey and fundamental to how I see the future.
As a futurist, I am neither a breathless optimist prone to hype every little technical advancement as a breakthrough leading to a shiny new future nor dystopian. I do think that as species, for all our one-dimensional thinking at times, we are going to turn out to be clever enough not to blow ourselves up nor poison our planet beyond redemption.
Forward to future! Let’s go explore.
Bryant Cruse
Jupiter, Florida
