Predicting the future is a thankless task

‘Never think of the future, it comes soon enough’, said Albert Einstein. 1 Predicting the future is a thankless task, so Dr Shabbir Amanullah is admirably brave to share his thoughts about the future of medical and psychiatric treatment. 2 Undoubtedly somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Dr Amanullah’s future is one where surgeons have been reduced to machine operators and physicians replaced by machines programmed in the recognition of symptom clusters. Thinking more broadly and with even more optimism, one could hope that our future human societies – or ‘society’, should globalisation reach its natural conclusion – will be so harmonious, and their people so self-actualised that many of the societal factors we identify today as predisposing towards psychiatric disorders will be banished. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, 4 ‘Soma’, a mind-altering drug, is widely used as a method of control through pleasure, while Philip K. Dick’s protagonist in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?