Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
122 lines (89 loc) · 8.79 KB

future.md

File metadata and controls

122 lines (89 loc) · 8.79 KB
Raw

the future of the world

The Future emcompasses a lot of concepts. Near future, distant future, eventual death of the planet, etc. So to try and get more structure I think some milestones might be useful:

  • Time based
    • Next 10 years
    • Next 100 years
    • Next 1000 years
  • End of ... (not in any particular order)
    • The planet - sun dies
    • Humanity - we fuck up
  • The ultimate end of everything (perhaps called "the universe")

At least one of these seems likely to occur and I imagine all of them might occur.

So far it seems to be there are 3 ways the future could go:

  1. environmental disaster
  • fight for natural resources dominates our time
  • survival of human race itself is in question
  • "progress" is put on hold to attend to more immediate concerns
  1. human-created power structures become too powerful (over human freedom)
  • like the world today, but more
  • the growth of current power structures - government/business
  • more people are reduced to mere cogs in a system
  • can envisage sum of all human activity as a higher level meta-organism (in the same way all the people in a company can change but the company continues - what is the company?)
  1. computers take over the world

Well, and magic 4th option, the world I actually want, I call it the garden of eden :) - it looks a bit like the shire from lord of the rings. A bit more on these in the "perfect new worlds" section below.

Or the ultimate end from death of the sun (which would be death of the earth, but maybe humanity has escaped in a magical spaceship by then).

Whichever one will happen first is the one we should fix, if we don't know which one will happen first, we should work on them all, until we have more information.

Maybe there are some other options though, this is probably not all the ways the future could go.

The important question is timescale too, is this 1 month (probably not), 1 year, 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years?

Perfect new worlds

There are a few projects which are trying to push the vision of the world as the beautiful place it could be. I'd love these to happen, I think they need to have an accurate model of the current world first. It's one thing to conjure up the magic fairy land in your head, it's another thing entirely to transition our current world into that.

The Venus Project

https://www.thevenusproject.com/en/

This is a lot to pick through! They are serious!

The Free World Charter

http://www.freeworldcharter.org/en

It seems blissfully unaware, or at least does not acknowledge, any of the difficulties we face in getting to this dream world. Prefering to state how things will be. The FAQ actually has a lot of the good questions I want to ask, but I'm not convinced by the answers:

Once people realise there is no longer any real scarcity, and they are a vital part of a community that supports them, greed and selfishness will become unnecessary

By removing money, you remove the main motivation for greed.

True incentives to work are passion, flair, helping out, meeting people, wanting to learn. Once money is removed from our lives, people will work with these incentives only

being free of work and financial constraints would enable you to fulfil your dreams

It would be nice if these things were true. I suspect they are not. Without any actual evidence to back them up I have to fall back on my intuition.

In a free world, people will also respect each other's entitlement to safe dwelling, privacy and security, because that's how they will be taught from the earliest age

This last bit is most ominous to me: that's how they will be taught. What if they disagree? Sounds like the seeds of a dictatorship to me.

I lean towards a darker version where there is fundemental conflict between freedom and the dream world. You can never have both. My vote is for freedom, for a bit of chaos, a bit of crime.

Institutes, organisations, or campaigns about the future

  • Future of Humanity Institute University of Oxford - enables a select set of leading intellects to bring the tools of mathematics, philosophy, and science to bear on big-picture questions about humanity and its prospects
  • Institute for the Future - an independent, non-profit research organization with a more than 45-year track record of helping all kinds of organizations make the futures they want
  • Future of Life Institute - aimed at keeping AI beneficial to humanity / a volunteer-run research and outreach organization working to mitigate existential risks facing humanity. We are currently focusing on potential risks from the development of human-level artificial intelligence
  • Campaign to Stop Killer Robots - calls for a pre-emptive and comprehensive ban on the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons
  • Machine Intelligence Research Institute - We do foundational mathematical research to ensure smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact

Structural violence

Something about the difference between ideal and current. http://www.structuralviolence.org/structural-violence/. Haven't read it yet.

Some resources to pick through