Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Pouya Nikmand's avatar

Beautiful and inspiring, thank you for writing this. Toward a future where we have everything you mentioned, and also importantly where injustice, violence, and racism are pushed into vanishingly thin margins. A future where people look at each other as inspirations and potential friends, rather than threats.🫱🏻‍🫲🏼🚀

Expand full comment
atilla's avatar

Imagining "the good future" as, "more of the fun and cool and full-of-love stuff and less of the annoying and painful stuff", feels super boring and unimaginative to me.

I expect and hope that it'll be more like, "fun and awesome stuff that we wouldn't or can't imagine, and painful, annoying stuff (some of which we also can't predict) that we deal with because it's worth it".

And I'm not even the type of person who really enjoys or mythologizes suffering and "grinding" through difficulty.

--------------------------------------------

For example, what would it be like to grab some friends (some alien, some robots, some humanoids, maybe our pets can talk now), get on a space shuttle, everyone gets a mech suit, and you build a little habitat on a random asteroid. And then play laser tag?

There will probably be a bunch of things that suck, maybe someone dies or is injured (and then revived/healed? it would still suck tho. or you're on a budget and you just die like normal), and thinsg that are super weird and cool (maybe new kinds of drugs, or, like, jumping around in a mech suit in an asteroid belt is probably extremely fun and nothing like what we have today).

It's not like we'll only asymptotically improve life on earth and just fix annoyances and problems until everyone is smiling and excited all day. If people go out and explore, you'll get many "gritty scifi" kind of situations, if they're on the outskirts of civilization.

--------------------------------------------

(Another pet peeve is that discussions of the future always seem to miss how dynamic the world can be. Designing a utopia is top-down, but life is lived bottom up (or moment to moment). But I haven't come up yet with examples for why the top-down perspectives yields wrong predictions).

Expand full comment
5 more comments...

No posts