I have been telling lots of people that I am writing a book about our transition past the industrial economy. If you have been reading Continuations for a while you know that this has been the subject of much of my writing here. So why write a book? For starters I greatly enjoy reading books so the idea of writing one is appealing. But what is the goal, what am I trying to accomplish with the book?
The key reason is that I am trying to influence where we are headed. Earlier this week I tweeted the following:
The range of possible futures for humanity is daunting: from nuclear self-annihilation to terrestrial abundance and interstellar travel
We live in an age of extreme possibilities. On one extreme when you visit Europe and/or follow what Putin has been up to in Russia it is hard not to fear a regression to a cold war world or worse (and similar concerns can be had about conflict emanating from other parts of the world). On the other extreme we are making amazing breakthroughs in fields as diverse as medicine and robotics that could let us live in abundance.
So which will it be? This question is more pressing than it has been in a long time. Not only because of the extreme possibilities but also because the lives of many people around the world are being uprooted by dramatic changes in technology, society and the environment. It is during such periods that historically bad things have happened.
If you are an extreme quantum determinist you would believe that what will happen was already decided a long time ago during the birth of our universe and that all that’s been happening since is governed by Schroedinger’s equation. Extremely few people take this position because it seems to fly in the face of our perceived agency. Yet, this is the position that is consistent with the current state of mainstream physics and only emerging theories such as some versions of the multiverse and, my personal favorite, constructor theory provide real alternatives (aside: as one of our sons correctly reminded me yesterday when we discussed this – just because you feel something doesn’t mean it is real and vice versa, after all, we don’t feel the earth turning or flying through space and yet it does).
Or you could be a technological determinist. You could believe that technology alone is enough to determine where we wind up. Again, few people would state their position as such but it is often implicit in a strong libertarian perspective. If only government would get out of the way, the people would use technology to make the world a better place. Some version of technological determinism is also implicit in the exact opposite view. There are those who seek to stop or slow down research and progress in areas such as stem cells or DNA manipulation because of a view that whatever new technology we have will inevitably be used for warfare or otherwise to harm people or the planet. The recent concerns about superintelligence are somewhat different because they are not about what humans will do with technology but what the technology itself will do (I am in the midst of reading Bostrom’s book and will post more about that).
My own view is somewhat different. I have called myself a technology optimist, by which I mean that we can collectively figure out how to use technology to make the world a better place. But we need to work at that. By itself new technology only expands the space of the possible, which is now broader than ever, as summarized in my tweet. Where we wind up in that huge space of possibility is our choice as humanity and requires that we have a view as to why humanity is here in the first place.
That is why I am writing a book. I want to influence, in however small a way, the choices that we make individually and collectively. I want us to embrace that we are human first and foremost (and that gender, race, age, nationality etc are all utterly secondary). I want us to embrace knowledge broadly defined as our individual and collective purpose, as what makes us fundamentally human and why we are here. I want us to pursue policies that will enable a human society based on knowledge and its associated values.
All of that is ridiculously ambitious and I will most likely fall utterly short but that doesn’t mean it isn’t completely worth trying. One of the reasons it is worth trying now is that others, such as ISIS, are busy filling the minds of those who feel left behind with an utterly retrograde view of humanity. I want to contribute to an alternative and coherent view of humanity’s future.
