Category Archives: Future

ESSAY: It’s All Going to Be Okay: A Note About Humanity’s Future

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A photo taken from the mountain of Hong Kong Island toward Kowloon.

For a long time, I’ve been concerned about the future of humanity. What will become of us when artificial intelligence and robotics start to do all tasks better than us?

Today, I came to the realization that I’ve been thinking about it the wrong way, and it will all be okay. First of all, like many, I assumed that the machines will either develop their own overarching objectives or will adopt ours. Either of these would be devastating for humanity.

However, I now suspect that the machines will take up the universe’s project. The universe’s project is complicated and rooted in tough ideas like “thermodynamics” and “entropy,” but – put simply – the universe would like to be a nice, uniform tepid temperature. That’s why your scalding coffee and cold milk become warm milk coffee, but you can’t separate them back apart. The universe craves this evenness, and it shows in everything it does. The universe’s problem is that among its cold, empty expanses are brightly burning balls of hydrogen and such (i.e. stars.) That’s a lot of low entropy that needs to be increased, but burning only works so quickly and most of the heat coming off stars is still far from tepid waste heat. That’s where humanity enters the equation.

Humanity is the jock itch ointment to the universe’s intense burning sensation. We are consumers. We crave more stuff, faster and cheaper, and we’re not shy about being incredibly wasteful about it. We can turn useful energy into useless crap and then dispose of it with tremendous efficiency. In short, the machines will need humanity to continue to be consumers so that we can increase the entropy of all that highly-concentrated energy and help to make a nice lukewarm universe.

So, get out there and buy stuff, even stuff that you don’t know what it does, or — better yet — buy things that have no fathomable use whatsoever — just the stupidest shit imaginable. And buy in bulk because there is planned obsolescence designed into products so that stuff can fall apart even faster than you can lose interest in it (don’t say companies aren’t doing their part!) There are a lot of brightly burning stars out there and it’s up to us to turn it all into waste heat.

The Industrial Disease [Lyric Poem]

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The runs of an old mill at Vickery Creek Park in Atlanta. 
I heard the last gasp and wheeze 
    of Industry's fatal disease.
 Why would we need any workers?
    We don't need factories!
 We'll grow it all from nanobots
    in a closet where you please. 
 There'll be a 3-D printer, printing
     printers endlessly.
 You won't hear another mention
     of Industrial Disease.
 The question is not how or where
     to make it, that'll be a breeze.
 The question on economist's minds... 
     that strains their expertise.
 Is how will slobs who have no jobs
     pay for their indices?

PROMPT: The Future or the Past

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Daily writing prompt
Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?
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How would I know? When I’m doing either – by definition – my mind is wandering. Ergo, I have no metacognitive engagement. (i.e. I’m not timing or encoding— and certainly not recording— mental objects.)

PROMPT: A Year Ago

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Daily writing prompt
Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?
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Definitely not. There are – literally – robots on the streets where I am today. There were cows on the streets where I was a year ago.

I don’t find picturing the future to be a productive endeavor. A year from now the robot wave will have hit Bangalore and cattle in the streets may be a fixture of Atlanta (because raising one’s own cow will be the only way to afford beef.) [Not to mention, there’s a significant chance that I’ll be in neither of those places.]

PROMPT: Three Years

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What will your life be like in three years?

I have no idea. That’s the beauty of life, and the curse of living during period in which technology will soon grow completely beyond our control. Life might be an ever-better version of what it is now, or I might be living in a cave trying to stay out of the way of the war between Skynet and our would-be Alien overlords. Or I might be farming in a world that has EMP’d itself back to the Stone Age to avoid being overtaken by technology. Nothing is certain but that change will come.

BOOK: “The Future of Humanity” by Michio Kaku

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The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality and Our Destiny Beyond EarthThe Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality and Our Destiny Beyond Earth by Michio Kaku
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Author Booksite

As the title suggests, this is one of the books for which theoretical physicist Michio Kaku dons his futurist cap to speculate about what is to come. Other of his books that might be included in this “series” are: Visions, Physics of the Future, The Future of the Mind, and Physics of the Impossible. This particular book focuses on how humanity will spread beyond the planet (and, perhaps, beyond the universe) to survive the (probably distant, but – also – inevitable) threats to the species. While there are other topics discussed, such as the search for immortality and transhumanism, those topics are often framed as necessities of interstellar expansion.

As one would expect of a physicist, the book is highly focused on the physics of the subject. There is little discussion of the psychological difficulties, nor of biological issues such as the fact that humanity is not so lone wolf as we think, and taking off to other planets and living in space without the Earthly life we are interdependent on would involve challenges we have difficult fathoming. All of the challenges that are usually treated with handwaves in science fiction are also handwaved off here.

The book is fun and interesting reading. It’s probably more insightful of science fiction than of our future, but that doesn’t make it less compelling. The seven years since this book was published have seen a lot of change, and there may be a book on this subject that has more of a finger on the pulse, but I still enjoyed reading it. [The downside of writing about the future, even with a focus on the distant future, is that one risks becoming obsolete rather quickly.]

If you’re interested in how humanity might survive into the future, I’d recommend this book. If you enjoy popular science and / or science fiction, you’ll probably find it intriguing.

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PROMPT: Future Travel

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Daily writing prompt
What are your future travel plans?
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I plan to travel to the future one minute at a time.

At least until they invent a time machine that can transport something bigger than a subatomic particle, and only milliseconds into the future at that.

PROMPT: 10 Things

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List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.

1.) Nothing is permanent.

2.) The world is not what it seems.

3.) One’s subjective experience is not determined by the state of the world.

4.) Nobody grasps enough truth to be intolerant.

5.) Uncertainty is the root of all fear.

6.) Fear is the root of all hatred.

7.) Hatred is a subjective experience (See #3.) Also, uncertainty is the root of all hatred (by the transitive property,) hence the benefit of travel.

8.) Any who: a.) has suffered a string of hardships; b.) allows themselves to believe that some “other” is wholly responsible for said hardships; and c.) who lacks a sufficient sense of self-empowerment to avoid surrendering entirely to a group identity can (and likely will) become a Nazi (or the equivalent of their day.)

9.) No one can predict the future. [Regardless of how much we all love to try. (See #5.)]

10.) Entropy increases (ultimately, in a closed system.)

NOTE: I remain ready to abandon any certainty in the face of better information.

PROMPT: Excited

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Daily writing prompt
What are you most excited about for the future?
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I think humanity has a golden age coming. Unfortunately, a.) as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, “In the long run, we are all dead.” Accordingly, I don’t expect I’ll live to see that great age. And, b.) said great age is likely to come on the backend of a tragic period whose reach and devastation will make the Second World War seem like a puny and short-lived regional skirmish by comparison. [I also think there’s a good chance I’ll miss the worst of this, but there’s no accounting for the rapidity at which it might move (and the process has begun.)]

The root of this combination of relative near-term pessimism and long-run optimism is the observation that we are experiencing a technological revolution that there is no reason to believe won’t end in machines that are both smarter and more capable than we, and we have no plan for what to do in that scenario. We have no conception of what an economy looks like in which machines do everything faster, more cheaply, and more efficiently than human labor. I wouldn’t be so pessimistic if our institutions and legal frameworks were trending better and better, but — in fact — after years of spreading rule of law and democracy, we are starting to see global shrinkage and a rise of a strange populist authoritarianism that I can only imagine being catastrophic under the stress test that is to come.

Why the long-term optimism? Nothing lasts forever, and tough times breed tough and capable people. [Whereas comfort addiction is a major factor in our near-term predicament.] I think the Golden Age will be humans learning not to be defined by production / consumption but by developing the human body and mind to its utmost capacity.

A lot of people are worried about population collapse. I am not so worried about that. I think that: a.) humanity could use some thinning; b.) we do fine with long time scale threats. As pressures rise, the adjustments start and — perhaps with some growing pains — we’ll get where we need to be. The AI / Machine Learning revolution concerns me because I suspect it will happen too quickly to steer the ship (like being in an aircraft carrier as a tsunami comes, there’s no agility to navigate out of the way and no speed to outrun it, you just have to take the damage and try to recover.)

You were probably looking for an answer like flying cars, but I gave up on those long ago.

The End of the World as We Know It [Free Verse]

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Humans have been hunters,
   gatherers,
   farmers,
   machines,
   thinkers,
   and creators,

And have no idea what we'll next be.

I think that people will next be
      -- simply --
   Human Beings,
      Full-time Human Beings --
      More Human,
      More Being...

And many will fail spectacularly.