FootprintsintheWind.com

This weekend I asked my 8 year old grandson about possible futures. He envisioned robots in the grocery doing the check out. You may have seen exo-skeleton devices, heard about nanobots to course our veins da Vinci repairing us from the inside out, seen the studies of chips being implanted in brains of mice to restore short term memory. What will these developments do to the skilled nursing facilities of ten or twenty years from now?

:- Doug.

We begin with our personal stories, our family stories, the story of our species. We move to asking about the alternative futures of humanity. Then we dare to ask might we, ought we, improve humanity itself.

:- Doug.

Thinking 300 years
encourages
rewards
engages
explores
examines
—patience

:- Doug.

We might create a technology of love: total disinterested looking out for the good of other persons.

:- Doug.

Into futures
with the generations
some little ways

:- Doug.

Clouds in the sky
promises
of life-giving water

:- Doug.

We had reached a stage of rugged individualism, especially in the United States. Are the wars, terrorism, and protests a way of saying “Have you forgotten us?”

:- Doug.

Start by telling some futures as stories in conversations with grandchildren. See what I can weave together to see what I know and what I need to study.

What kind of futures would you want? Would you want to travel to other planets or the stars? Be part machine, part human? Live for 150 years? Be super strong? Always be healthy? Be able to remember everything? Be smarter than anybody? Create things never thought of? Meet God?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1888

The challenge point
is in “happily ever after”
the hero bringing the boon
here the forces grey
hold you hero in their ooze

Please pass it on.

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It is good there be multiple paths to the future because there are multiple futures.

:- Doug.

To have a purpose is to look beyond where you can see. Beyond the goal, even beyond any ends.

This is something an algorithm cannot do.

:- Doug.

Peccability might just be of humanity our genius.

:- Doug.

It is our advantage, or could be, when we most like to think ephemerally, ethereally, large picture.

:- Doug.

It might be important to human learning that our memory be blurry. If we remembered everything like a computer disk does, maybe irrelevant or less than relevant memories would get in our way. Maybe we learn as irrelevant becomes less than relevant and graduates to relevant and then to necessary. The truly irrelevant may fade. Now becomes more important than prior or possible.

:- Doug.

Write a story about the day you realize the algorithms took over your life.

:- Doug.

Whom do you know—any place in the world—to help us think together about uncounted futures? It is more than one or a few of us can fathom: many of us together have a chance. Many of the few of us who care do exist. We can converse.

:- Doug.

Humanity: how do we catch you by the imagination?

:- Doug.

We will be challenged to devise how to live on other planets. If the algorithms permit us to go. We will challenge ourselves. Maybe there will be a tussle between algorithms and humans: which will be used by the other?

:- Doug.

It is up to us to invent humanity. What are the qualities of being human? What will they be in the centuries to come? Or in even 30 years? Do we get to choose!

:- Doug.

We are the ones who can take time and reflection away from productive things to be truly productive—of humanity.

:- Doug.

If we develop an intelligence 5,000 times our own, or it develops itself, how do we control it, or protect ourselves? We might install it in a human. Which one? Several of us? Or we install us in it? Which of us? Do we build an inviolable ethic into it? It will be able to reconsider that. Do we build several to compete? Would they form alliances? Would there be peace? Even now they are the imponderables.

:- Doug.

Tell me some things I cannot know. Only imagine. If that.

:- Doug.

Humanity does not have a future
we have futures
we may not all live
in the same orbit

:- Doug.