FootprintsintheWind.com

If we could have a practical future, what would you design?

:- Doug.

If humanity finally arrives, what and where would that home be? What is forever? One one-thousand year generation? Then?

:- Doug.

What if you lived a very long life without a job?

:- Doug.

What if rich did not matter, did not get you anything or anywhere important?

:- Doug.

What comes after the information age?

:- Doug.

Death could go away by genetics and other biologic advances. Taxes could go away because there would be not much income or ownership of value to tax. (Except maybe those if any outside the commons who controlled the artificial intelligences and algorithms.) We may no longer have the poor with us. What is life without these complaints?

:- Doug.

What if we were enabled to retire in our prime—or even as we entered our prime? Again, if we retired on and off for most of our lives, or worked only a few hours a week or year? What would you do with life? What if everybody had enough food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical care, and computing power to do whatever they wanted? How would their wants increase?

:- Doug.

Whatever good futures at which we arrive it will be an interim, just like all history. For those in this place and time, it may be for ever.

:- Doug.

In our possible futures, is there a home for the humble, a life for people of dignity?

:- Doug.

Will what we do today with people in nursing homes who cannot help themselves inform what our society will do with useless humans after machines put us out of work?

:- Doug.

Do leads to hope.

:- Doug.

I dream the futures of story.

:- Doug.

When you tell a story to the 11th generation, remember you are quickly becoming part of their future. And past.

:- Doug.

Let us work to clearly see our 11th generation: they might be different from us in ways we cannot understand: quicker in thinking; composed of a significant proportion of machine; have challenges and worries we cannot foresee (but could we yet understand?); they may in fact be a different species.

With changes occurring exponentially in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, and humanity changing more slowly, what then?

There will be spurts and different sections of technology and society will stagger at different paces. What then?

What can we project for sure? These things in the last three paragraphs probably.

:- Doug.

Do we set our children on the best path? Or do we invite them to create better paths?

Or yet again, invite them to question?

:- Doug.

Come hear a story.

:- Doug.

The frustration of meditation for some people may be they set themselves a goal: to empty their minds, to stop thinking. Or contemplation: to stay on the subject. Be kinder to yourself. Simply watch what your mind is doing, invite it back to breath.

:- Doug.

The more we exercise the brain the more it grows. Physically. Throw new stuff in and the dendrites make more connections. So interacting socially morphs the brain. New thinking means new brain cells means new pathways. Four in an hour is said to make the pathways permanent. Go meet people. Exchange. Grow young and old simultaneously. Young for new stuff, old for perspective. Biologically in its brain cells, encompassing of previously unanticipated worlds, a complex society is growing.

:- Doug.

Might divinity be holographic?

:- Doug.

Come to peace with your mind. Come to peace with futures.

:- Doug.

We could analyze the stories, yet it seems our time ought better be spent not in tearing things apart, but in growing from them. Maybe that is the question to ask: how can we grow from that story?

:- Doug.

Turn agenda over to my co-learners? What other choice takes account of reality?

The question is in what ways to turn it over, what ways to invite, what questions can they help me raise.

:- Doug.

Soon we may have to re-think. Soon.

:- Doug.