Do we have a limit?
The search through the futures is all to ask the questions: What will people do? Who are we? Who might we be? Do we have a limit?
:- Doug.
Archive for the 'Conversations' Category
I write in the margins of books
I write in the margins of books: is this conversation with the author? With myself? With others who might pick up the book?
:- Doug.
Storms put nitrogen
Storms put nitrogen into the air: plants grow. Storms might be as necessary to humanity as storms to life.
:- Doug.
Hard to change
Some things about humanity may prove hard to change: the desire to help another; the desire to become intimate; the desires for beauty, truth, and goodness; the desire to desire: to dream, to explore, to grow.
:- Doug.
Futures sneak upon us
The futures may sneak upon us. We will barely recognize what is happening. Then we will see what has been done to us, mainly in retrospect.
:- Doug.
Down training
One job will survive the downsizing of the labor force caused by robotics and algorithms: trainers. They will help people stay a step or two ahead of the continual loss of human work. We may need to “down train:” to do less specialized, more general work, even physical labor.
:- Doug.
Bots dream the dreams?
Will the bots be able to dream the dreams? The dreams beyond space solar, hydrogen power, space elevators? Will they need us for our dreams? Or something akin to dreams?
:- Doug.
If we are smart
If we are smart, robots, AI, and algorithms will push us to become smarter. We will let them take over chopping wood and carrying water, and we will figure out which wood and which water. We will also have to stay one step ahead of them. We will have to decide what humanicity means.
:- Doug.
Nursing home robots?
What tasks in a nursing home could be taken over by algorithms and robots?
:- Doug.
Would you want to meet these?
Will the 11th generation be people you’d want to meet? What are you doing about it?
:- Doug.
I asked my 8 year old grandson
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.
Begin with personal stories
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.
Disinterested love technology
We might create a technology of love: total disinterested looking out for the good of other persons.
:- Doug.
Rugged forgetting us
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.
