FootprintsintheWind.com

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.

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.

How many humanicities and how many futures? Verbs?

:- Doug.

So just what is human?

We might not know till later, centuries from now. Or we might be in a position to design humanicity ourselves. Or at least ask the question of ourselves and the generations.

That too is a service elders can offer.

Not all of us. Not to all elders. To those who hear.

:- Doug.

The daily things that make life easier decide for us. Defaults take over. Rebels in our fantasies, but when did we act?

So if we let the little intelligent things we create take over our “little choices” (sounds less important than “decisions”), if they make decisions better than us, if these beasties do a better job than what we used to do, if we become superfluous, then why do we need intelligence ourselves?

So maybe we are the peak. Maybe to be stupid would not be so bad—we would not get bored so easily. We would want fewer emotions so we would do nothing and feel OK about ourselves. Not good, but not guilty.

:- Doug.

In truth we might decide to downgrade humanity. The decision would be taken in myriad small non-decisions by large numbers of people. Let the system, the algorithm, the smart application choose. It chooses well enough. There are other things I’d rather do, and things pressing. We may indeed be the pinnacle. Thinking is already too much work. If then humans are useless?

:- Doug.

Maybe a major service of elders is to record that desires and experiences were once important.

:- Doug.

I do not know, and the entire world is a guess. A guess by trillions of entities.

:- Doug.

I am not about teaching, but finding. Not even learning. Finding. Path finding? I am not so sure, at least as far as it suggests I will find the one path, or even one that gets through the woods to something. Because I do not know what. I cannot even guess, let alone predict.

:- Doug.

Humanity may just end not in fire or ice or the sun going super nova, but by fading out, becoming irrelevant in a world of data being the only thing, or super algorithms.

That is possible. What roles does that leave for elders, especially the 300-year grandchild elders?

That is the question, is it not?

:- Doug.