The end of the beginning

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I really starting to think that this is where our culture's at. Not edging toward nuclear apocalypse, environmental apocalypse, or horns, halos, and the descent of the New Jerusalem pyramid ship.

I think we're looking at the death-throws, at least in the west, of human rights abuses, activism of the type that creates new problems to be solved, and in ten or fifteen years time I think even in Berkeley if someone gets up on a soapbox and starts ranting they'll probably meet with hoots and lewd noises and gestures - for all the right reasons, people are already getting a really vivid sense that things of that sort are just another morphing of puritanism and by then the actual problems if inequality will likely be handled well enough that anyone who would do that sort of thing will be a particularly angular/eccentric individual and the ability to see that for what it is will be public sphere common knowledge.

So right now we're grinding our primordial stuff down, taking our wars with guns to wars with memes and microphones, and pretty soon our desire to make noise and act up will also be worn off. So when that's spent and we get our primordial fire and chaos, need to impress, need to compete destructively to impress friends or a mate, what'll be next?

I generally don't bring up NDE'ers in the context of politics, they do have some interesting visions of how the subconsicous mind works and perhaps what's below it but they almost never have anything cogent to say about politics, culture, or the future. I'd actually give one guy credit, who passed away (for real) back in March of this year. The guy's name is Mellen Thomas Benedict and when I listened to his lectures he actually I think said something very useful and if I could encapsulate what he was saying - it was probably the happiest and most optimistic version of Nietzsche I've ever heard. His suggestion was that the mind of the universe evolved with matter (that fits perfectly with a world that's as hot, chaotic, and anguished as this one has been), that it is gaining self-awareness through its mistakes, and as our culture gets more sophisticated in its knowledge and self awareness it takes part in a substructure that acts like a system equilibrium which applies that knowledge to further prevent war and whether you think of the collective unconscious as something that pipes into our brain through microtubules or if you think that it's just the thing that's in common to our genes, the putrid stuff that keeps us treating each other badly will be working its way out.

Per that worldview our future is to iron out our psychological problems as a race, explore other planets, explore other galaxies even, and we've barely scratched the surface of what's coming. If it looks like crap right now or like people are politically losing their adult bearing this is probably a fair amount like a big methane bubble getting burped and once its out of our collective culture's system - providing we side step it and solve whatever legitimate grievances were behind it as well as the psychological and group dynamic factors that blew it up to parade float proportions - it'll be behind us in the best way possible.

Its nothing profound I know but it's useful to also think that as human beings our sense of the now is always standing on a cliff where we have this solid land behind us and a void in front of us, which easily leads to a false sense of impending doom. In fact thinking about what I just said I can't help but think of the Fool of tarot key 0 in the Rider Waite deck - about to do what looks like stepping off a ledge but know it'll be perfectly fine.

There might not be a whole lot to say to any of that aside from give a not but I thought I'd throw at least one good ray of optimism on the topic. IMHO we're pretty close to enhanced AI catapulting our technology, if some of the right private thinkers get into the game of building ethics and learning machines we may even bread our own race of super-human heroes and essentially bring our own guardian angels to earth. Any which way the future almost always looks like a big cloud of debris buzzing around and it's tough to tell whether nuclear winter, ecological winter, nanobot gray goo, or a nice sized comet, solar flare, or asteroid will get us. I suppose all of that just means worry less, crowd-fund steps in the right direction more, and everything far more than likely will turn out okay.

Eh, I predict a world run by techno-oligarchs who increasingly require humans to act like the machines that have largely replaced them in the economy. We'll go from being alienated workers to fully alienated consumers. You'll get subcultures of people experimenting with more atavistic lifestyles on the side - some will drop out completely.

Parts of the world will perhaps turn to a mixture of religious fanaticism and warlord anarchy with an enormous black/narco economy - little Somalias and Afghanistans.

Okay, I don't think that world is very likely, but I'm having difficulty in seeing yours as likelier.

Maybe some sort of Star Trek version of socialism will emerge eventually.

The way I'd put it - abundance is a heck of a drug and I think that will do a lot to shift the fader in our nature from closer to the chimp side more toward the bonobo end. For technocrats to be the 1/10,000th of 1% ruling over everyone else with an iron fist would require them aggressively de-democratizing technology and with coding and even AI neural networking being the way it is that's a pretty tough thing to manage.

I wish I could agree, and while I feel relatively hopeful for the future of my particular part of the wirld, sitting in my socialist european wonderland of a home country... I'm afraid other parts will not fare that well - for no other reason that we, in the western world, are consciously lying to ourselves about how bad the whole climate thing seems likely to become. So we'd need seven planets of resources for us all to live like americans right now. Fine, let's assume we could optimize things to work out for everyone - but right now, the planet can not even absorb our exhaust if things stay as they are, let alone we if increase our production sixfold.
I'm worried about how increased droughts will screw up the already drought-prone areas - which are also the flashpoints of social unrest and warfare already.

so, yes, start trek. I hope. eventually-
just... how much blood will flow until then... while the richest evolve into superhumans in the near future....

A few quick points on that, not in any particular order of salience:

- Mark Blyth in one of his recent lectures suggested, even with China and India coming up to full speed industrially, we were now down below $50 a barrel for oil and it would not only stay that way but even decrease as the world is moving off of oil. The idea that the world industrial base could triple or even quadruple and the demand for oil decrease is a really hopeful sign.

- The carbon doom clock for 1.5 C at the end of the century just got extended perhaps another 20 years. We're in a position now where solving this issue won't require a financial apocalypse, just steady innovation and cost reduction for solar, wind, possibly even the advent of fusion - the latter of which they're already closing on completion for a serious test model tokamak in France.

- If the democratization of technology, block-chain, and open source stays on track Star Trek will even be too autocratic of a vision. Space will probably look like Alaskan outposts but with high quality entertainment where people are getting things done, mostly utilizing AI, maybe a bit of law enforcement although with AI who knows how that will change, and the exploration of energy and resource phenomena will happen but mostly we'll be onboarding the different ways to use what we learn and employ it.

- AI might really mean us solving problems, in the next twenty or thirty years, that we never would have dreamed of solving. As far as natural resources for example, if we think we might get dangerously low on tungsten for example, it's not like we've atomically obliterated it into another element. Our landfills of today might be our nanotech mines of tomorrow and this might be a bit far fetched for the near future but we may even eventually figure out what it takes to leverage conversion of periodic table elements without exorbitant energy cost.

I look at how fast the US liberalized and I do think that a lot of the third world cultures will surprise us. I think their thresholds for significant change will be higher and there might be a lot of very oldschool strong man types who'd rather try to dominate the situation but I think they'll be too few and too late to stop the rise of progress or kill nearly as many people they don't like short of nuking them. None of that's a guarantee of course and even with puddingmouse's scenario - a good nuke on the US mainland or somewhere like that could deeply frustrate that future and cause things like martial law to slow down some of that progress. Hopefully we'll find better ways to resolve nuclear proliferation and our defenses against rogue actors employing it, as well as the kinds of things Nassim Taleb worries about like weaponized smallpox and the like.