It seems like, for the last 30 years of my life, we didn’t really need to spend much time struggling with what to do with the long-term future of humanity. The idea in my head has always been “what folks around me currently have, but for more people, and using less stuff.”
If fusion is ever going to be a thing, if energy production keeps getting cheaper, if AI is contributing significantly to the knowledge economy…that’s just not gonna be enough of a vision anymore.
Any vision of the future that centers around technology making the world better has to reckon with how wildly different human views of a better world are, and how easily subverted to different ends technology can be.
@shauna @hankgreen AI / cyber-ethics is going to be supremely important if we don't crash industrial civilization before the economy is restructured around post-energy scarcity and AI.
I don't subscribe at all to Marxism as such but a Marxian-esque critique of the ownership of the means of production or the means of driving the knowledge economy is going to be absolutely essential too.
You don't have to be a Marxist to disagree with how resources are owned and distributed in society.
One of the greatest successes of the wealthy has been convincing the mainstream that anyone raising a critique of capitalism was a central planning communist hoping to jail enemies and starve millions.
Hank Green
Shauna GM
Brendan W