[ExI] Too Much Futurism or Not Enough?

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2012-06-10 18:07, Natasha Vita-More wrote:
> It seems that there is something missing. I don’t know what and perhaps
> it is just a “gut” feeling. But I trust my instincts and I sense this
> quite strongly.

There is the future as entertainment and as something that is coming 
real. I think we have ended up with far more thinking about it as 
entertainment, and it is drenching out the attempts of actually building it.

There is an instant gratification element in thinking about the future. 
Imagine, and you are there! And in our networked, global and transparent 
society we can get great future imagination instantly: just click your 
mouse to go to TED, extropy-chat or Arxiv.

At the same time making the future is about as tough as it has ever 
been. It require persistence, focus and hard work. But we - the future 
oriented people - are educating ourselves with instant gratification. I 
suspect that we have become less able to focus on the big projects. This 
is a statistical thing rather than individual: some people are clearly 
unaffected, but a lot of potential future-makers who would otherwise 
have made something are now happy with the entertainment or light 
projects. And quite plausibly many of us are easily distracted.

There is also the paradoxical effect of the networked world on one hand 
allowing you to reach out to big networks of like-minded people, on the 
other hand apparently making it harder to reliably coordinate 
large-scale action. It is easy to create focused responses on particular 
issues, but hard to create wide consensus to do something (due to echo 
chamber effects, the inhibiting effects of having done simple symbolic 
actions, the splintering of the social space into subnetworks etc). So 
while we can crowdsource amazing things, we cannot actually build 
consensus to go in particular directions: any futures that are dependent 
on that are near impossible to reach.

So maybe our success in some technosocial dimensions have undermined 
progress in other, wider directions.

Or maybe this is just evidence that I am turning a grumpy old man (I am 
almost as old as Alcor! :-)


-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University