[ExI] Too Much Futurism or Not Enough?

[Giulio Prisco]

Anders, you have always been a grumpy old man, because you speak with
the voice of wisdom.

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 9:13 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> 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
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