[ExI] instilling ambition

[Anders Sandberg]

On 19/01/2013 05:48, spike wrote:
> My vision for the future is coping with gradually tightening energy 
> sources and doing cool stuff anyway, replacing fossil fuels with 
> renewables and such, but there might be a serious flaw in that line of 
> reasoning. What if the now generation has only small visions to dream, 
> only break-even as a goal? Will that work? Will they take up the 
> burden of struggling to maintain what we were just given?

I think this is an important concern. Guarding and maintaining our 
infrastructure of life is not the only vital goal: instilling ambition 
and dynamical optimism in the next generation is perhaps even more 
important.

At the risk of showing old man credentials, I think there is cause for 
concern given the widespread tendencies to overprotect children, giving 
them sometimes excessive support but little criticism, and placing them 
in situations where they cannot fail but there are no incentives to do 
anything different. One problem with traditional green thinking has been 
that it encourages a backward-looking conservative mindset where the 
order of nature must be preserved (although the order of society can and 
maybe should be overthrown); it can easily synergise with other forms of 
risk aversion, whether personal, economical or social.

I think one good sign is the growth of the Maker movement: people taking 
charge over their material objects and learning to make or change 
things, write their own software and so on. That is an important mindset 
and something every parent should encourage in their kids (no matter 
what the danger is to their material possessions). But there might also 
be a need to encourage big thinking, to get people to realize that we do 
have the power to change the world by inventing new things that change 
the rules. 3D printers, home biohacking and being able to code is neat, 
but you should aim at changing manufacturing, invent new ways of 
coordinating people, or combine them with other things to make something 
totally unthinkable that forever change the world.

Any other ideas of how to instil grand ambition in people? Force them to 
read a bit of Rand, Nietzsche or von Braun?

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University