Preamble

Avoiding a dystopian future basically entails this: avoiding the paths that may lead to it. First, to know what to avoid we’d need to define what a dystopian future actually is. And to think of a future that far ahead, what we need to do is understand what we may see in the near future, and what changes we may expect in the short term. And to then go down that path, understanding what each of these things may lead toward.

But to do any of that, we need to understand where we are right now and how the possibilities may arise and to even do this, we need to understand our past. So that we know how we got here, what the probabilities were of getting here and to see if we can actually make predictions standing there in the past and looking toward the future, which now is our present. And hence trying to derive an understanding of how we got to be here, where we are and where we might be headed, which means making similar predictions standing at a different point in time looking toward a different point in time.

We will, of course, also examine our ability in making such predictions and if and how our thinking and judgement may be clouded or flawed. The biological hurdles that we may face by our very nature, i.e., if and how we and our brains are wired to function may get in the way of our ability to do the above-mentioned. This also includes any other possible problems we may face in doing so.

So first we’ll try to understand and establish what the problems are, what may have been the processes by which the problems came to be, and then move onto where we are today, as in where the situation stands and hence, what directions we may be able to take and then, at last move on further into the future: what the multiple possible scenarios may look like in the even more distant future and that then if also dystopian, then how best can we solve those problems.

Day 15.