Manifesto for the Future Pt. 1

We ought to be free from the drudgery of manual human labor.

As robotics continues to improve our manufacturing capabilities, we will see human labor being completely displaced by technology. I have adopted this statement because there will be a variety of benefits provided both for my life and for society by removing human labor. This isn’t to say manual labor will be completely beyond human capability, we just won’t have to do it anymore because machines will be so much better at it. We could still dig holes for the heck of it, but there would be robots there to do it better and faster for when we get tired. Society will benefit from reduced manufacturing and labor costs, reduced prices of goods, and generally more free time for people to do what people do. Things like travel, eating, having fun, and generally exploring our world will become much easier with the elimination of manual labor. We won’t have to wash dishes anymore, or clean toilets, or even do our own laundry because everyone will have a low-cost robot for all that. Our lives will become happier, less cluttered, more fun, and generally easier to enjoy with the elimination of all this drudgery. It could be argued that we won’t appreciate the good aspects of our lives as much without the counterbalance of these tasks, but I would argue that we would truly just have more time to enjoy a greater spectrum of all the good things. The people who would be potentially displaced from their old jobs could be given greater opportunities to participate in society in more meaningful ways if suitable job training programs were put in place too.

Source: “Technology and the Future.” The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson.

We should have access to our personal genome and the ability to modify it to improve our health and longevity.

So many things regarding our health come down to our DNA. Having access to our genome and the data contained in our cells means allowing individuals the power to know what diseases they are more susceptible to, what kind of attributes their bodies could have that might differ from their current phenotypes, and most importantly to know when their time might be up. Ancillary to this knowledge comes the ability to change what we currently hold in favor of something newer and better. If our genes predispose us to Alzheimer’s disease and society has a solid understanding of how to modify those genes to edit out the possibility of developing said disease, then it is a good thing for everyone to do so. If cancer is contracted due to an explosion of reproduction of a few certain cells, and a treatment could be devised to target the specific genes responsible for the mutation, then we can eliminate cancer. These diseases ruin families, weigh on society in the form of direct and indirect cost to healthcare systems and generally end lives. It would benefit individuals to take control of this most fundamental mechanism of life and change it to allow for greater happiness on a personal and societal basis. Finally, if we could eliminate death from our genome, we could then be free to continue exploring and creating until we see fit to stop. Our families would become clans of immortals ever-increasing our numbers and expanding out into the universe to spread the beauty of life.

Source: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (p. 40-43)

We should be able to augment our own intelligence with artificial computerized intelligences.

Human intellect is the most complex mind we’ve ever encountered in the universe, until we compare it to the collective knowledge of the internet. We have amassed such an enormous amount of data, that it would take a single human mind eons to process it and pull anything useful out of it. With the advent of artificial intelligence or neural networks as new tools to manipulate these massive stores of data, we will be able to make more accurate, smarter, better, faster decisions on an unprecedented basis. These technologies will allow us to make great leaps in numerous fields such as healthcare, finance, and even space exploration. Once we develop a successful brain machine interface, humans will literally merge their consciousnesses with a machine, thereby upgrading our physical intelligence and ushering an entirely new era of evolution. We will be able to inhabit both the physical terrestrial world as well as a rich digital landscape of our own design. We will be able to think in ways we can’t even imagine currently, connect to each other’s minds through direct interfaces to share ideas and perspectives more fully, and deepen our knowledge and understanding of Life itself. We will be able to solve problems too big for our collective efforts at present. Things such as climate change will become small trifles in comparison to what we could do with our new minds. We may even end up joining our biologic and computer minds into what some futurists have deemed the singularity, becoming more or less immortal in the process.

Source: Vinge, Vernor. “Signs of the Singularity.” IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, IEEE Spectrum, 1 June 2008, spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/ethics/signs-of-the-singularity.

We ought to have free or nearly free universal education.

As the world population grows, so must access to quality education for all who inhabit it. A more educated populous means more jobs being created, more high-paying positions being filled, and all around more prosperity for the economy. On top of that, people educated about simple things such as their own health and nutrition can better steer themselves away from chronic diseases such as hypertension and diabetes that have been increasingly problematic for first world societies. Traditional education institutions have provided the backbone for knowledge creation and proliferation in the past, but as people are beginning to leverage the scalability of software and the internet, better forms of education will continue to become more available to even greater populations. What’s necessary is giving access to these softwares and programs to people who have been all but left out of our world economy up until now. The growing wealth gap can provide an indication of how important it is that we begin including third world populations in the sharing of our collective knowledge, so we don’t leave them even more out of our shared future. As technology continues to ramp up the speed of our learning, it needs to become a priority that we make these technologies free or nearly free to use and grow from, so that we can utilize the full potential of our global population to deal with growing threats such as climate change and environmental pollution. Teaching everyone skills to adapt to the world we’re creating must be a priority lest we continue to create pockets of inequality and disparity. Lastly, as our world reaches its carrying capacity for the human race, having a more educated population could actually help us to slow overcrowding because wealthier nations statistically have fewer children per household.

Source: https://www.epi.org/publication/states-education-productivity-growth-foundations/

We should no longer depend on fossil fuels and instead utilize efficient green energy sources.

If the recent superstorms have been any evidence, our climate is going to shit. Environmental science has proven without a shadow of a doubt that global warming is real and an influential force in weather patterns. According to NASA, the 17 years since 2001 have been the warmest ever. (By the way, that’s all the years since 2001...) Additionally, annual temperature records which have been kept since 1881 show an average rise in overall temp since 1910. The ice caps are melting; we’re losing land to oceans which become more like acid every day; the reefs are dying off; entire species are going extinct at a faster rate than recorded civilization has ever seen. The flame of Life is dimming on our planet. It’s no longer a question anymore. And unless we want to watch as the sole harbor for biological existence in the entire observed universe slowly fades into another cold, hard rock gently ambling through the vast nothingness of space, we need to do something. There is no longer a choice.

Yes, we will change the environment back to the cradle of life it once was by modifying our behavior; specifically, our interaction with the environment through extracting raw materials and most importantly, energy from its bowels. Instead of draining and purposely fracturing the Earth’s crust to syphon oil and natural gas for use as polluting fuel, why not reach to the stars like our plant relatives? Unlimited free energy surrounds us at all times during the day, and we will find a way to harness this energy more completely in the future, especially as our demand for electricity surpasses the available supplies of fossil fuels.

Source: https://climate.nasa.gov/

We should become a multiplanetary species.

As mentioned above, our planet is becoming smaller and less inhabitable for all life by the decade. As the supremely intelligent lifeform on this solitary blue marble, it is our duty to preserve the possibility of complex life in this universe continuing on even after our eventual transcendence or demise. We may be too young to remember the energy and cultural impact created by the Space Race of the 1960s and 70s, but as companies like SpaceX begin to prove that other planets are in fact not out of our reach as once was believed, people are beginning to get excited again. And why shouldn’t they? Our quest to conquer the devoid vacuum of space has given us only good things in the long run. New technologies developed during the Apollo missions and others have gone onto have enormous influence on our lives in the modern era. Things like satellite communication, solar panels, CAT scans, and even the phones and computers we use everyday would not have come to fruition (or at the very least would have taken decades longer to develop) if it were not for governments taking a keen interest in becoming a space-faring species. Think of the innovations that could come from figuring out how to foster life on other planets and how they might affect how we live differently on our home planet. If we could understand better how to create a livable environment on a planet devoid of all life, think how easy it would be to fix our current climate issues. The private sector is now leading the forefront of discovery in this field, and unhindered by political agenda, it will continue to make leaps into the great unknown until we find our rightful place among the stars.

Source: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html