Take a long view of humanity. See the centuries of quotidian drudgery between periods of roiling tumult, flashes of genius amidst endless toil, billions upon billions who barely live and silently die. Ask how we are not the same.
Human beings are flawed, desperate, grasping, haunted creatures. We are tool-using, myth-making apes; intelligent animals, to be sure, but animals at our core. We don’t really know ourselves, have little understanding of our past, can’t conceive of a future much different from the present.
A small fraction dominates the rest, as has always been the case. Wielding wealth and power to gain more wealth and power, exploiting advantage to maintain advantage, they use religion and popular culture to placate and subjugate the vaguely dissatisfied masses.
Most of us simply exist, never asking why it should be this way or how it might be different. We are either too hungry, too busy, or too afraid. The tiny fraction that does ask questions can’t agree on the answers, and anyway have no power to effect change.
Into this implacable existential vérité from time to time come prophets who offer a way out, a way up, a better world, an attainable future of happiness, justice, and plenty. Extolling the virtues of God, the Market, the System, or the Machine, all they ask is faith and following.
Turmoil at the top, fleeting hope for real change, and it soon settles down to more of the same.
Years roll on, decades pass, leaders rise, thrive, then pass away. Meanwhile the nameless faceless hordes claw, struggle, breed, suffer, and disappear, generation after generation. Not one in a thousand—not one in a million—of these grasping, haunted humans is remembered beyond the grave.
As it ever was.
Now we come to our time. The new day. The century of accelerating returns, of Friendly AI, of nano-cornucopia, of endless life, of The Singularity.
Is this more of the same? Do the oracles of transhumanism and techno-utopia have a genuinely novel message? Or is it merely recycled hope, old wine in new bottles?
Our challenge is to be unafraid of pondering such difficult questions, and to be unashamed of admitting the tentative and contingent nature of our proposals.
Taking a long view, acknowledging our likely insignificance within the broad sweep of history, cultivating humility and shunning grandiosity—all this can help fix us firmly in reality and make our plans more likely to be taken seriously, and maybe, just maybe, to actually make a difference.
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