18-Vision-of-the-Future.txt

TITL:
   *My Vision of the Future*
   By Forrest Landry
   Nov 16th, 2022.

ABST:
   As a counterpoise as to how the future could be
   conceived of, rather than, and as an alternative to
   the trans-humanist long term total utilitarianism.

TEXT:

   > Do you have a positive vision for the future?.

   Well, yes, actually I do.

   My positive vision of the future
   is a kind of a hybrid
   of the best elements of our past
   and the best elements of our present.

   We have in the world already
   all of the things that we would ever need
   to make a beautiful future.
   one where people are prosperous
   and/or they are thriving,
   where people are generally happy,
   where we are health is happening,
   so people can really be in their experience of life
   and enjoying that
   for its its natural own sake.

   I am not trying to describe some sort of utopia.
   I do not think that is a good idea.
   I think that most of the time --
   if you are hearing people describe something
   that sounds too utopian
   there is a problem --
   it is probably a cult.
   It is some sort of marketing scam
   or a spin on some thing that people are trying
   to hide some sort of extractive process.

   If it looks like marketing and hype,
   and/or anywhere you see _anything_
   that *might* look like it is marketing or hype
   then it probably *is* marketing hype --
   which means it is *not* in your interest.
   Be warned!

   - ?; how do we get it to the point
   where people are relating to one another
   in a manner that the action of each person
   is actually to the interest of the other?.
   Doing so is actually in everybody's interest.
     - Ie; there are some real skills
     that are needed broadly, on everyone's part,
     when thinking about positive future visions
     and/or when recognizing the value of the present.
     There is definitely at least some effort
     that is needed to be put into articulating
     those skills,
     and describing such communication emphasis
     and intention in real ways.

   When a person is healthy --
   when they are healthy in their body --
   they do not mind being "an animal".
   That is, they do not mind being human.
   There is a there is a profound sense
   of enjoyment and peace and value,
   in just the sheer gracefulness
   that can happen in one's own body
   when it is healthy.

   When things flow smoothly,
   when a person's motions,
   both in their minds,
   and when everything else around them --
   when they are adapted to the environment
   that they are in,
   and when the environment is graceful
   with respect to them too,
   then there is true beauty.

   I think that there is a there is
   a very low level premise here
   when we are talking about the techno-utopian approach --
   as trans-humanism, machine minds, etc --
   is that I am presupposing,
   as a notion of the vision of the future,
   that there is a true embodied health.
   A health realized in the land
   and the community,
   and the people,
   and the families --
   all of that,
   and to really have that
   be kind of a focus,
   which enables people
   to be in a more satisfied and joyful, and healthy.
   For them to just genuinely be comfortable
   being in their natural organic animal state.
   In this, the notion of the organic
   happens to be something that is a good,
   and it is a good way to characterize key aspects
   of this vision of a healthy organic future.

   This is in explicit contrast with
   the sort of inorganic hypothesis
   that trans-humanism keeps leaning into.

   For example, consider some earlier movies
   as holding some of the trans-humanist visions.
   We watched the "Star Trek Motion Picture" last night.
   That movie features an extremely illustrious vision
   of how technology is taking us into space.
   It presents a soft version of military command,
   one deeply emotive and humanizing,
   while still maintaining "chain of command".
   That spacecraft are fast and capable,
   and people work hard and work together,
   and are skillful in navigating communication
   and their own emotional integrity.

   And things are interesting.
   There is a profound sense of hopefulness,
   of inspiration, of value of the human,
   and of other cultures and ways of life.
   The inclusiveness is taken for granted,
   and there is no suggestion of anyone exploiting
   anyone else at all -- no economic process at all.

   There is even this incredible suggestion that
   technology can transcend itself,
   that people can be more than machines.
   The main culmination of the movie is this event
   where a guy merges with a machine
   and that whole package transcends being itself.
   In the movie, the whole thing just disappears
   and some emanation of light and enlightenment.
   It is a vision of glory and of total epiphany.
   It is the rapture of the machine in some kind
   of pseudo hyper sexual union with the divine
   as the ultimate of logic and feeling and emotion.

   All of the surfaces of the ship are clean and zen.
   No mess, no fussiness, no irrelevant details.
   It is, in a way, the perfected autism environment.
   No wonder that technologists and geeks everywhere
   tend to love the Star Trek series.

   But the humans were humans and the machines were
   machines, and except for the ultimately idolized merger,
   which happens only once -- all prior instances were
   a kind of death with a hint and suggestion of a
   transcendence of death -- who could not want that?.

   In effect, this movie is something of the exact basis
   of how trans-humanism, and artifical long termism,
   became some sort of total utopian dream hype.
   That the language of it, via Bostrom and Kurzweil
   has been grounded in the sort of science fiction
   vision of the future that is presented in this movie,
   except that behind the scenes, implied at the margins,
   that it is technology that benefits,
   and not the organic humans.

   Look at how much this sort of thing
   benefits the technology companies.
   They (and/or their representatives, knowingly or not)
   have spun the various SF representations
   into various marketing campaigns
   for technology companies to prosper
   so as to build the future.
   Look at all of the implied marketing that Elon does
   putting together SpaceX and/or Tesla.
   He glorifies technology as the solution to all problems.

   So you can see where the trans-humanist
   synthetic sterile and virtualized value
   of the machine technology "civilization"
   with artificial "long term" total utilitarian
   "potential visions" of the future are coming from.
   It is a perfect storm of sales and marketing.

   First it appears in SF
     (ie, in Science Fiction and in San Fransisco),
   then via layers of marketing
   and of the ever increasing hype cycles
   that are oriented around the particular
   neurological biases and proclivities
   of the sorts of types of people
   who tend to be scientists and engineers.
   Engineers (and/or autistic spectrum people generally)
   are people who actually really want to do good,
   who join movements like Effective Altruism,
   and attempt to do/achieve the actually impossible.
   For examples of the kinds of things
   that geeks and quiet types
   (autism spectrum people)
   tend to focus on
   in order of their occurrence in history,
   include
     1; to make the philosophers stone and/or (later)
     2; to build a perpetual motion "free" energy
     ("nuclear energy will be too cheap to meter")
     and now, more lately, the also impossible task of
     3; to implement "AGI alignment" and/or "safety".
   Geeks, scientists, and engineers of all types
   are often, due to their own needs of life and home,
   are taken into the service of the rich elite,
   of those that are not at all concerned with
   the public good, the environment,
   and the commons value (though like any king,
   they pretend to be, while simply living high
   above the law, dining on the resources of others,
   taking away their choices, consuming, killing, etc).

   Engineers and scientists are generally people
   who want to do good things in the world,
   and to actually be in the service of humanity,
   to be worthy of respect and honor and prestige
   by doing the great and worthwhile hard thing,
   making the vehicle and craft of human progress
   (like the Star Trek Enterprise ship, with its
   command staff above, and the engineering team
   below, working "together" to do great things).
   They, by being the natural beneficial way
   that they are, are also specially vulnerable
   to the depredations, deceptions, and delusions
   set up by the Dark Triad types moving among them.

   Little do those engineers and scientists know
   that they are being *used* by these other people,
   the nar-social, the owners, bosses, executives,
   venture capitalists, 'Wall Street speculators',
   ones who tend to not ever make anything themselves,
   or to actually write or develop anything new
     (they use and take credit for the work of
     somewhat more anonymous ambient others)
   except insofar as needed to actually manipulate,
   to make glossy sales videos extolling the benefits
   of some new product, service, or financial thing.

   The nar-social use the SF imagery of things
   like the Jetsons and the notions of Star Wars
   where robots are cute and no one ever sees any
   actual blood, gore, or wanton destruction --
   it is all mostly spiritual and mostly painless --
   to promote their own hidden agendas, ones
   of extraction and power and profit.

   The nar-social Dark Triad types
   have much less value for life,
   their own or others,
   and are actually quite selfish,
   even while pretending to be
   (and are for sure signaling of)
   generous and magnanimous,
   as a leader of the people, etc.
   They are ones who play games
   not on computers virtually, harmlessly,
   but in the real, actually,
   with other people as _involuntary_ participants,
   with their very lives, health, and wellbeing,
   and in the politics of power,
   in economics (cryptocurrencies taking whole life savings)
   and in war (killing machines, missiles, guns, weapons).
   Even life itself is used as a weapon (pandemics)
   and as an extractive extortion
   (biotech and pharmaceuticals).

   The nar-social,
   living only in the private self satisfaction of moment,
   thinking not of the future at all,
   or of the rights of the choices of others,
   think only of acquisition, of social power,
   attempting to climb to the top,
   no matter how many broken lives,
   lost life savings (you want to buy some crypto!),
   and the many bodies they leave behind,
   ones too emotionally or physically traumatized
   to ever be able to make unconstrained choices again.
   Human beings will not prosper from these outcomes.

   Fortunately, it is, with some few exceptions,
   actually unlikely, for simple practical reasons,
   for the vast majority of the TUA agenda to be
   actually realized, in the real world.
   The major problem is what happens in the interim.

   Do the cult followers of "Bostromism" end up
   killing everyone and everything in a total planetary
   permanent toxicity in their over zealous, arrogant,
   and over the top obsessive compulsive unending attempts
   to implement their world wide perfected security state
   so that they can then, with impunity and answerable
   to no one for nothing, then replace all actual humanity
   and life with some (few) super elevated hyper-elite
   superior race of radically 'enhanced' "post-humans" --
   the ones who can afford all of the ultra expensive
   gate-keeper managed cyborg prosthetics and neural
   up-links?.  Do the dictators and their lackeys win?

   Or is it maybe the case that the engineers and
   the scientists become savvy to the marketing hype
   of the nar-social among them and elect
   to do the right thing and reject the notions
   of the artificial delusion of a panacea utopia,
   and elect to cooperate with real people on real
   problems in the real world, to the benefit and health
   of everyone, in all ways, in all modes of being?.

   The visions of Bostromism are not at all realistic.
   They are pure deception, perfect images of seduction
   based on pseudo-moral arguments that have no merit.
   They depend on aspects of computer science that
   simply do not work in physics or math.
   Examples include things like "computronium" and
   "hyper drives", virtualized consciousness, etc.
   Such visions depend on ideas of artificiality that
   actually ignore complete life cycles of all aspect,
   ignoring all manner of side effect toxicity that
   make such things impractical and immoral
   in the long term, despite the also equivocation
   of the very meaning of signaling "long term" interest
   in the actual well being of actual organic life,
   healthy and emotionally integrated people, etc.

   Instead, we, as humanity, can get better at
   integrating and working with the truths
   of the organic, of the wisdom and joy of life.
   That the realistic part of our future action
   is to really get good at doing the organic,
   at integrating diverse sources of wisdom into
   a natural and healthy whole ecosystem of process,
   one in which the smallest and the largest are
   equally involved, in being, in their very essence.
   That we can have conscious sustainable evolution
   using what is already available, with the resources
   and the technology we have already today developed.

   For example, the internet already works.
   Making it faster simply makes it easier for
   advertising and marketing executives to take
   advantage of peoples natural biases for more
   high intensity social signaling in the form of
   more flashy videos delivered more quickly,
   involuntarily, and at higher complexity
   than anyone can moderate, let alone understand.
   That the costs and consequences of simply "more"
   in the space of the inherent increases of complexity
   have a diminishing marginal return on investment,
   and eventually, the entire Ponzi scheme runs down.
   Tainter wrote about this in the "collapse of
   complex civilizations", and others have written
   about the symptoms of this (cite "strong towns")
   insofar as the costs born by the public,
   eventually exceed the carrying capacity of the
   extraction tax base maintaining them.

   So when I think of my preferred 'future vision',
   it begins by imagining all of the thoughtful
   people of the world becoming very savvy to
   all of the kinds of social manipulation games
   that they have become inadvertently entangled with,
   and rejecting all of the cultist hype,
   the distorted arguments of "virtual value" and
   "technological civilization", the false "potential"
   and "technological inevitability" of AGI, etc,
   as all simply being temporary, and now ended,
   manifestations of just the obsessions
   of the very few (the rich connected elite) --
   as people which can now safely be ignored,
   overtly, obviously, publicly, as such fake values
   as no longer the implicit background driver
   of what matters in the actual real world.

   Once that overall background level of discernment
   has been increased, (and the deception decreased),
   to the point of actual polite effectiveness,
   then maybe we can think in ways that are not just
   intelligent and sensitive
   but also to be integrative of wisdom,
   of emotional integrity and health,
   both inside of our own selves and spirit,
   but also in our communications
   and in our treatment of each other.
   That we could potentially all have
   actual real situational awareness of what matters,
   rather than the forever broken proxy
   of some single metric dashboard app.

   Maybe from there, with actual care and compassion,
   and of consideration and embodied and diverse
   conscientiousness, that our skill of being
   in and with actual community, in a commons
   of a healthy organic natural wild and wonderful life,
   thriving in a concert with all of the ecosystem
   of the lands and environment surrounding all
   in beauty, grace and dynamic motion.
   That many of us would even have a sense of humor.
   This is not a tame vision, but is an alive one.
   And it is practical; more practical and vital
   than anything than can be done with mere machines
   made of metal, and silicon, and plastic, wires.

   I have a vision that by knowing the difference between
   fake forms of virtualized social process (institution)
   and real forms of embodied living process (community)
   that we can, most of us, all actually know, and prefer,
   the healthy being and becoming of the latter,
   and to disfavor, everywhere, in all ways, the former.
   That we can have actual healthy culture, and from
   there, in a distributed way, a discovery of values,
   and from that, maybe, in time and attunement and
   keen discernment, the evolution of a dream, a vision,
   for what the community really wants and feels
   very must most alive with, that in realizing that
   vision, with also a distributively evolved communial
   strategy of collective manifestation, that maybe also,
   we could find within that sustainable communal health.

   This is kind of where my leanings go preferentially.
   It is in significant contrast to the usual Bay Area
   method, where some single person has a strategy
   to use and misuse vision to manipulate people --
   friends, family, angel investors, to then invest,
   to continue the one persons strategy to use vision
   to manipulate even more people -- executives, staff --
   to make some product or service and then marketing
   and sales, which further implements the strategy of
   vision manipulating the culture of the public
   so as to shift their behavior, to compell them to
   buy, or to vote differently, or to otherwise act
   in a way that is not actually in their service, etc.
   Singleton strategy over vision over culture --
   all forms of unending monism, is the way of death.
   Only by following the path of life, of culture
   before values and vision, before the strategy
   of the many, may we maybe sometimes have life.

   There is a lot that can be accomplished in this way,
   right now, which depends on nothing so much as our
   organized respect for one another's mutual choices,
   and the skills thereof, as ones and at once together.
   There are no (fake) contingencies; we are already human,
   and we can allow ourselves to know what that means.
   No new technologies have to be invented --
   we can already make what we have work for us,
   for life, rather than against us, against life.
   We do not need new markets, or new financial things,
   or new anything, really, in technology.
   There is no need to "productize" or "sell" or "buy".
   It does not have to be implicitly weaponized via
   being converted into a narrative (politicized)
   which can be broadcast by thought police leaders.
   The only people who will object to this "plan"
   of no plan, are those who are seeking to
   take something away from you -- beware of them!.
   We can choose to reject the artificial and the virtual,
   the fake values and fake money in favor of real values,
   real choices, and real lives, real people you know.

   And not only are those things accomplished
   in a real reasonable straightforward way
   but they are accomplished in ways
   that are genuinely actually good.
   Not just in what looks good (flashy shiny hype utopias)
   or feels good (lots of sugar, addiction, drugs),
   that we can understand what is good,
   what that means, and moreover, we can actually know
   how to achieve that state of health and vitality.
   It does not necessarily require us to be doing
   impossible things (like inventing ever more
   techniques for convincing fake signals of safety
   of/by adverse artificial intelligence agents).

   So in the interim, that means I have a vision
   that I will not be alone in the space of fighting
   the delusions of the vocal and very well funded
   minority attempting to take over the world
   and "make it a better place" (for them, and not
   at all for us, for anything else that is alive).
   This involves many people noticing the real,
   and taking the hype out, getting real, actual,
   getting people to recognize the hype as hype
   and the power politics as the politics of fear,
   and to elect, amongst all of that, to always
   choose love over fear.  To simply stop feeding
   (working for) the wolf, the predators, the
   ones who take and take and never give anything
   back, except maybe loss of hope and delusion,
   toxic risk, and disease and death for all that
   comes after.  That we all need to get back to
   what we actual care about, what we love,
   to real human thriving, in natural and organic ways,
   in ways respecting of life, and of one another,
   what we care about what do we love what matters
   and thus to be emphasizing of doing the things
   that support what actually matters:
   supporting the thriving of life on this planet.

   So yeah I have a positive vision for the future.
   It is one that incorporates a sense of humility
   rather than one of compulsion, control and domination.
   One that supports the beauty of the natural wild,
   rather than some pristine and prissy domestication.

   Visions of the future do not need to be grand.
   They can be humble and homey, and still be real.

   And this is a kind of litmus test too.
   If someone is put off by the humility,
   if they simply cannot see the value of this
   vision, of thriving life and embodied health,
   then that is something of a warning.
   If they are off-put by these concepts,
   then perhaps they are suffering some sort of
   disease of the soul, an unwillingness to accept
   the actual truths of life,
   that maybe they have an absence of wisdom,
   and that they prefer their own benefit over
   and to the exclusion of all others;
   to value the present over the future,
   or the extreme future over the present --
   all as some sort of justification of
   extreme and unwarranted risky actions,
   ones that benefit their feel good in the moment,
   at the expense and harm of everyone else.
   People put off by humility and groundedness
   in embodiment and in communication are not
   in a right state, not in right relationship
   to/with other people.

   These are all things to be mindful of,
   as we start thinking about conversations.
   We are wanting to track the kinds of dynamics
   that emerge in conversations with people,
   in regards to "what do you really want?".

   The overall bottom line is something like
   'be comfortable in your own true organic
   and animal nature, your own feelings and intuitions,
   as integrating of real wisdom and wholeness
   and in true wholesome health and dynamic vitality,
   in person and in community, in land and environment,
   as much as your curiosity, enthusiasm, inventiveness,
   and intellect, as to be applied to solving
   real and interesting commons problems'.
   That this is not a rejection of the artificial
   but a temperance of it, a unwillingness to
   accept long term toxicity in favor of expediency.

   And if you notice that someone
   is/are fundamentally uncomfortable
   with their own actual organic nature,
   if they are continually trying to hide
   in and into descending into technology
   (power and money and gaming and addiction),
   such that they have hopes and dreams of
   maybe one day 'abandoning it all',
   'giving up on everyone and everything else',
   as a kind of 'scorched earth policy'
   so that they can have the false hope of
   'uploading' or 'upgrading'
   their organic natural physicality,
   so that they can be/become a "higher class"
   of the more then eugenically perfect elite,
   and/or maybe they continue to seek
   and to argue to/towards any of all of
   the rest of the worst of the trans-humanist
   artificial "(artificial) long terminating"
   "total value of the potential future"
   bullshit long scam --
   if they think that being the con,
   or using the con, even unconsciously, maybe
   as directed by others, and arguing so,
   is actually a "good idea" (tm),
   then you can know, for certain,
   that they are for sure
   actually profoundly uncomfortable
   in their own skin,
   that they want to remove all possible
   skin in the game,
   to absent and negate
   their own very ground of being;
   that with and within their own lost soul,
   that they are in such pain, at such a level,
   and so totally traumatized,
   that such ridiculous visions and action
   that seem indicated in the trans-humanist
   technological "inevitability" marketing agenda
   to the degree that any of this
   even remotely seems like a good idea to them,
   then you can know, for sure,
   that maybe they are also
   just truly lost.
   Do not count on such people for guidance.

   The only way you can really play in life
   is to have skin in the game, to be actually real.
   To be sex positive rather than just tech positive.
   People operating from within a traumatized mind
   tend to fear the rights and choices of others,
   and/or to disrespect the choices of others.
   They tend to weaponize everything, to set up markets
   and gatekeeping, rent seeking, to see social power
   and control, conditionalizing, bundling, taking,
   as a kind of theft of the future for their present.

   All of the artificiality, and virtuality, and
   the unending rapacious greed, the seeking of power
   and control and domination in anger and fear,
   it all represents some form of inner trauma,
   represents a real harm that has happened,
   and/or is *still* happening, as one mistake
   of conflict begets another mistake of conflict.
   That reason is being used
   as a tool of the unreasonable --
   that those that are reasonable are being used by,
   and deceived by, unwittingly seduced by,
   those that have no reason other than themselves.
   That all of this will need to be addressed,
   or at least limited, boundaried, somehow in life.
   That which does not sustain life
   will not (eventually) continue to live.
   We, as community, will need to heal somehow,
   to restore our own real skin in the great game.
   We simply do not want, and cannot allow,
   our future choices, in crisis, to be made by
   those that are the most fearful, the most traumatized,
   and therefore, the actually least wise, the least cool.

   This is where a heart boundary needs to be created,
   a kind of protectiveness that is respecting of
   everybody's rights of embodied and living choice,
   now and into the future, honoring and acknowledging
   the sacredness of the real, of the natural wild,
   and there are real and practical techniques
   and skills to do so, that we could much more
   easily make use of, more easily then any tech
   we could ever even potentially, in principle, invent.
   That by being in skillful attunement and at one-ment
   with the actual vitality and flow of life,
   that we all could continue to live,
   and to live together, in true and trusted community.
   That is where my emphasis would be on,
   in regards to what my vision of the future
   would actually be.

   Amen.