The Present Through the Lens of the Future – Part 6 – Coping with Acceleration

Imagine it is 500 years in the future and there is a student whatever-the-equivalent of ‘reading’ whatever-is-the-equivalent of a ‘book’ of history^*Given that ‘history is written by the victors’ and the narrative recorded in the ‘book’ will thus depend on the path society has taken, we are necessarily predicting the future when we seek to answer the question.  But absurd idealizations of objectivity aside, how might the present moment be viewed? about our present. What will be considered the grand challenge of our time^*One boundary condition is necessarily that there is someone to ask the question, thus some degree of ‘victory condition’ must have been met (from an existential perspective).  So in answering the question, perhaps it is impossible to avoid the bias of our own perspective on what must be true if we are indeed going to survive.?

The contenders:

• Climate Change
• Finite Resources
• A World Without Growth
• Evolving Our Values
• Expanding ‘I’
• Coping with Acceleration
• Digital Life
• Polarization vs. Homogeneity

Coping with Acceleration

The times, they are a changin’.

Not just that, the rate of change is changing – we’re experiencing acceleration on all sorts of axes relevant for how we live our lives. Exponentials abound. The technology and culture of our present day is almost alien to our parents. How alien will the world in 50 years be to us?

Put succinctly, could the grand challenge of this time be in finding the anchors of our values that can be carried across generations when the rate of change is so high?

What might such cultural values entail and why are they existentially relevant?

At their core, cultural values should find themselves selected for in service of our needs. Culture is subject to the logic of natural selection, but what comprises selection pressure may be more subtle.^*Culture can be seen as an emergent property – our agency in determining the dominant culture is a question for the anthropologists and sociologists. Natural selection operates on a basis of selection for propagation – how might we institute selection pressures that transcend ‘survival’ and ‘reproduction?’ Culture can change within the lifetime of a single individual, the ‘software’ running on our collective ‘hardware.’ Is it not possible that what serves survival (or thriving) in one era may not ultimately serve in another (e.g. the unbridled use of fossil fuels)?

It begs the question of whether there are indeed values that we might hold constant across generations, through all future evolution of our species in both ‘software’ and ‘hardware.’ Or, perhaps, we should hold ourselves to the standard of continuing to improve upon and refine our values to serve us in each moment, and each future moment, optimally based on our collective concurrent wisdom. Process instead of product. We should then seek to establish a self-propagating pattern of intentional value-refinement that will enable us to identify with the future ‘humanity.’ We would thus be defined as a species by the intention and process of seeking the good, striving for the better, and hoping for the best. Let’s hope that our student 500 years from now can be so generous as to see that in us.