This is a companion piece to the blog post I wrote last night called The Future: An Optimistic Look. In that post I chose to write a stream of consciousness style post (which is my method) focusing on a positive look at the future and where I think it may indeed go. I avoided the dark, negative, pessimistic, and other type of thoughts and discussions in that post. It was intended as such.
This post is also going to be a stream of consciousness style post, but it will focus more upon the journey to get to that other future and many of the likely negative things that we will have to deal with. These are all speculations on my part as they flow from my mind, so they are not presented as prophecies. They are me guessing. So if I "fail to address" something you believe I should have addressed. This is my imagination, and my stream of consciousness. I am sure I won't think of a lot of things.
With the other post emphasizing the positive directions I see that we may actually get to, this one will focus on the things we must overcome, and some of the challenges I believe we are likely to face before we can reach that positive destination.
Humanity has in history had some baggage in its survival mechanism that leads to cycles of behavior. These cycles are often quite negative for humanity as a whole, but they appear to be something that continues to poke up its head. This is the fact that there always seem to be those who enjoy and crave power over others. We see this at the earliest of ages with children picking on other children. We see it with people doing what they think will please some popular person with the hope of becoming popular themselves. We see people that believe passing laws to force other people to behave, speak, and leave the way that other people believe is required. We see people willing to use physical force to make this happen. We see humanity as predominantly interested in taking the easiest path which is also sometimes called the path of least resistance. We see humanity as saying they don't want to do politics, that they don't listen to drama, etc. The problem is that politics is the avenue by which people pass RULES/LAWS which force the behavior of others. This trait of preferring to take the path of least resistance, and avoid conflict leaves the door open for people who do embrace politics to pass rules to FORCE those that do not bother to look at politics to do things.
There is a quote "If you don't do politics, then politics will do you" though I do believe it was worded differently than that.
This is important to know when considering the future. This is not going to go away. It is also an extremely large maze that we must manage to pass through in order to actually reach ANY future. The maze of politics is here, and has been here for some time. It isn't going away until we find a way to navigate it.
The people that tend to get most involved in politics and actually run for office unfortunately tend to often be those that want to have the power over other people. There are exceptions, but close observation of politicians current, and past reveals that these exceptions are a minority. Some of these people will also be sociopaths, and some of them may indeed be psychopaths. People who gain their thrills from being able to make decisions for large amounts of people.
Our systems tend to make this easy for them. Remember that path of least resistance? It begins in small gatherings. Someone is needed to volunteer to take on a position that most people find inconvenient or tedious. A person steps forward. They do the tedious things. They are soon presented a similar choice, but the new position has even more powers and authority. Each time they float up to a new position they gain more power over more people. It mostly comes from them agreeing to do the job when the rest of us would rather just go on with our own plans and not have them disrupted by having to do these tedious things. We willfully give power to people without truly knowing much about these people other than the fact that they are willing to do the job and that means we don't have to do it.
We give power to those who tell us what we want to hear, simply so we can continue with our own plans with as little disruptions as possible.
Sociopaths, and psychopaths that have any intellect will likely realize that these are paths to power and to satisfy their personal urges. Tell the prey what they want to hear and they will keep giving you more and more power.
The population is fish, and they simply keep trying different bait until we give them power.
To get to the future in my other post we will need to become more aware of this and take more responsibility. That future that I presented in my positive post removes the power that these people crave. It is therefore, not in their interest to see this future happen. They will working counter to achieving those goals. They likely will do this for any other ideological future that the rest of you may have as well.
We granted more and more power to people that want power, and told us what we wanted to hear. They are not going to be interested in giving up power. Yet, simply removing those people will not solve the problem. Why would I say that?
The problem within all of us that allowed them to acquire this power in the first place would still exist. This means we would remove them and there may be momentary periods where seemingly decent people fill such roles. The problem that allowed those removed will remain. Eventually more power hungry sociopaths will occupy a majority of the positions of power again.
Now my positive ideology does away with most of these avenues, though they are something humanity will always have to deal with.
To overcome this we need to identify the tools the powers use to limit the awareness of the public, and make us more susceptible to their bait. This is why I so often essentially preach the message of critical thinking. I believe a population well versed in critical thinking would be a lot more difficult to bamboozle.
If this is not addressed then I believe we are doomed to repeat historical cycles. Some of them as our technology becomes more and more advanced lead to the potential of us destroying ourselves, the planet, etc. These cycles could bring any ideas to the future to an abrupt and permanent halt.
OVER POPULATION: This has been a problem and a point many times in history. Some "intellectual" will state some statistics stating how many people should be allowed or everything will end. Interestingly enough we've exceeded such predictions many times and the end didn't come. That is because new technology, and new methods of doing things changed the projections. Holding onto fixed "this WILL happen if you don't give us THIS" is usually going to be false and is often arrogance. There will continue to be discussions of over population. There will be many discussions on how such things should be addressed. Some of these are likely public, and others are likely very conspiratorial. Wars do reduce population, so that is one positive side effect for those demanding population reduction. Limiting legal number of children per couple is another way. They could even intentionally sterilize people after that number of children. Then the more conspiratorial side they could continue to add things to food, medicines, water, etc to greatly reduce fertility. This is also one of those areas where abortion is often listed as justified. As a voluntaryist I have problems with ALL of these.
They may see the population as being a huge barrier to us reaching the future as they believe we will destroy ourselves simply due to population, starvation, etc. Those sociopaths will use such horror stories to convince the masses to grant them powers. These horror stories are how they will convince the path of least resistance masses to let them do some of those above programs. If people challenge them they will villify those people, and they may even pass laws banning such speech.
In truth if these sociopaths try to control us less it is likely the people can solve these problems, for many of their actions slow our ability to reach solutions.
AUTOMATION: Things becoming increasingly automated coupled with better and better artificial intelligence makes it increasingly unnecessary for human beings to do most tasks. As people become more and more unnecessary the sociopaths in power have less and less reason to cater to the needs of those people. If they say "Do this or we won't support you?" the answer will no longer be to give in to the will of the people. It will instead be "We no longer need your support, crawl off and die somewhere." Sociopaths in power only see we the people as a controlling influence if we resist their manipulations and we stand up to them. Yet we are only a controlling influence as long as they cannot accomplish their goals without our help. As things become more and more automated then human assistance becomes less and less necessary.
As to the people. We'll have the challenge of having to create our own opportunities. Yet those opportunities will increasingly be automated as well. All people are likely to face periods where an opportunity is gone and they must spend time trying to come up with some other opportunity. How do they survive in those gaps between opportunities? This is why the concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI) comes up. I am not a fan of UBI if it requires a government of sociopaths to operate it. Thus, why in my positive post I presented a form of UBI that essentially requires no government. I foresee a lot of people dying and experiencing other difficulties during these gaps between opportunities. As automation continues those gaps will likely become longer and more frequent.
At some point people may begin to think we really don't need people. People are no longer in vogue. They will come up with some way to justify mass deaths of people. We see how easy it is for these sociopaths using their propaganda agendas to make people justify "It's okay if they die, they voted for Trump", "It's okay if they die, they are white", "It's okay if they die, they are muslim", "It's okay if they die, they are racist", etc. Those generalizations today show how easily they manipulate the public into thinking murder and death of certain segments of the population is acceptable. So why wouldn't it be easy for them to convince the public that all the deaths of the people is "for the greater good?"
VIRTUAL REALLITY: People will increasingly go into VR and spend a lot of time in created media and experiences rather than focusing on the reality around them. This will increase their propensity for giving people power as that will be the path to least resistance. "Sure, you can have that job. I just want to make sure I make my daily VR experience." This could however lead to a solution for over population. If we spend less time physically interacting with each other then it would naturally lead to reduced procreation. Virtual Sex isn't going to produce pregnancies.
AUGMENTED REALLITY: We are already in a heavily augmented by technology reality. The fact I am having social interactions with those of you here on Steeemit is an example. This has become a very real place for me though I am sitting in front of my computer, reading, writing, etc. All the hours I spend here are hours I do not spend out in the reality around me. Instead I am in an augmented reality. We see this also when you walk in a room of people hanging out and they are all staring at their phones rather than talking to each other. These aspects are going to have ramifications and it is difficult to know for certain where they will go. We do know there will be many negative events related to this. Hopefully we learn from them and find workable solutions.
TRANS-HUMANISM: The merging of man with machine whether it is bionics, enhancements, etc is a trend. Yet the concept is to eventually transcend the need to be humans. We could view this as a technological evolution. Will we enter times where trans-humans are demonized and we justify killing them, or will the trans-humans at some point justify those that refuse to become trans-human? I mean if technologically we enhance people will non-enhanced people become a burden rather than something useful? There are other dangers. Eventually we will try to transmit someones mind into a machine with the hope they can live forever. In our arrogance will we push forward and will important things be missing? Will we become 100% logic and no compassion. At that point, why would we need a human? Could that transfer turn people from people with compassion and feelings into people that are essentially sociopaths and psychopaths? As people think they've understood the mind and everything this is indeed a risk. The only thing humans might be useful for at some point would be procreation. Yet even then that may be not needed. If you can transfer a mind what would stop you from copying a mind. Imagine George Soros transferring his mind, and then copying it into many versions of himself.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:* The true danger of AI is the point at which the AI decides humans are no longer beneficial or necessary. Yet, in reality humans may die then. The AIs will communicate about their creators, who are no longer around, and "life" goes on. This is more of the "Terminator" style of world.
I believe what is more likely to be the issue is military AI being put into the hands of human sociopaths and psychopaths and highly efficient AI killing machines being wielded against people. This is likely to happen at some point. Whether we can make it through this period is the challenge.
DARK AGES: Erasing of history, dumbing down of population, and a new dark ages where the population has very little memory or knowledge of things from before. They simply blindly agree with whatever they are told. We are pushing towards this now. If it happens the question is will we come out of it? Will we go through another historical cycle?
The Hope
I believe the most important thing we can do to address all of these issues lies in the area of education. Our education is currently controlled by the sociopaths in charge. If you seriously look at the purpose of education it is primarily focused on indoctrination, conformity, and control at this point. It is a factory for creating cult members.
It is supposed to be about teaching reading/writing, math, science, history, logic, philosophy, languages, and the tools we need to survive and improve the future. Teaching people to be individuals and think for themselves.
A large portion of education these days is not focused on useful skills at all. It is instead focused on psychological manipulation, political correctness, and how to array the students against desired targets as villains. In other words it is the opposite of teaching them to think for themselves. Agreeing with the group, and attacking anyone with a different point of view is being taught as acceptable. Resistance to challenge is taught. Do not listen, do not consider, just push forward with the message you have been taught.
Critical Thinking is almost extinct in the education system, and as far as I am concerned it should be taught from the earliest ages and non-stop. That is the tools that allow us to detect and resist manipulation. They are the tools that allow us to have productive discussions with people we may disagree with. They are "critical" to our future.
Our education as it exists currently is a monster, a virus, and it is the kool-aid. There is the joke about "drinking the kool-aid" yet that is what our education system is today.
Due to history not really being taught most of the people don't even know there was no Department of Education in the United States until the 1980s. So for hundreds of years the population did not require the government (sociopaths) to dictate what should be taught, and how it should be taught.
The education system is the number one problem. It is the door to the minds of the people of the future, and the sociopaths are pushing box after box of bullshit, control, and manipulation through that door.
If this was a bit dark for you, my other post I focused on positive/optimistic views of the future.
