Looking forward to 2019 and beyond, I see that a wonderful future is waiting for us as humans. Humankind will create wonders on Earth, we will build cities on the moon and Mars. There will be artificial general intelligence that surpasses our level of thinking, molecular assemblers constructing the necessities of life from the soil, resurrected dinosaurs grazing the soil alongside de novo unicorns, and probes departing for the nearest stars.
There will be wealth beyond measure, in an age of plenty for all. Hunger and disease will be banished, even as we engineer all of the greatest dreams of past visionaries into reality.
The present, seen from the perspective of futurists two or three centuries past, already appears a golden age of staggering, near-magical machinery. An era of grand wealth and comfort, in which even the poorest of the wealthy nations live the lives of nobility, immune to famine and pestilence.
But our cities and our achievements, the towering spires and the internet, the freeways and clinics, are little more than monuments to their originators. The engineers and the creators and the visionaries of this modern world of ours are long dead or even now dying of old age.
It is a noble thing to build a greater technology, to generate the wealth of choice and capability that will aid billions in years to come. To contribute to the construction of the golden future, one step at a time is right and proper.
We put fences around graveyards. That is a foolish thing, a wished-for separation of concerns that do not and cannot exist. Every city, every building, every road is a tribute to the dead who created them.
Every last cultivated part of our environment was touched by someone who is now no more, gone to oblivion. When we walk into the doors or drive over the asphalt, it becomes a tribute for us as well. For our generation.
Whatever we strive to build, no matter how noble, no matter how useful, it will be nothing more than a monument, a marker destined to be worn down to nothing while we no longer exist if what we do does not contribute to the good of all.
The true value of building a better future can only exist when we are all assured of living to participate in that future, in health and vigour, of sound mind and body.
A house can only be a house and a tribute if its architect and/or resident are alive in the hearts of those who live on. Yes, we should build wonders, because we can, because we can dream into existence a far better world. But of greater importance than any other technology, we must build the means to end suffering, to enable life to continue for all of us without suffering.
Until we do, we are merely marking time until we break this cycle. When we do, all that we achieved will have more meaning. The continuing story, the progression, the achievements of humankind will be celebrated.
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