To me, the next great challenge of our time isn't finding the next SpaceX, but gradually dismantling the corporate dogma of full employment. The short-term goals should be along the lines of getting to a 30-hour work week, a single-payer healthcare system, free college and UBI from an automation moonshot.
The long-term goals should be about how to get everyone in the world self-actualized, but doing it sustainably so we don't destroy the planet in the process. We'll be on renewable energy by 2030, but the real destruction is happening due to manufacturing that we don't actually need. Getting demand flipped so that we can get to a sustainable or non-growth based economy is going to be tricky and may not happen before 2040-2050 as the singularity looms.
My dream for this would look like a 20-hour or less work week, with a great deal more capital available at the bottom with near-zero or negative interest rates. Young people would train for a few years in something like a peace corps doing the difficult work that nobody wants to do, then use the life skills they've learned to eliminate those hardships for everyone else going forward. Their degree or equivalent certificates would go towards hard disciplines, advancing things like medicine where devotion and commitment to a large organization is actually required.
But the rest of their time would be spent in their own endeavors in the humanities or working in maker spaces to invent new things. That's where the real innovation will come from. So instead of a the next SpaceX requiring $300 million, it will just need a few people with access to shared computing resources so they can iterate unfettered by the time suck of the workaday world.
We can look towards Star Trek for inspiration. In the meantime, I expect everything to go the opposite direction from the way I suggested, just like it has been for the last 20 years. We'll see more wealth inequality, more disenfranchisement, more neocolonialism. Unfortunately it's probably going to get worse before it gets better. But in spite of that, we can still envision the dream and work to manifest change locally in our own lives, as we plant seeds of hope globally.
The long-term goals should be about how to get everyone in the world self-actualized, but doing it sustainably so we don't destroy the planet in the process. We'll be on renewable energy by 2030, but the real destruction is happening due to manufacturing that we don't actually need. Getting demand flipped so that we can get to a sustainable or non-growth based economy is going to be tricky and may not happen before 2040-2050 as the singularity looms.
My dream for this would look like a 20-hour or less work week, with a great deal more capital available at the bottom with near-zero or negative interest rates. Young people would train for a few years in something like a peace corps doing the difficult work that nobody wants to do, then use the life skills they've learned to eliminate those hardships for everyone else going forward. Their degree or equivalent certificates would go towards hard disciplines, advancing things like medicine where devotion and commitment to a large organization is actually required.
But the rest of their time would be spent in their own endeavors in the humanities or working in maker spaces to invent new things. That's where the real innovation will come from. So instead of a the next SpaceX requiring $300 million, it will just need a few people with access to shared computing resources so they can iterate unfettered by the time suck of the workaday world.
We can look towards Star Trek for inspiration. In the meantime, I expect everything to go the opposite direction from the way I suggested, just like it has been for the last 20 years. We'll see more wealth inequality, more disenfranchisement, more neocolonialism. Unfortunately it's probably going to get worse before it gets better. But in spite of that, we can still envision the dream and work to manifest change locally in our own lives, as we plant seeds of hope globally.