Political debates 50 years from now

a catalogued tweetstorm

Mainstream debates 50 years from now could center around:

1. Equal opportunity cognitive enhancement and biohacking

2. Allocating resources towards the advancement of machines (posthumanism) vs. the flourishing of humans (transhumanism)

   • Posthumanists will argue that the ultimate end should be the survival of the strongest form of consciousness

   • Transhumanists will argue that human survival and the protection of future people should be most important

   • Discourse would be accompanied by an elevated appreciation for the human condition as we explore what we can lose

3. Identity continuity and diversity

   • Should our past beliefs and views have an expiry date, after which they are no longer attributed to us?

     • How much growth are we afforded in a lifetime?

   • Should we be allowed to adopt multiple identities — avatars of the true self — in society, to reflect the multitudes that we contain?

     • IMO, personality types will become more crystallised, extreme, and prescriptive; and we will be able to pick and choose which of those types we want to embody in a systematic way, by adopting or cultivating an associated avatar - can envision a world in which the left believes in legitimising, wearing, and using avatars as a means of self-expression

   • Promoting longevity and healthy life-extension: how longevity might affect the availability of resources for the population, and whether continued research is deserving of funding. Relevant debates:

     • Is life-extension ethical? (would it extend suffering, or lead to purposelessness?)

     • Would it stagnate progress?

     • Would it lead to overpopulation / a shortage or resources?

     • Could it affect national security?

     • Would it perpetuate inequality? (how could life-extending means be made accessible to all populations?)

4. Sleep augmentation & dream capture

   • Relevant debates, assuming by now we have invented a tangible way of capturing dreams through consumer-facing devices:

     • Should captured dreams be accessible to governments or law enforcement?

       • Should legal systems use them to predict future (potentially criminogenic) behaviour?

     • The ethics of compelling someone to work through sleep, or speed-sleep if we’ve figured out a way to absorb inputs and perform tasks while simultaneously reaping the biological benefits of complete REM cycles

       • Should we expect workers and students to continue performing effortful cognitive activity at night?

       • Will banning or discouraging this make a country less competitive on a global scale?

       • What could religious/spiritual objections to this look like?

5. Space governance

   1. Should corporations be allowed to claim ownership of extraterrestrial land?

   2. Is the moon a state?

   3. Should we mine the moon?

6. Climate

   • Vegetarian or veganism will move from being an innocuous personal dietary preference or individual moral choice to a marker of political identity. This will be driven by:

     • An increased awareness around animal rights (as we explore how we ought to think about rights in an age of new emergent consciousnesses)

     • The climate crisis

7. Discourse around morality (a moral revolution)

   • Being a utilitarian vs. a virtue-ethicist will become a core part of social identity, as we begin to think about the assimilation, treatment, and acceptance of future people and forms of consciousness.

First published on 8/9, 2022 on Twitter