what we will have achieved by 2100

a scattering of low-confidence predictions; more fun than scientific

1. We live longer now: after a billionaire’s resolve to map out each bodily bio-marker and optimise their individual function, we learnt that a bottom-up approach to longevity may work to create a “mortality plateau” — but only when used along with a top-down approach, like meditation and embodied cognition, can it actually reverse bodily degradation and ageing.

2. We coexist with nature, and see ourselves as participants in a diverse ecosystem alongside other forms of life and consciousness. As a population, we are increasingly vegetarian. The story that humankind tells today is one of culture, progress, and nature.

Returning to nature

Hundreds of years ago, humans saw themselves as enmeshed within the ecosystem of the natural world — we lived among nature, foraged for food within it, and worshipped its elements.

Then, when religion rose to become the dominant belief system, the focal point of devotion was anthropomorphized, and positioned outside of nature. According to historians, this lay the foundation of modern anthropocentrism — the system of beliefs that frames humans as separate from and superior to the nonhuman world.

Natural disaster impacting humanity on a global scale could prompt the realisation that the human “self” is not distinct from the natural “other” — and that we are — and choose to be — inextricably enmeshed within the natural world. Then, we will live cyclically, observing and respecting the environment and what we take from it.

Philosophy behind the return: Gelassenheit

While the devastating effects of natural calamities might compel us to be more responsible stewards of nature, this will be amplified by a spiritual need for a release — a beckoning of reconnection with authenticity, and liberation from a world of calculative thinking.

In the times of Aristotle, technology was conceived of as techne — the production, craft, or bringing forth of something. But, according to Heidegger, this is no longer true — instead, the essence of technology in modern times is Gestell, which refers to the way technology frames (“enframes”) our relationship with the world. It assumes that nature and humans are passive ‘standing reserves’, which can be exploited or put to use with he help of calculative thinking.

Heidegger instead advocates for Gelassenheit — a more contemplative, less utilitarian mode of engagement with the world and technology. Gelassenheit involves “letting the world to be”, rather than trying to control or quantify it, and practicing meditative rather than calculative thinking.

Calculative thinking computes, while meditative thinking contemplates the meaning that reigns over all there is. In a world where calculative thinking may be delegated to machines, this may be more important than ever.

3. There are two ideological camps into which people self-select — transhumanists and posthumanists¹

Transhumanists believe that the ultimate end is the survival and future of humanity. Technology exists as a means to a human-focused end.

• Goals: Individual transhumanism: a project dedicated to achieving the betterment of humanity; an attempt to “retreat from the existential challenge” of finitude and quicken the evolutionary process of expanding extropy to transcend biological & cognitive limits

• Philosophy: Based on ideas of the Age of Enlightenment²

• Economics: Resources should be allocated towards 1) preventing risks from and misalignment of more advanced consciousnesses, and 2) maximising human flourishing. Regulation around the development of potentially harmful technologies is encouraged and incentivised.

• Technologies: Transhumanist projects include life extension, brain-computer interfaces, wearables, prosthetics, cryonics, whole-brain emulation (mind-uploads), and other technologies that augment human function

Posthumanists believe that the ultimate end is the survival of the strongest form of consciousness; whether or not it is human consciousness. They believe that a species greater than humans can exist, and that it is our responsibility to build and nurture it.

• Goals: Cosmic posthumanism — to achieve the potential of life in the universe; to preserve the light of consciousness in the universe

• Philosophy: Posthumanism is rooted in postmodern philosophy³. The philosophy rejects the binary oppositions of human—non-human, and the premise of ethical and biological anthropocentrism

• Economics: They believe that we should allocate capital towards the discovery or development of more advanced life-forms. Simply, they are executers, interested in building and tangibly experiencing the benefits that progress can yield. Government regulation is discouraged and viewed as a barrier to progress.

• Technologies: They believe in moonshots and deep tech. They want to mine the moon, build AGI, and create quantum computers. Advanced tech is a goal, rather than a means to an end.

4. People have begun rock-climbing in multitudes: isometric muscle-strengthening was found to be associated with increased quality of life, and increased leisure time from cognitive automation enabled excursions to engage in meaningful meditation and immersion in the natural world.

5. You sit down to write and you write unprompted, unassisted, freely. In 2026 a prescient philosopher demarcated writing into functional and creative — to use technology to assist with the former was permissible and astute; to use it for creative work was immoral, since it entailed the eviction of the divine dissatisfaction that drives truly creative, novel work.

6. In the 2000s a VC declared that software is eating the world. Today, it is spitting it back out.

   • Space: We live in dynamic, immersive digital realities. Street signs and directions, once absorbed into a GPS, are now externalised back into the real world, projected as AR beams updating in real-time based on where you want to go. You can access an immersive at-home shopping experience through VR — or you can walk through physical stores in a mall, scrolling through dynamic representations of SKUs or toggling sizes, colors, and prints as you walk through the different aisles. The physical world, once condensed behind a screen, has reclaimed its status as the default mode of existence, this time powered by virtual infrastructure, and intertwined with digital interfaces.

   • Music: You can have a soundtrack for your life, spun up by BCIs that create pre-emptive audio experiences. These wearables monitor amygdala activity so that they can predict your mood before it fully manifests, and play music that is immediately congruous with your current subjective state.

7. Consciousness is a puzzle we haven’t yet solved, and progress is asymptotic — what our scientific and metaphysical theories tell us about correlations and subjective experience brings us closer, but each discovery uncovers several new questions, taking us further down the rabbit hole. Some notable milestones:

   1. Studying (and cultivating) distributed consciousness: We’ve learned that the octopus is the ideal analogue for distributed systems of consciousness; understanding distributed consciousness can inform the study, development, and architecture of synthetic consciousness

   2. Conceiving of a collective consciousness: We discovered that studying consciousness in a single individual, or trying to map its neural correlates, may be reductionist; and that when several intelligences operate close enough, like a magnetic field, they produce something infinitely more intelligent, and several degrees more conscious. We lack the perceptual apparatus and cognitive competence to experience the field of sentience, of collective consciousness, produced by humans around the world intelligising in unison — but have turned to ancient Eastern scriptures to understand the nature of a universal consciousness and the conditions required to manifest it.

1. This demarcation is hypothetical, and likely an imperfect way to describe stakeholders in emerging technology today. For example, the companies spearheading AI progress today are also paving the way for safety research, and advocating for a system of checks-and-balances. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are focused on tech to augment human lives (Neuralink), while also devoting billions of dollars on moonshot projects to “expand the light of consciousness in the universe”. EAs are concerned with risks associated with AI development (transhumanist-ish), but also advocate for the welfare of non-human beings through cause areas like the reducing suffering in non-human animals.

However, the transhuman vs. posthuman split seemed to be the closest possible approximation to classifying anthropocentric vs. technocentric attitudes towards progress today.

2. The Age of Enlightenment was marked by a rise of rationalism & empiricism; thinkers like Descartes emphasised the power of human reason as the basis for knowledge and understanding

3. Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical movement that questions and challenges the fundamental assumptions of modernity and the Age of Enlightenment, including ideas about objective truth, universal values, and stable meaning. It emphasizes the relativity of knowledge, the role of language and power in shaping our understanding of reality.

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Inspiration, sources, tools:

• Posthumanism vs. Transhumanism (Merzlyakov)

• Transhumanism and the meaning of life (Sandberg)

• Biological systems as models for decentralised medieval government (Wangerin)

• The question concerning technology, and other essays (Heidegger)

• Heidegger’s critique of the technology and the educational ecological imperative (Heidegger)

• This is technology ethics (Danaher, Nyholm)

• GPT-4

• https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1453590715267788803?lang=en

• Blueprint

• The Marginilian: Martha Graham on the life force of creativity and the divine dissatisfaction of being an artist (Popova)