Happy Future Day!

[Ed Hudgins]

Happy Future Day!
By Edward Hudgins

Stand up for optimism about the future today!

Transhumanism Australia, a non-profit that promotes education in science and technology, has marked March 1 as “Future Day.” It wants this day celebrated worldwide as a time “to consider the future of humanity.” If all of us made a habit of celebrating our potential, it could transform a global culture mired in pessimism and malaise. It would help build an optimistic world that is confident about what humans can accomplish if we put our minds and imaginations to it.
 

The Future is Bright

The information and communications technology that helps define and shape our world was, 40 years ago, a vision of the future brought into present reality by visionaries like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The exponential growth of the power of semiconductors allowed entrepreneurs to create one new industry and cutting-edge good product and service after another.

Today, we are at exponential takeoff points in biotech, nanotech, and artificial intelligence. For example, the cost of sequencing a human genome was $100 million in 2001, $10 million in 2007, but it costs only a few thousand dollars today. Steve Jobs created the first Apple computers in his garage. Biohackers similarly housed could transform our lives in the future in ways that still seem to most folks like science fiction; indeed, the prospect of “curing death” is no longer a delusion of madmen but the well-funded research projects in the laboratories of the present.

For a prosperous present and promising future a society needs physical infrastructure—roads, power, communications. It needs a legal infrastructure—laws and political structures that protect the liberty of individuals so they can act freely and flourish in civil society. And it requires moral infrastructure, a culture that promotes the values of reason and individual productive achievement.
 

Future “Future Days”

We should congratulate our brothers “Down Under” for conceiving of Future Day. They have celebrated it in Sydney with a conference on the science that will produce a bright tomorrow. We in America... (Finish reading here.)