The Future's Perspective

Some time ago I was listening to an old George Hotz stream and he was talking about how to assess if someone’s position on a topic X was valid or not. I remember specifically him saying something along the lines of “It only makes sense to argue something if saying the contrary is also a possibility”. That means something like a politician talking about the priority of children or education really isn’t saying anything, because no one in their right mind would say that they are not a priority. This idea stuck with me, and I tried expanding it, I wanted to discover some predicates for falsifying ideas or discourses that weren’t saying anything. If I succeeded I could spend more time investigating the ones that had value instead of running down dead ends or circular arguments.

A predicate I found that works similarly to what Hotz described is something I’m calling “the future’s perspective”. The idea is “Will this argument hold a thousand years from now?”, the number of years is arbitrary, but generally, the more in the future someone will still be defending it the better. This is based on the notion of how society changes its discussions from time to time, and things that were once a debate are now a dead bifurcation in the past of the path we call the truth. In the 1600s, defending Galileo’s ideas would get you killed, and four hundred years later, we know that he was right and the church wrong. It doesn’t mean that people during that time should’ve known that in the future (now) the status quo would’ve changed. At the time, the slow pace at which information traveled meant that most people didn’t even know that the earth’s centering in the solar system was ever questioned. In modern times discussions happen more openly, and the evidence and arguments you know about the sides are limited by your interest in researching them.

Now, how will the people of the year 3000 react when they discover what we were fighting over in 2023? Will they still be uncertain about decriminalizing drugs or will they have banned/accepted them for good? What about guns? Will racism still be a thing or will it be listed in the history books alongside the other barbaric things we’ve done? What about homophobia? Will religion still be around? If so, which ones? We are a product of our time.

What I’m trying to push, I realized, is how do you imagine the future to look like? I’m not talking 5 or 10 years, but 500 or 1000 years from now. You may think it’s not possible to have a clear vision of what it will look like and you are right, it’s a creativity exercise. 1000 years seems like enough time to solve most problems we are burdened with today, things like disease, and scarcity may become things of the past, how will life be after them? This future world will be like a utopia, something like what we read only in the most optimistic sci-fi stories. We should push today for what we believe will be the norm in the future, only then it may come to be. It’s our responsibility as functional specimens of the human race to do what we believe is best, maybe not for us now, but for the many more that are yet to be born.