The Long Now

Never heard of it before. My first impression: I wish there were more science, but I liked this quote.

If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way—and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart. When I told my son about the Clock of the Long Now, he listened very carefully, and we looked at the pictures on the Long Now Foundation’s website. “Will there really be people then, Dad?” he said. “Yes,” I told him without hesitation, “there will.”

I find it hard "believing" in a technological future too. I have that "last paragraph of a long book" feeling. But they're right, it's probably not healthy.

One major difference: LessWrong has a common (if not prevailing) view that the billion-year-scale future of most of the universe will be decided in the decade-scale future. In a sense, the last page of one book and the first page of a much greater one.

The Long Now seems less like "today's thinking will define the future" and more like "today's thinking needs to be extensible into the future"

Here on LW, we want our nuclear-powered flying cars, dammit!

I don't.

Flying cars are a silly SF idea. Even if we had the technological ability to make them, remember that the social success of a technology often depends on politics and the human factor, rather than technology itself. We have enough problems regularing traffic on 2D roads - imagine what kind of accidents flying cars would be capable of.

I personally take the approach that one should think Less Wrong and act Long Now, if you follow me. I diligently do my daily spaced-repetition review and n-backing. I carefully design my website and writings to last decades, actively think about how to write material that improves with time, and work on writings that will not be finished for years (if ever).

It's a bit schizophrenic since both are fairly total worldviews with some fairly conflicting recommendations about where to invest my time - it's a case of very low discount rates versus very high discount rates, I suppose.

Perhaps we should view the Long Now as insurance? I think that's how they describe some of their proposals like a Long Library and seedbanks - as insurance in case the future turns out to be surprisingly unsurprising.

The Long Now Foundation seems to be a dissapointing organisation to me. The many smart people involved should surely be able to find something better to do with themselves than that.

http://fora.tv/partner/Long_Now_Foundation

...does have some worthwhile material though.

LN embraces signaling like there's no tomorrow (ha!) -- their flagship project, after all, is a monumental clock to last thousands of years, the goal of which is to "lend itself to good storytelling and myth" about long-term thought.

Is this gesture at least made in good Machiavellian faith?