it can be strangely appealing to be very
down about the future of humanity when
we think of the future apocalyptic
scenarios come so naturally flooded
cities energy crises civil wars we’re
afraid of being naive after all we were
once promised jetpacks
and won’t be so easily taken in again we
like to tell ourselves we’re too
intelligent to be excited by the future
but there’s another possible explanation
where oddly a bit resentful it can be
painful to imagine all the things we’re
going to miss out on imagine going back
in time to 14th century Europe and
confronting people with the solutions
which a few centuries later became so
readily available one might meet a woman
whose six-year-old daughter had just
died of scarlet fever
she’d be hysterical with grief one would
then explain that in seven hundred and
forty four years time there would be on
the very spot where she was standing a
chemist where for two pounds fifty she
could have got the antibiotics that
would have saved her beloved child or
imagine describing Heathrow Airport in
the Boeing Dreamliner to a man who had
starved suffered seasickness and been
taken prisoner on a three-year
pilgrimage from Berkshire to Jerusalem
or imagine telling a guy with toothache
about the anesthetics which he wouldn’t
be able to get for another six hundred
twenty three years or confronting
Jamshid al Kashi a 15th century
mathematician who spent years of his
life doing vastly complicated
calculations to work out the ratio
between the diameter and the
circumference of a circle with the fact
that his sums would one day be doable
with a small plastic box picked up next
to the express checkout of the
supermarket we could imagine such people
coming to deeply resent news about the
future instead of seeming inevitable our
miseries can come to appear like cruel
temporary accidents we realize that in
the broad span of history people don’t
have to suffer many of the things we’re
going through we just happen to be
condemned to them because we’ve been
born at the wrong time a visitor from
the future will no doubt pity us as much
as we pity our medieval ancestors
they’ll feel so sorry that we had to
have an unhappy marriage 27 years of
anguish shame and frustration for both
parties which would so easily have been
solved in a few minute
by having a minor adjustment made to the
ventral tegmental area of the midbrain
of one of the parties they’ll feel
appalled that we had to die of
pancreatic cancer or work so hard in a
more or less meaningless jobs when at
last robots are truly doing everything
and there’s a guaranteed income for
everyone on the planet equivalent to
what a Swiss dentist earns today were
often negative about the future to
defend ourselves against recognition of
how absurd much of our suffering will
seem from the position of 300 years from
now we’re faced with a cruel thought
that solutions to some truly horrible
problems of today might be just over the
horizon
but unfortunately still too late for us
the 19th century painter Jericho focused
on the Agony’s of just this kind of
missing out in his monumental depiction
of the raft of the Medusa the sailors of
the ship wrecked vessel Medusa had
drifted for two weeks in the painting
Jericho shows us the moment when the
survivors who is still clinging to the
raft finally catch sight of the ship
that will rescue them the tiny sail can
be just seen on the horizon but for many
the rescue was too late they died just
before the ship could reach them a few
days or even hours sooner and they would
have been spared the most horrible
Agony’s we too are like the survivors on
the raft
the rescue ship will come but often too
late we should feel a reasonable and
appropriate pity for ourselves we
deserve compassion because even if their
comparatively comfortable our lives are
still actually very hard when considered
in the light of the future we can
identify a new kind of comparative
poverty that we’re suffering from when a
person is poor not in relation to what
others around them have now but poor in
relation to what people will have at
some point in a dimly imaginable more advanced and more intelligent future
down about the future of humanity when
we think of the future apocalyptic
scenarios come so naturally flooded
cities energy crises civil wars we’re
afraid of being naive after all we were
once promised jetpacks
and won’t be so easily taken in again we
like to tell ourselves we’re too
intelligent to be excited by the future
but there’s another possible explanation
where oddly a bit resentful it can be
painful to imagine all the things we’re
going to miss out on imagine going back
in time to 14th century Europe and
confronting people with the solutions
which a few centuries later became so
readily available one might meet a woman
whose six-year-old daughter had just
died of scarlet fever
she’d be hysterical with grief one would
then explain that in seven hundred and
forty four years time there would be on
the very spot where she was standing a
chemist where for two pounds fifty she
could have got the antibiotics that
would have saved her beloved child or
imagine describing Heathrow Airport in
the Boeing Dreamliner to a man who had
starved suffered seasickness and been
taken prisoner on a three-year
pilgrimage from Berkshire to Jerusalem
or imagine telling a guy with toothache
about the anesthetics which he wouldn’t
be able to get for another six hundred
twenty three years or confronting
Jamshid al Kashi a 15th century
mathematician who spent years of his
life doing vastly complicated
calculations to work out the ratio
between the diameter and the
circumference of a circle with the fact
that his sums would one day be doable
with a small plastic box picked up next
to the express checkout of the
supermarket we could imagine such people
coming to deeply resent news about the
future instead of seeming inevitable our
miseries can come to appear like cruel
temporary accidents we realize that in
the broad span of history people don’t
have to suffer many of the things we’re
going through we just happen to be
condemned to them because we’ve been
born at the wrong time a visitor from
the future will no doubt pity us as much
as we pity our medieval ancestors
they’ll feel so sorry that we had to
have an unhappy marriage 27 years of
anguish shame and frustration for both
parties which would so easily have been
solved in a few minute
by having a minor adjustment made to the
ventral tegmental area of the midbrain
of one of the parties they’ll feel
appalled that we had to die of
pancreatic cancer or work so hard in a
more or less meaningless jobs when at
last robots are truly doing everything
and there’s a guaranteed income for
everyone on the planet equivalent to
what a Swiss dentist earns today were
often negative about the future to
defend ourselves against recognition of
how absurd much of our suffering will
seem from the position of 300 years from
now we’re faced with a cruel thought
that solutions to some truly horrible
problems of today might be just over the
horizon
but unfortunately still too late for us
the 19th century painter Jericho focused
on the Agony’s of just this kind of
missing out in his monumental depiction
of the raft of the Medusa the sailors of
the ship wrecked vessel Medusa had
drifted for two weeks in the painting
Jericho shows us the moment when the
survivors who is still clinging to the
raft finally catch sight of the ship
that will rescue them the tiny sail can
be just seen on the horizon but for many
the rescue was too late they died just
before the ship could reach them a few
days or even hours sooner and they would
have been spared the most horrible
Agony’s we too are like the survivors on
the raft
the rescue ship will come but often too
late we should feel a reasonable and
appropriate pity for ourselves we
deserve compassion because even if their
comparatively comfortable our lives are
still actually very hard when considered
in the light of the future we can
identify a new kind of comparative
poverty that we’re suffering from when a
person is poor not in relation to what
others around them have now but poor in
relation to what people will have at
some point in a dimly imaginable more advanced and more intelligent future
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