Thank you for writing this post and for including those examples.
To address the first part of your “Meta” comment at the bottom of the post, I think that, were I to do this exercise with my peers, it would not cost much time or energy, but could potentially generate ideas for desirable states of humanity’s future that might result in some of my or my peers’ attention temporarily being reallocated to a different cause. This reallocation might take the form of some additional querying on the Internet that might not have otherwise occurred, or might take the form of a full week’s or month’s work being redirected towards learning about some new topic, perhaps leading to some dissemination of the findings in writing. So, doing the exercise, or some similar version of it, you’ve described above seems minimally valuable enough to give it a try, and perhaps even experiment it with.
In terms of exercise formats, if I were to implement “sessions to generate desirable states of humanity for the 5yr, 10yr, 25yr, etc… future”, I would probably get together with my peers each month, have everyone generate ~10 ideas, then pool the ideas in a Google Doc, and then together, prune duplicates, combine similar ideas, come up with ways to make the ideas more concrete, and resolve any conflicting ideas. If I am not able to get my peers together on a monthly basis, I would probably do something similar to what I have described, and then perhaps post the ideas in a shortform.
In my own work, I already do this to a degree; usually I have a list of things to write or learn about, and add a subjective (x% | y% | z%) rating, where x means how motivated I am to do it, y means how valuable I think work on this topic is, and z means how difficult it would be for me to work on it, to each project idea. To supplement exercises in generating descriptions of desirable states for humanity in the coming years, it would probably be easy enough to add some quick subjective estimate of importance to each idea when it’s generated. Also, a mechanism for generating desirable states for humanity could be looking at macroscopic issues for humanity, (off the top of my head, not ordered in terms of importance) - {Aging, That humans war, Aligning AI, Human coordination failures, Injury and disease, Wellbeing, Earth Isn’t Safe (natural risks, including anthr. climate change), Resource distribution, Energy and resource supplies, Biorisks} - and then coming up with ideas for “what civilization would look like if this issue were addressed”, or something similar.
Thank you for writing this post and for including those examples.
To address the first part of your “Meta” comment at the bottom of the post, I think that, were I to do this exercise with my peers, it would not cost much time or energy, but could potentially generate ideas for desirable states of humanity’s future that might result in some of my or my peers’ attention temporarily being reallocated to a different cause. This reallocation might take the form of some additional querying on the Internet that might not have otherwise occurred, or might take the form of a full week’s or month’s work being redirected towards learning about some new topic, perhaps leading to some dissemination of the findings in writing. So, doing the exercise, or some similar version of it, you’ve described above seems minimally valuable enough to give it a try, and perhaps even experiment it with.
In terms of exercise formats, if I were to implement “sessions to generate desirable states of humanity for the 5yr, 10yr, 25yr, etc… future”, I would probably get together with my peers each month, have everyone generate ~10 ideas, then pool the ideas in a Google Doc, and then together, prune duplicates, combine similar ideas, come up with ways to make the ideas more concrete, and resolve any conflicting ideas. If I am not able to get my peers together on a monthly basis, I would probably do something similar to what I have described, and then perhaps post the ideas in a shortform.
In my own work, I already do this to a degree; usually I have a list of things to write or learn about, and add a subjective (x% | y% | z%) rating, where x means how motivated I am to do it, y means how valuable I think work on this topic is, and z means how difficult it would be for me to work on it, to each project idea. To supplement exercises in generating descriptions of desirable states for humanity in the coming years, it would probably be easy enough to add some quick subjective estimate of importance to each idea when it’s generated. Also, a mechanism for generating desirable states for humanity could be looking at macroscopic issues for humanity, (off the top of my head, not ordered in terms of importance) - {Aging, That humans war, Aligning AI, Human coordination failures, Injury and disease, Wellbeing, Earth Isn’t Safe (natural risks, including anthr. climate change), Resource distribution, Energy and resource supplies, Biorisks} - and then coming up with ideas for “what civilization would look like if this issue were addressed”, or something similar.