The Future Starts Here

Higgs is skilled at putting together concepts and ideas in new and interesting ways. And in this book he looks into the future to explain why we're not doomed after all. In doing so he considers several present and near-future topics. These include

artificial intelligence,
big data,
virtual reality,
social media,
interplanetary travel,
rewilding,
a universal basic income,
gen Z, and,
ecological collapse.

Then tries to establish if we have any reasons to be hopeful. Which, to be honest, he sometimes struggles to achieve. The problem being an attempt to rationalise events which run contrary to his overarching narrative. But saying this, the book is still and interesting read, most of the time.

‘The idea that our civilisation is doomed is not established fact. It is the latest in a very long line of stories.' And this story is a ‘circumambient mythos', writes Higgs as he disappears down a rabbit hole.

In fact, in the chapter on how AI functions, Higgs explains his friend is training a computer to write like the author. And even as the results start to make some sense, it always feels lacking:

“The machine was going to a lot of trouble to mimic what it had been trained to copy, but it was doing so without any larger sense of meaning or purpose. It was the literary equivalent of an X-Factor contestant.”

And at times I wondered if I was reading Higgs, or the work of this AI?

The upshot of the whole book is each generation form their own historical narrative. This includes the part they play in it. Everything is hopeless now because Gen X dominates. They are creating the narrative and suffer from nihilism and self centred individualism. Higgs suggests we should pin a lot of hope in our current generation (Gen Z) of kids. They have grown up with the internet and have been exposed to an unprecedented amount of technology in their upbringing. Gen Z are also surprisingly different from the generations that preceded them. They appear to have exactly the type of highly social conscience required to change humanity's ways.

Yet these are the same generation that are ‘too socially anxious' to use a manned checkout for fear of human interaction. And while he argues against ‘blind optimism', he's still extremely upbeat about us, the human race. All said, it gave me, a firmly entrenched Gen X'er some hope and optimism.