Dear Members of My Generation and Their Children,
It's possible that World War III has already begun, and we just haven't realized it yet. But if we are truly at war once again, our choices about what we are fighting for will determine everything that comes after.
Archduke Ferdinand. Image Credit: Associated Press
I'm not a historian, but I see a pattern here. Both of the last century's world wars had opening phases in which it wasn't really clear who was going to fight against whom. It took several months the after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand for everyone who was going to get involved in World War I to declare themselves. And it was six years after Hitler came to power in Germany before World War II started.
Right now, tens of thousands of people are dying every year. Many are brutally murdered at the hands of terrorist leaders whose territories will never make it into the United Nations. Others are slaughtered by dictators whose countries should not be allowed to remain U.N. members.
But we're still trying to figure out who the enemy is. Terrorists who kidnap hundreds of girls in Africa and set bombs in Boston? Dictators who wipe cities off their own maps, sending thousands over the borders to refugee camps? Rabidly corrupt governments who work hand in hand with drug cartels?
Or are we actually fighting über-wealthy shadow warriors, the 65,000 or so people on the planet whom the World Bank calls "Ultra High Net Worth Individuals," who enslave garment workers in Asia, claim that health care and pensions in this country kill jobs, and pollute the world's air and water in order to get even richer? Are they the enemy?
We shouldn't wonder about it too long. As St. Francis of Assisi wrote: "You have no enemy except yourselves." The choices my generation - the generation currently in power - makes now will decide whether our children will be our future. And the choices you make, O Gentle Readers Still In School, will decide whether your children will have much of a future at all.
If the average global temperature rises too much, the future could look like the struggle for survival humanity endured thousands of years ago. If a global pandemic starts in one of the countries the billionaires are currently plundering, and then spreads to the rest of us, there may be no future for humanity at all. If there is a nuclear holocaust - either due to war or to catastrophic plant failures - earth, air and water may grow so poisoned that life will eventually cease altogether.
What do all the above-mentioned potential cataclysms have in common? They would all be the result of self-serving technological developments, like the supercomputer HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey pictured at the top of this post.
HAL was supposed to guide a human mission to Jupiter. And in the beginning, it did just that - similarly to the way that fossil fuels made our lives easier and medical science wiped out some terrible diseases. But in the film, HAL's determination to save itself led it to kill almost everyone on board the spacecraft. And our own blindness to the future may lead us to destroy everything we have enjoyed as a society, or even as a species.
Today on National Public Radio, I heard an interview with a philosopher and expert on artificial intelligence named Nick Bostrom. Bostrom is head of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.
In the interview, Bostrom said something that really got me thinking - and moved me to write this open letter, instead of my usual post about developments in biblical archaeology. He said:
A design for the Austin, TX Waller Creek redevelopment
project. Image Credit: archinect.com
"If we can make it through the rest of this century intact, I think the future for Earth . . . could be very bright indeed."
It's up to us to make it through the rest of the 21st century intact. I probably won't live to see the next century, but you, Gentle Reader, very well might. And in the 22nd century, your children will either inherit a golden age in which technology helps us grow, learn and develop in freedom, or they will have to struggle to make it out of the Stone Age once more.
So please - let's end this war. Let's end war, period. Let's choose our enemies more wisely than our grandparents did.
In love and hope,
Bonnie
