Bryan Johnson argues we're at a unique moment in history and need to become "future literate," adopting a long-term perspective beyond immediate goals. Current systems keep us short-sighted about transformative possibilities by 2500 and beyond. Failing to act now, he says, will look like a missed turning point to future intelligent beings.
It seems to me that we have an opportunity that no generation of intelligent life has ever had. We can aspire to a future of existence that exceeds our imagination by orders of magnitude that we just can't comprehend. And there's this opportunity for us to wake up, to be sober in our thought and to realize that the systems of the world today, the motivations and the goals we're told to have, the social norms have us staring immediately in front of our face and not at this longer time horizon. And that it would just be a tragedy if we didn't recognize the specialness of our opportunity for each of us to do what we can. If there's intelligent life still around in the year 2500, they have some document of history that they would look back at this time in the early 21st century and say they got it, they figured it out. They saw the point on the horizon. They got themselves along that path. They were able to bridge into this new possibility.
