The same sorts of controlling people can be found in your local homeowner’s association – people who want to tell you what you can do and what you can’t. Fresco’s vision is just an updated commune. He’s a hippie that never grew up.

Kurzweil is bright and he’s got some interesting ideas, but his vision and life extension technologies wont happen either. Man is not designed to live for very long at this time. Humans, like plants and other parts of nature, follow cycles. You can try to force extend them but the DNA is supported by a field and if the data is not in the field, the DNA reverts. This is why cancer comes back for many people or why they attract the same illnesses again and again – because they haven’t altered those cells supportive fields.

People don’t think. You don’t think. I don’t think. No one in the world is capable of creating a thought by themselves.

A human can’t exist in a void. His entire life, mind and existence is a reflection of what is around him and which he has absorbed in his field. People just react to their environment. Their thoughts are reactions.

The more data your field possesses, the more complex the capacity for “thought”. It’s been awhile since I’ve rambled on here, so bear with me…because this is going to be long.

Each mind is a field. Each subject of data is a field. This can be math, history or golf. Human life is just a fancy fractal picture – a bunch of fields interacting, regenerating and spinning off infinity in an infinite number of new directons.

The sun rises? Just a field. The earth and everything in it? Just fields. All these fields.

Now look at nature. Mutation and growth occurs rapidly in the sunlight and slows down in the dark. Evolution occurs fast near the surface of a world where the energy transfer is highest. Fields evolve. Evolution isn’t really about genetics, genetics is just the mask it wears. Evolution occurs as the fields interact.

This post was triggered by yours. I would not have made it, without it. It is not a thought – it is a reaction. My field now gets to spew forth all sorts of data which I’ve picked up along the way and resides in my field. Some who read this will react positively and some negatively. All fields have certain biases and these are engaged ALL the time. Nothing is on perfect equilibrium in our lives. Everything is in a state of bias. So the sun coming up is either good or bad. Every event in our lives gets this bias – even reading posts at the Habitable Zone.

So what does this have to do with the future?

Well we have all these fields. All these fields are constantly cycling. They are pulsating and regenerating. Our lives are just reflections of data stored in our fields. The future of each person – just like their past – is recorded in these fields. If you stubbed your toe while riding a bicycle – that data and experience exists in your field as a bit of energy and it will have a bias. It is now part of that field and will reappear again in some manner. Plants evolve. Animals evolve and man’s personal experiences evolve as well. Evolution is the absorbing of new data and the combining of field data.

Everyone born in this solar system is interfaced with the solar field and our planetary field. Experiences they have had here while in these fields will have these field markers. As they evolve, events from their life will reappear. One day, month, and year becomes very much like the last. The circumstances of their life change somewhat, but if we look closely we see that every person has built upon these events that started before they were even out of the womb.

When they die? That’s already predetermined by their field as well. And that field will not cease to exist, because our souls are part of even larger fields! We are like the skin cells of our body. They follow their cycle, die and then fall away to be replaced by another. After we die, we get reborn and are drawn to the same fields. Earth or whatever planets we have had experience with will reappear for quite some time.

So the future for the humans living now is much like their past and present. A few centuries from now the Earth will still be very barbaric in many parts and the souls that incarnate there will be drawn unto it via these field interactions. They will evolve and some will graduate to other regions or even other worlds.

Human evolution is so very slow. Even now in this technocratic culture, people are acting like robots every single day. They don’t realize they don’t think and only react. They don’t have that data in their fields yet to come to those sort of realizations.

So expect more of the same for the next millennium. More wars. More violence. More exploitation. More insecurity. More carnal reactions.

And this is all swell and good. Evolution takes time, but it creates a stable rubric for future growth in that manner. Wildly accelerated things are unstable – because they contain so many elements not fortified and balanced by experience.

Some day every human alive on this world will at some point reach the realization that all these things are symbols. The body, eating, sex, work, families, the environment and even space and time – it’s all just symbolism. We are learning the most elemental behavior and appreciation for life and the universe around us. We interact with other beings and create a microcosm of the multiverse here on a tiny planet. All human experiences will someday be almost meaningless. The same way we view the spelling tests or math tests of our elementary school years.

We can’t imagine what comes next. Existing in a state where we are “everywhere” at once and seeking out and interfacing with data from fields that are new to us. Constantly becoming more expansive, more knowledgeable and coming into contact with many more souls than ever. Constantly seeking balance as we do so. Our earth friendships will seem miniscule to the trillion trillion souls we will interface with; some who are still learning of what they are and others who keep redefining “sentient” for us.

I write posts like this not for others, but for myself. Every time I “info dump” I attract the same sort of thing to happen to myself. Everyone who reads this post has to have some form of compatibility with it – likely because they “info dump” on others as well.

Like I said earlier, no man is an island. We exist and react to energy directed at us. So if we want to evolve, we need to interact with others and choose well whose fields and which environments we interface with.

For most of our history, humans lived the same lives their fathers and grandfathers before them, and they expected their children and granchildren would live the same way they did. Oh sure, they were aware of natural disasters, wars, of different kings and dynasties, and other events, but even if they might be aware that the Old Ones, the Anasazi, lived differently, evidence of that prior age was only preserved in myth and legend. No one actually remembered what it was like in the past. Renaisssance art depicts New Testament events and characters in contemporary dress and late medieval armor, and even today, our religious films portray Jesus’ disciples dressed like 19th century Arabs.

It hasn’t been until fairly recently that people have been aware that their grandparents wore different clothes, used different tools and techniques, perhaps even spoke a different dialect of their language than they did. 15th century Columbus would have been amazed by the complexity of a clipper ship from four centuries later, but he could have learned the rigging eventually. But nothing would have prepared him for a steamship.

A man born at the turn of the twentieth century knew his grandfather was aware of railroads, telegraphs and repeating rifles, but had never heard of internal combustion, aircraft, or electric lights. Women didn’t show their ankles until after the Great War, and their mothers scolded them. Today, a sabbatical or hiatus in your career can leave you incapable of catching up where you left off when you return to the workplace.

The pace of change increases, not just technological, but cultural as well. We have not yet reached a point where the culture simply cannot change any faster because people will no longer be able to keep up with it. But that event, (similar, but not quite the same as Kurzweil’s Singularity) will itself be a change with profound consequences. Even though people may be incapable of adapting any faster, our economy, technology and culture have become addicted to ever faster rates of change. Something has to give.

Even now, people are starting to say ¡No más!

The default for human societies since Ur has been enormous stratification, enforced by physical power, and under the absolute rule of a centralized authority. The exceptions have been few, far between, and compared to the great empires of history, short-lived.

People like to imagine living in a variety of brave new worlds. Nobody ever imagines they’d be anything other than an Alpha.

It would be fun to talk with these two guys, but I’d first have to find out what the Latin phrase was for “who programs the programmers.”

The only difference is that you don’t claim it would be utopia. And you’re right. The success of your political philosophy would be hell.

Still, I can say that what I know of Fresco’s future sounds more like a place I’d like to live. Or retire…that’s the thing about such designed and planned communities, they turn out to be Rossmoor. Still, what’s not to like about “a future without poverty, crime, war, corruption, or waste”?

That what that world won’t have, but I’m not clear on what it would have. I read about objections that Fresco perpetuates a divide between science on the one hand, and “the finer things in life”–art and culture–on the other. I would not want to live in world without culture, but who would? So I can shrug and call it unlikely that that kind of world could ever exist, because it seems so at odds with human life. If Fresco’s ideas are really that cold and “scientistic”, it’ll never happen in the real world. The human way is to harvest the good ideas from utopian ideas and chuck the rest.

Speaking of cold and scientistic, hey, what about that Singularity and the infinite resources and knowledge and all around godlike powers? That’s a heady brew, and I’m not sure I’d want to live in a world that so thoroughly indulged the classic adolescent power fantasy. Sure, I could handle it, it’s all you other jerks who’d spoil it for me Some great science fiction novels have been inspired by the idea, so for that I’m grateful.

The Singularity is supposed to happen to us as the inevitable convergence of all the trend lines on infinity or zero (whichever one makes the best utopia), all at once some time in the mid 21st. It’s sometimes portrayed as a quantum apotheosis, and I have to ask: Have Singularists never heard of the Uncertainty Principle? The fact that we’re talking about it guarantees it can’t happen.

Obvious: Investor hears all this Singularity talk, buys it, and decides to back a winner. He goes looking for tributary threads leading to Singularity, dumps money on somebody, and accelerates one line of development. It may come in too early, or another promising line of inquiry doesn’t get funded because of the conscious choice.

The best you can get under these circumstances is more of a keyhole than a geometric point, and certainly bigger than the eye of a needle. A singularity with a circular probability of error. Right….

So sure, the future will surprise us, and I think I prefer that too (be careful what you ask for, alacaray). The future may not be entirely under our control, but we can influence it, ER (and both visions swear they’ll ameliorate the gloomy future you foresee). But I don’t think that either Fresco or Kurzweil is advocating Soviet-style central planning, TB. That’s a hammer-and-nail thing, and, with all due respect, don’t quit your day job for a career as a futurist.

Thanks for bringing it up, Jeff. You’re right about the topic being in the spirit of the Zone, though I wouldn’t say there has ever been a consensus about the inevitability of a ‘better future through technology’. I can’t imagine that kind of intellectual lockstep at the one place where I know I can always get an argument on any subject under the sun.