Quantifying the Rate of Change

We live in an era that involves an extraordinary amount of change. To see this, consider the rate of global economic growth, which in recent decades averaged around 3 percent per year.51 This is historically unprecedented. For the first 290,000 years of humanity’s existence, global growth was close to 0 percent per year; in the agricultural era that increased to around 0.1 percent, and it accelerated from there after the Industrial Revolution. It’s only in the last hundred years that the ...

 Mental States in Gamer Mastery

Learning State While in the learning state of mind your objective should be to concentrate on learning and experimentation. You should play to win, and take matches seriously, but not be afraid to try different strategies for the purpose of learning. In this state you aim to maximize your learning, not your win-percentage. Feel free to think about your moves, what would have happened if you took another route, what you are going to try in the next matchup and so on. It is only beneficial to...

 Star Wars Nostalgia VS Star Trek Futurism

Also, Star Wars is set in a fantasy past that can look like anything, while Trek is supposed to be a projection of what we imagine our own future to look like. And Star Wars has always been an exercise in nostalgia from the start — nostalgia for ’30s movie serials and comic strips, for ’40s war movies, for ’50s hot rods and samurai movies, etc. It’s always, always been based on the past and set in the past. Star Trek looks to the future, and our idea of the future is always changing.

 The Volumetric Approach to History

You will be thinking that we are coming to the end of this book: we’ve dealt with eight centuries, so there are only two to go. You may be surprised to learn, therefore, that in historical terms we are not even halfway. The reason for this discrepancy is that history is not time, and time is not history. History is not the study of the past per se; it is about people in the past. Time, separated from humanity, is purely a matter for scientists and star-gazers. If a previously unknown uninha...

 Credit is Trust in the Future

We’ve already seen that money is an astounding thing because it can represent myriad di

 Can Identity Survive a 200-Year Lifespan?

Walter Glannon has argued that a lifespan of 200 years or more would be undesirable because personal identity could not be persevered over such a long life (Glannon 2002). Glannon’s argument presupposes that personal identity (understood here as a determinant of our prudential concerns) depends on psychological connectedness. On this view, we now have prudential interests in a future time segment of our organism only if that future time segment is psychologically connected to the organismâ€...

 Fortune of Conception

Moralists and theologians place great weight upon the moment of conception, seeing it as the instant at which the soul comes into existence. If, like me, you are unmoved by such talk, you still must regard a particular instant, nine months before your birth, as the most decisive event in your personal fortunes. It is the moment at which your consciousness suddenly became trillions of times more foreseeable than it was a split second before. To be sure, the embryonic you that came into existen...

 Relativity in Space Warfare

"Most of you are too young to remember the term future shock. Back in the seventies, some people felt that technological progress was so rapid that people, normal people, couldn't cope with it; that they wouldn't have time to get used to the present before the future was upon them. A man named Toffler coined the term future shock to describe this situation." The commodore could get pretty academic. "We're caught up in a physical situation that resembles this scholarly concept. The result has...