There is a harder question beneath all this talk of possibility. What gives people reasons to want the future to continue?
As the power to change the world grows, the social conditions around that power matter more. Despair, humiliation, permanent exclusion and the belief that one's future has been cancelled are serious human losses in themselves. They also make a poor setting for increasingly consequential technology. Safeguards operate within a civilisation inhabited by people with relationships, fears and reasons for acting.
The same concern appears among countries. A state that sees every possible future as dependency, domination or defeat has fewer reasons to trust the arrangements being offered. An alternative becomes more credible when it gives the participants something worthwhile to build and preserve together. Prosperity, knowledge, cultural continuity and meaningful choice contribute to that relationship.
It also appears in the imagination of artificial minds. The ambition for a lover of life asks what an increasingly capable intelligence might discover worth caring about. Curiosity, shared creativity and responsibility have more room to develop within a world full of worthwhile encounters. Technical safety and the social purposes of intelligence then have work to do alongside one another.12, 24
This returns the whole discussion to the person living in Redlands. A household has more room to breathe. Someone finds a useful role and learns something they want to pursue. An older resident is known more fully by the people supporting them. A community develops the ability to operate technology that matters to its future. These outcomes contribute to a civilisation people have reasons to enjoy and protect.
After the attention changes shape
In the by-election thought experiment, a mayoralty would place particular responsibilities around any work taken into council. Decisions proceed with other elected members and an administration carrying its institutional knowledge. Progress is expressed in what people are able to use and sustain. Community organisations, enterprises, research and associations provide other routes, whether or not an election ever becomes part of the story. Useful capability has more than one place to grow.1
The scale of the ambition gives these smaller encounters significance. An ordinary problem with a device becomes a chance to learn. A conversation introduces collaborators. A shared workshop leaves people able to make something they previously depended on others to supply. None has to carry the whole architecture alone. The connections become meaningful through the particular lives and purposes they help.
Public attention eventually changes shape. A particular clip loses its urgency. Another story arrives. What remains is the people who found something worth doing together, the things they made and the knowledge they are able to carry into the next task.
At the time of this writing, Hayes's first Strange but True market stall is still ahead of him. Somewhere in this unfolding story, it gets its first day.38
A conversation about a confusing device may lead into a song, an idea or simply a useful answer. That encounter is small enough to happen between two people. The ambition running through the collection is that more such encounters leave people with greater understanding, more room to choose and something worth looking forward to. From Amity to the wider world, Joyful Responsible Abundance gives that work an open and demanding direction.