I dare to hope for a post-hope world, where people are never treated
merely as means but always as ends, where no consciousness is sacrificed for
some greater religious aim, where no identity is harmed out of malice or
greed or negligence, where the ability to reason and act is held in the highest
regard by all, and where this is reflected not only in our hearts but also in our
social institutions and business models.
I dare to hope that people will stop suppressing either their Thinking
Brain or their Feeling Brain and marry the two in a holy matrimony of
emotional stability and psychological maturity; that people will become aware
of the pitfalls of their own desires, of the seduction of their comforts, of the
destruction behind their whims, and will instead seek out the discomfort that
will force them to grow.
I dare to hope that the fake freedom of variety will be rejected by people
in favor of the deeper, more meaningful freedom of commitment; that people
will opt in to self-limitation rather than the quixotic quest of self-indulgence;
that people will demand something better of themselves first before
demanding something better from the world.
That said, I dare to hope that one day the online advertising business
model will die in a fucking dumpster fire; that the news media will no longer
have incentives to optimize content for emotional impact but, rather, for
informational utility; that technology will seek not to exploit our
psychological fragility but, rather, to counterbalance it; that information will
be worth something again; that anything will be worth something again.
I dare to hope that search engines and social media algorithms will be
optimized for truth and social relevance rather than simply showing people
what they want to see; that there will be independent, third-party algorithms
that rate the veracity of headlines, websites, and news stories in real time,
allowing users to more quickly sift through the propaganda-laden garbage and
get closer to evidence-based truth; that there will be actual respect for
empirically tested data, because in an infinite sea of possible beliefs, evidence
is the only life preserver we’ve got.
I dare to hope that one day we will have AI that will listen to all the dumb
shit we write and say and will point out (just to us, maybe) our cognitive
biases, uninformed assumptions, and prejudices—like a little notification that
pops up on your phone letting you know that you just totally exaggerated the
unemployment rate when arguing with your uncle, or that you were talking
out of your ass the other night when you were doling out angry tweet after
angry tweet.
I dare to hope that there will be tools to help people understand statistics,