I've been trying to work on a big creative artwork alongside my Literature Review for my Thesis. It's still in it's infant stages and I'm not being very productive with it, but if I manage to complete it, it should reflect a lot of my philosophical views and fears for the future of humanity. I'm trying to create an interactive short story which I will narrate and post publicly via YouTube. This short story, if I do it right, should be about the difficulties humanity will face if technology succeeds in empowering humanity to pursue it's own values. Let me explain:
I don't think there is any objective set of values that humanity should follow. I think ideals like emancipation, equality, lack of hunger, freedom of speech etc are invented values that ultimately stem from biological impulses we've evolved with. Coming up with systems and tools to accomplish these values are great at first, but by following our gut too far, we risk doing more harm than good. I think this is most easily seen when it comes to food in the 21st century. Our desire to minimize hunger has resulted in the mass production of highly addictive sugar which has resulted in obesity and health problems. Clearly empowering humanity with the technology to minimize hunger has backfired to some degree, not due to technological faults, but because our values weren't fully refined.
Now imagine a 'happy ending' to a science fiction novel where each individual human has been empowered by technology to pursue whatever goals they like. I would argue that this will still be a dystopia because humanity will inevitably trap itself chasing a poorly refined goal. If you give a teenage boy unlimited time and resources to pursue his own goals, he could simply just spiral into an addiction of video games.
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