Author's Note: A Tale of Two Futures

First in my Author's Note series, this week I will be discussing how our technological, economic, and social decisions all work together and how we can get to a better future.

I believe we’re all, by now, familiar with that one scene in the Matrix where Neo must decide to take the red pill or the blue pill. A common interpretation is that one of these pills will allow Neo to see the world as it really is, while the other will allow Neo to continue living a comfortable, albeit artificial, life while being used as a battery to power intelligent machines, bent on destroying what remains of thinking, feeling humanity. In writing, this is a very explicit plot device called the inciting incident. An incident, a.k.a. being pursued by AI agents, has brought Neo to a crossroads, and it very much must be his decision which direction to take. While we on the sidelines may be cheering him on to take one pill or the other, let me tell you a secret: it doesn’t matter which pill he takes. Had it been the blue pill, and important to the plot that Neo woke up, he would still have woken up…somehow. That’s the author's magic: the decisions the characters make are often illusory, whereas in the real world, we must make real choices that have real impacts on our lives.

This is the first installment of my Author’s Note series, where I discuss a future that we can get to, and the changes I believe we need to make to get there. This one is more general, but I’ll be getting into specifics in upcoming posts. Paid subscribers get this series first, but as usual for everything we post here, these posts will all open to everyone within a week, so you don’t have to be a paid subscriber (though it’d be helpful for us if you decide to become one!).