(contest) How should humanity steer the future?

[Michael Allan]

Deadline: April 18, 2014
http://www.fqxi.org/community/essay

Dystopic visions of the future are common in literature and film,
while optimistic ones are more rare. This contest encourages us to
avoid potentially self-fulfilling prophecies of gloom and doom and to
think hard about how to make the world better while avoiding potential
catastrophes.

Our ever-deepening understanding of physics has enabled technologies
and ways of thinking about our place in the world that have
dramatically transformed humanity over the past several hundred
years. Many of these changes have been difficult to predict or
control — but not all.

In this contest we ask how humanity should attempt to steer its own
course in light of the radically different modes of thought and
fundamentally new technologies that are becoming relevant in the
coming decades.

Possible topics or sub-questions include, but are not limited to:

   * What is the best state that humanity can realistically achieve?

   * What is your plan for getting us there? Who implements this plan?

   * What technology (construed broadly to include practices and
     techniques) does your plan rely on?  What are the risks of those
     technologies?  How can those risks be mitigated?

(Note: While this topic is broad, successful essays will not use this
breadth as an excuse to shoehorn in the author's pet topic, but will
rather keep as their central focus the theme of how humanity should
steer the future.)

Additionally, to be consonant with FQXi's scope and goals, essays
should be sure to touch on issues in physics and cosmology, or closed
related fields, such as astrophysics, biophysics, mathematics,
complexity and emergence, and the philosophy of physics.