You don’t have to die to become a penniless refugee. All it takes is for the earth to move sideways, back and forth, for a few seconds.
I wasn’t going to bring this up, because it’s too convenient and I was afraid of sounding ghoulish. But think of the people in Haiti who were among the few with a secure future, one bright afternoon, and who became “penniless refugees” in the space of a few minutes. You don’t even have to postulate anything outlandish.
You are wealthy and well-connected now, compared to the rest of the population, and more likely than not to still be wealthy and well-connected tomorrow; the risk of losing these advantages looms large because you feel like you would not be in control while frozen. The same perception takes over when you decide between flying and driving somewhere: it feels safer to drive, to many people.
Yes, there are possible futures where your life is miserable, and the likelihoods do not seem to depend significantly on the manner in which the future becomes the present—live or paused, as it were—or on the length of the pauses.
The likelihoods do strongly depend on what actions we undertake in the present to reduce what we might call “ambient risk”: reduce the more extreme inequalities, attend to things like pollution and biodiversity, improve life-enhancing technologies, foster a political climate maximally protective of individual rights, and so on, up to and including global existential risks and the possibility of a Singularity.
You don’t have to die to become a penniless refugee. All it takes is for the earth to move sideways, back and forth, for a few seconds.
I wasn’t going to bring this up, because it’s too convenient and I was afraid of sounding ghoulish. But think of the people in Haiti who were among the few with a secure future, one bright afternoon, and who became “penniless refugees” in the space of a few minutes. You don’t even have to postulate anything outlandish.
You are wealthy and well-connected now, compared to the rest of the population, and more likely than not to still be wealthy and well-connected tomorrow; the risk of losing these advantages looms large because you feel like you would not be in control while frozen. The same perception takes over when you decide between flying and driving somewhere: it feels safer to drive, to many people.
Yes, there are possible futures where your life is miserable, and the likelihoods do not seem to depend significantly on the manner in which the future becomes the present—live or paused, as it were—or on the length of the pauses.
The likelihoods do strongly depend on what actions we undertake in the present to reduce what we might call “ambient risk”: reduce the more extreme inequalities, attend to things like pollution and biodiversity, improve life-enhancing technologies, foster a political climate maximally protective of individual rights, and so on, up to and including global existential risks and the possibility of a Singularity.