Tomorrow we’re off to the Singularity Summit. Since first learning about the Singularity, we’ve been talking about AI, alien life, nanotech, reality as a simulations and all sorts of interesting futuristic topics. In researching these topics, I’ve found that everyone seems to have their pet version of the future. At the Summit tomorrow, I’m sure we will be thoroughly convinced that AI will be most important issue facing humanity in the future. Now, I think futurism is a lot of fun and very useful in understanding our universe, but no matter how much we plan and speculate, we can never predict the future exactly.

Jorge Luis Borges has a great story about this called “The Secret Miracle”. The story is about a man who has been sentenced to death by firing squad. During the night before his execution, he realizes that the future never unfolds as you imagine it will. He spends the hours leading to his execution trying to imagine every possible way he would be killed in the morning, believing that if he can think of a scenario, that scenario will not occur. I won’t give away the ending, but it’s a very interesting concept.

Think about your own life. If you’re like me, you probably couldn’t have predicted your present situation two years ago, even two months ago. Really we can’t even predict the next day most of the time. So, if we were to assume that all of the wildly differing theories of futurism are wrong, what might we end up with?

Futurism is fun because there are always new surprises around the corner. Will we be destroyed by global warming or wayward nanotech? Will the second coming of Christ save us or a super intelligent AI? Probably none of the above. The future is so exciting, we can’t even imagine it.

Note: I wrote this post on Thursday. On Friday Eliezer Yudkowsky had this similar post at Overcoming Bias. Coincidence? Maybe I’ll ask Eliezer at the Summit today.