Kevin Kelly: recommendation

Transcript context

…How would society most change if we simply could double or triple our amount of long-term thinking? I am involved with this group called the Long Now Foundation, where we’re trying to promote long-term thinking. I think the way it would change is that there would be a couple of things. One is I think we would collectively, maybe mostly through government, have more long-term research involved, and the benefits of that would be spilling over to everything. Most science experiments today last as long as a PhD, which is like four years, and there’s very little really long-range research being done. Then, secondly, there’s very little projects that might take 25 years or more to do, whether infrastructural or otherwise, and more of those — garnered by the number of people who understand that there’s a benefit to having payoffs come not just for the current generation but future generations — would allow longer-term, maybe even bigger projects to become more normal and conventional than they are right now. Then, thirdly, I think thinking in terms of generations rather than just the immediate next quarter or next year — I think that also would enable us to manage the planet in a better way, because lots of the planetary things that we’re interested in and paying attention to have a longer-range dynamic than just the immediate year or two: the “short now,” we call it. For individuals, I think that that’s not maybe necessarily going to change their own lives, but I think it changes our lives at the civilizational level. Of all the people you have known, who is it that has handled power the best?…

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