Saturday 13 November 2021
Today's Disrupters, Better Tomorrows?
Three trends that most profoundly determine our tomorrows are Inequality, as fore-fronted by the Occupy movement, which, as Michael Levitin, in his book “Generation Occupy”, has described, continues its societal impacts long after its emergence, Artificial Intelligence, as described in Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan’s “AI 2041”, which is reaching into all human affairs, from personal to occupational life, and Migration, particularly for our TorontotheBetter focus here, human migrants. Together, however, these disturbing trends can and must, actually contribute to the possibility of a better world.
The necessary counterpoint to inequality's social plagues is a renewed
determination to remove it, so generating informal "communism", particularly, as ever in modern history among the young, though it may be without a single political formation as its agency.
As for AI, its potential is for the removal of work as drudgery, so realizing the aspiration for free life that
has motivated utopian science fiction as long as humans have dreamed beyond
their historical boundaries.
Thirdly, the consequence of Migration, the negatives of
its involuntary version now horrifically before us once again, is to reveal, albeit often destructively, that we are together with others in this space we call
human society. Global warming and the environmental movement have made the cliche of "we're all in this together" an unavoidable reality.
To synopsize the three trends, our limitations and separateness
in community, must and can, be surpassed in a societal communism that frees us
all, the original ideal of communism.
