All Possible Futures: Unruly Human Futures 2025 Recap
Slop v good quests, the trend that ends all trends, and some readings.
Leibniz’s doctrine of striving possibilities held that Omne possibile exigit existere - everything that is possible demands to exist. Within a theology where God defined the logic of these possibilities, they would unfold through History until we eventually and necessarily arrived to the best of all possible worlds. But in a version of history where this summum bonum, this God, is not as transparent, the question of which possibilities should be pursued becomes cloudy. And what awaits us at the end of History is no longer obvious.
Which one to build among all possible futures - we have all seen one version of this question in the Daniel v Marc Andreessen contest over a Pope’s tweet. Kyle Harrison wrote a wonderful piece on this latest battle in the war of slop against good quests.
Our inaugural Human Futures Summit, held in London on October 21st, was built on the premise that by asking the right questions, we can get to better answers. So we started from maybe the most important question of all - how can technology change our concept of humanity over the next century? All the possible futures, be those slop or good quests, lie in the answers to that. You can see some of the builders, thinkers and researchers who joined us to share their perspective, in the link below.
A glimpse of what we’ve been discussing.
All the talks from the Unruly Human Futures Summit are now available!
The trend that ends all trends
One framework we’ve been using to think about slop v good quests, and what tech stack we need as a civilisation to thrive, is around depopulation. We’ve written about it extensively in our new thesis. The tl;dr is that, at the current fertility rates, humans are going extinct.
Fred Wilson objected that humanity has “many self-correcting mechanisms”. It is true that we managed to dig ourself out of a bunch of quite deep holes in the past. And hopefully we’ll figure out this one too. But unless you agree with Leibniz that some inherent divine law will naturally yield the best possible world, the real self-correcting mechanism is that every once in a while we panic, get our act together, pick ourselves up, and figure out how to make this civilisation thing work once again. History is the sum of our collective efforts, more than a salvation mechanism.
So if preserving civilisation is a good quest (unfortunately still a non-obvious assumption for some), the question becomes what technologies we need to build to go through this current age relatively unharmed. Broadly speaking, the answers are in the space between complete automation, biotechnological singularity, and new governance infrastructure.
In any case, what we point out is just the slope of the curve and the built-in lag, which will undoubtedly completely transform the world in our lifetimes regardless of what we’re able to do about fertility rates.
But we’ll let you read the thesis and tell us what we’re missing.
Some more important pieces to read:
Two is already too many by Phoebe Arslanagic-Little in WorksInProgress. It helps everyone frame the scale and slope of the problem: “every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them.”
Shifting Demographics by Max Bray
On Energy:
Energy Prediction 2025, by Casey Handmer
What to do if energy gets cheap, by Mackenzie Morehead of Compound
The next frontier of electrification, by the Obvious Ventures team
Five readings for some possible futures
State of Brain Emulation Report 2025, by Niccolò Zanichelli, Maximilian Schons and others. It’s a great work to get a sense of the SOTA and where the field is going. One of the contributors, our Christian Larsen (Netholabs), gave a talk discussing the whys of whole brain emulation, and what it means for a humanity that for the first time will face a superior intelligence, with access to ~unlimited compute power. Both to be enjoyed alongside this keynote by Masataka Watanabe.
The Electric Slide, by Packy McCormick and Sam D’Amico. Not really hot off the press but a piece we’ve thought about a lot, while we were working on our concept of transition from a labour-bound to an energy-bound world. The article also has its own version of Leibniz (“anything that can go electric will”). To be read with From Petrostates to Electrostates.
Why Culture May Be Our Most Powerful Lever for Progress, by Beatrice Erkers. On why we need hyper-entities, memes, and great cultural products to build better. We read this while we were organising Jason Carman’s London premiere of Planet, and really enjoyed it. And for another take on culture and growth, see 2025 Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr’s work below.
Can the West avoid Fiscal Armageddon?, by Nicolas Colin. We’ve seen the French government falling over spending cuts, the British one scrambling for fiscal offsets, and Merz of Germany declaring that “The welfare state as we know it today is no longer economically sustainable”. How we deal with this now will determine the lives of the next few generations.
How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America, by Michael W. Green. How are benchmarks established for us? And are we expected to view our lives through those benchmarks’ lenses? An incredible piece on how we define the poverty line, what is middle class, and the optical illusion of prosperity.
And some books we enjoyed recently
Post-Europe, by Yuk Hui
The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia, by James Holston
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, by William Dalrymple
The City and Man, by Leo Strauss
A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, by Joel Mokyr
Machine Decision is not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence, by Benjamin Bratton, Bogna Konior, Anna Greenspan, Amy Ireland (Editors)
The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin
Farewell to Westphalia: Crypto Sovereignty and Post-Nation-State Governance, by Jarrad Hope and Peter Ludlow
The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism, by John Gray
The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, by R.D. Laing
The Big Print: What Happened To America And How Sound Money Will Fix It, by Lawrence Lepard