Four Ways to Die in the Future: Memento Mori in Space
Extracurriculars
As I brought up in Intro Week 7, scanning is a key practice for futurists. There’s an irreducible creative element to spotting things that are interesting and relevant when they might seem like noise to most people. Necessarily, weak signals of change are novel, surprising, and challenging, so they’re often found on the fringes of society, and, as Dator’s 2nd law suggests, they will tend to appear ridiculous at first.
In this vein, I will sometimes browse through the indie section of comic book or board game stores looking for “weird” content that fits the criteria above1. I’m not very good at this: it’s rare to find something promising, and most of these don’t pan out. However, I did find and walk to talk a little about an indie role-playing game (RPG) collection by P H Lee with Aura Belle called Four Ways to Die in the Future; as advertised, it’s a collection of four small games that act as meditations on themes of death and the future. As an indie production financed via Kickstarter, it’s able to present provocative ideas that may not have made it through the filter of a publisher.
In the first game, Amidst Endless Quiet, you play as the AI controlling a doomed spaceship in interstellar space that has a limited amount of time to decide which one (if any) of its cryogenically frozen passengers to save. This connects clearly to conversations around AI alignment and ethical programming, especially in self-driving cars. As you play, questions naturally arise about what makes some lives more worth saving than others - is it something intrinsic to the individual, related to their value to society, or do your own opinions or relationships matter as the one making the decision? I also think about the discussion around climate change and what we owe future, even unborn generations2. Knowing that our decisions as a society will save some at the expense of others adds gravity to the work of designing preferred futures.
The second game, Island in a Sea of Solitude, is a two-player game about having a final 30 minutes to communicate with an artificial facsimile of a deceased loved one. The games were developed between 2013 and 2019, and this technology now exists3 (though it hasn’t been widely commercialized), and suffers many of the same issues, such as glitchy memories and limited time before the experience degrades. The practice of writing to the dead to help address needs in this life is at least 4,000 years old; what does it mean to add simulated responses and create a conversational loop? Will this facilitate the healing work of grief or arrest it? I expect this will be an area of active research over the next decade or two.
Game three, Alone on Silver Wings, is a one-player game that’s really more of a meditative practice. You carry around a small notebook, and when you have a strong emotion, reaction, urge, etc, you’re invited to reflect (and write) about how your actions will be remembered and felt in coming years, their effect on the future of humanity, on the future beyond humanity, and as we approach the heat death of the universe. This practice of contemplating human insignificance, our infinitesimal existence given the scope of the universe in both space and time, has many ancient echoes, from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible to the stoic practice of Memento Mori4 to Buddhist Maranasati; the trick is how to maintain this perspective without getting sucked into the Everything Bagel of nihilism - in my view this requires a balancing conviction/practice of “significance”, which the game doesn’t explicitly provide. Disappointingly, my biggest takeaway from playing this game was that I experience intense emotions less frequently than I would have guessed.
The final game, The Tragedy of GJ 237b, is the first zero-player game I’ve ever played5. It’s essentially a piece of performance art exploring one of the issues raised in Erika Nesvold’s Off-Earth: when we settle on other planets, what is our duty to protect whatever life may already be there? How much does the answer change if the life is intelligent? If the biological details on a planet mean the difference between benign settlement and xenocide, how careful can/should we be? If we make a mistake anyway, what should we do and how should we feel about it? The game makes no attempt to answer these questions; not surprisingly, it strikes a somber tone.
These four games occupy an interesting niche. I don’t think it would be appropriate to characterize them as “fun”; I doubt this was even intended. They help to stretch the brain, but they aren’t appropriate as group exercises due to their intimate nature. The nearest analogous experience is reading a sad novel6; I feel slightly more fully human for having experienced them.
The theme that ties together all four games is the impermanence and fragility of our mortal existence. This stands in opposition to the scenario archetype Jim Dator describes as Continuation, or the “official future”, where most everything continues along its current trajectory7, representing something between a mechanistic assumption about reality and naive extrapolation of local linearity. All living systems appear to go through cycles of birth, development, and death. The interactions between components of our society are messy and complex and they create emergent surprises8. Whether due to the natural obsolescence of ideas (per Molitor) or a wildcard event, expect the future to be missing things we can’t imagine living without, and full of things that seem ridiculous today.
Rarely, I will ask the employees if they have anything with “new ideas”, but I still haven’t found a way to ask this question that results in something better than a blank stare.
This is adjacent both to the idea of “being a good ancestor” and Greta Thunberg’s “you are stealing our future” charge.
If you haven’t yet read the linked article from the San Francisco Chronicle, take the time to do so. It’s an absolute gem of a piece where you can feel the pull of the future in a tactile, unsettling way.
Which, as far as I understand, people practiced even before they could buy special coins from Ryan Holiday.
Not played?
If this is your vibe and you’re looking for a recommendation, try The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra.
Cars keep getting shiner and curvier, phones keep getting smaller, etc.
For example, the way that the decreasing cost of compute makes brute-force stochastic AI possible, and reveals that tasks from coding to drawing can be thought of as prediction problems.