What do we *really* need to be educated in, to handle the next few wild decades? David Wood and his “Vital Syllabus” lays it out
David Wood’s futurist initiatives have always brought us insight and excitement at The Alternative Global, particularly as he is crucially concerned with the human motivations, emotions and values that drive the adoption and pursuit of radical technologies (indeed hoping they can become transhuman - a more evolved, networked version of human agency and vision).
David is also a fine communicator of his prospectus - and he’s now aiming to become an educator in it, too.
What he calls The Vital Syllabus asks: “In our age of multiple pressures, dizzying opportunities, daunting risks, and accelerating disruption, what are the most important skills and principles to cherish and uphold?” The VS aims to provide those. Below is a graphic of the Vital Syllabus’s priorities, both aspirational and cautionary:
We’re going to reproduce the outlines of the Vital Syllabus below, under a Creative Commons license. It’s a collaborative work in progress - if you’re interested in helping out contact David here. But we recommend you take the striking with the familiar, and do research on terms you don’t recognise.
1: Learning how to learn
How to pick up new skills quickly and reliably:
The strengths and weaknesses of various online search tools
Finding online courses that are best suited to individual needs
Finding learning communities that can improve understanding
Skills in evaluating the reliability of sources and communities
The risks of overestimation of self-expertise
Active learning
Learning via playfulness and retrospectives
How to consolidate new learning
How to set aside previous learning that no longer pertains
Knowing oneself better in order to learn in the best way
2: Communications
Communications with a variety of different kinds of audiences:
Speaking well
Writing well
The importance of narrative as well as facts
Graphic and video design
Immersive communications
Understanding audience needs
Building empathy
Better listening for better communications
Converting negative critics and trolls into constructive partners
Pros and cons of different communications environments
3: Agility
Dividing up tasks into a series of short sprints
Obtaining useful feedback at the end of each sprint
Updating plans based on new information obtained
Combining a series of short sprints into lasting positive change
When Agile goes wrong
4: Creativity
Going beyond existing methods and solutions:
Methods for generating innovative new ideas
Methods of evaluating innovative new ideas
Methods for transforming new ideas into actual solutions
Methods to decide between innovation and the status-quo
Design and creativity
5: Augmentation
Technology and tools to boost abilities:
Traditional methods to boost memory, concentration, etc
Uses of personal, wearable, and embedded technologies
Biofeedback mechanisms
Roles for brain-computer interfaces
Tools that can act like a “personal guardian angel”
Tools and techniques to strengthen critical thinking
Tools and techniques to boost creativity
Tools and techniques to boost resilience
Tools and techniques to widen or deepen perspective
The impact of various “consciousness raising” practices
6: Collaboration
Becoming wiser and stronger together:
Addressing individual blind-spots by collective analysis
Designing teams to promote synergies rather than cancellation
Forms of play and other team activities that boost mutual learning
Strengths and weaknesses of wikis and other open systems
Obstacles to collaboration
7: Emotional health
Mindfulness
Playfulness and recreation
The benefits of a growth mindset
The strengths and weaknesses of positive thinking
Not being slaves to inner anxieties and other “demons”
Handling fear of failure
Dealing with underperformance in oneself and others
Failing forward and failing fast (associated with Agility)
Social skills and perceptiveness
Understanding, supporting, and valuing diversity
Distinguishing eustress (“good stress”) from harmful distress
Links between emotional health and social circumstances
Links between emotional health and physical health
8: Physical health
Factors impacting physical health:
Augmenting the body
Accelerating personalised medicine
Opportunities for all-round “better than well” health
New options for fertility and pregnancy
Opportunities for lives in a state of permanent youthful vitality
Anticipating the Longevity Escape Velocity
Anticipating social changes due to greatly extended healthspans
9: Foresight
When forecasts were mistaken
Forecasters and superforecasters
The purpose of scenarios
Identifying trends that have the potential to cause disruption
The factors behind potential exponential change
Identifying potential accelerators – and brakes – for trends
Establishing “canary signals” for advance warning of tipping points
How trends can combine to form breakthrough scenarios
Examples of interconnections producing unforeseen scenarios
Using imagination to anticipate novel scenarios
Methods to evaluate the credibility of imagined scenarios
Methods to evaluate the desirability of imagined scenarios
Methods to assess actions to influence the actual course of scenarios
Precautionary and proactionary approaches to risk and opportunity
10: Leading change
Inspiring and maintaining transformations:
Why major change initiatives often fail
Positive methods to manage major change initiatives
Cultivating a sense of urgency instead of complacency or resignation
Building and managing a coalition to guide vital change
Identifying and addressing misaligned incentives
Moonshots and moonshot worship
Crossing the chasm
11: Technologies
In history, the present, and the future:
The structure of industrial revolutions
Technologies and overhang
Energy systems
Food, clothing, shelter, and beyond
Nanotech
Biotech
Infotech
Cognotech
Virtual and Augmented Reality
Robotics
Quantum tech
Space tech
Social tech
12: Economics
In history, the present, and the future:
The positive accomplishments of free markets
The failure modes of free markets
The tragedy of the commons
The mixed model
The role of business
The roles of money and banking
Cryptocurrencies
Tokenomics
Protecting property
Crime and punishment
The circular economy
13: Governance
In history, the present, and the future:
Regulating technologies
Incentivising technologies
Evidence-based policy vs. ideology-based policy
Socialism and its issues
Egalitarianism and its issues
Meritocracy and its issues
Minimal governance
Lean governance
Self-regulating technologies
Trustable monitoring
The narrow corridor
Redistribution
Social safety nets and social contracts
UBI and FALC
Centralisation vs. decentralisation
Industrial strategy
14: Democracy
In history, the present, and the future:
Technocracy and democracy
The separation of powers
Proactive vigilance
Failure modes of democracy
Deliberative democracy
Enhancing democracy with AI
The role of career politicians
Beyond party politics
Toward superdemocracy
15: Geopolitics
Influencing political processes, nationally and internationally:
Sovereignty and interdependence
The international separation of powers
Nuclear deterrence
Alliances and partnerships
Self-governing virtual states
Seasteading
Rejuvenating the Bretton Woods institutions
16: Numeracy
Arithmetic and analysis for the modern age:
Exponentials
Probabilities
Lies, damned lies, and statistics
Estimating harm vs. ruin
Complexity
Numeracy for privacy and security
Game theory
17: Science
Distinguishing “good science” from “bad science”:
When scientists were mistaken
Normal science and revolutionary science
Debates over scientific methods
Science and human nature
Cognitive biases
Social pressures on science
Science and consciousness
Science and parascience (parapsychology)
Potential limits of science
18: Philosophy
When philosophers were mistaken
Practical examples of the impact of philosophical decisions
The potential large impact of transcendent thinking
Awareness of philosophical biases and fallacies
Implications of modern science and tech for traditional worldviews
Strengths and weaknesses of religions
Strengths and weaknesses of humanism
Theories of good and evil
Virtue signalling
Evaluating unborn generations
Theories of mind
Free will
Approaches to determine ultimate priorities
Evolving a framework for ethics fit for the 2020s
19: Transhumanism
A philosophy particularly suited to the 2020s:
Components of transhumanism
Varieties of transhumanism
The values of active transhumanism
The transhumanist shadow
Criticisms of transhumanism
Transhumanist culture
Anticipating the growth of transhumanism
20: Culture
The basis for extended flourishing:
Societies with increasingly diverse subcultures
Limits to tolerant coexistence
Coexistence with AIs and robots
Coexistence with animals with uplifted capabilities
Options for the future of work
21: The environment
The context in which humanity exists:
Our cosmic context
Environmental independence and interdependence
Planetary boundaries
The co-evolution of life and mind
Options for re-wilding
Options for de-extinction
Options for paradise engineering
Options for exploring the wider universe
Alien life and the Fermi paradox
22: Landmines
Identifying and addressing the biggest risks ahead:
The left behinds
WMD proliferation
Biotech hazards
Infotech hazards
Financial instabilities
Environmental instabilities
Political instabilities
Cancers within society
Reason under threat
Divided nations
Divided aging
Bubbling under
Existential opportunities
23: The Singularity
Options for the advent of artificial superintelligence:
The singularitarian stance
The singularity shadow
Different routes to ASI
Hard and soft take-off
Possible timescales to reach ASI
The control problem
The alignment problem
Human-ASI merger
No Planet B
The singularity principles
AGI or not AGI: fundamental choices
24: Ultimate Futures
Picotech and femtotech
Ultimate physics: births and deaths of universes
Beyond human death: cryonics and reanimation
Space-time engineering and technological resurrection
The transcension hypothesis
The simulation hypothesis
Parallel multiverse branches: communication beyond base reality