OFC Meeting 13

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12 March 2019:

"Free-for-All" Discussion of future Futures Topics

(Evidently there were no meetings in Jan or Feb 2019.)

Feel free to add your thoughts here!

Two items that may be of some interest:

1. The future of Music and
2. The future of Big Pharma and the role of medical ethics and the Law.

In addition, in our efforts to get much younger people to attend our meetings, we might want to visit the local high school (Kwalikum) to see if it has a student debate group and if so whether some of its members might like to join us on the second Tuesday of each month! If I am able to make it tomorrow I will try and elaborate a little more on these items. -- Keith

You might want to revisit our previous "free-for-all" or the one before that to harvest some ideas.

AGENDA ITEMS

• Guest Speakers: Anne Toby, CEO of the ElderCollege, has expressed an interest in coming to some of our meetings, and possibly in giving us a talk on her specialty, Human Genetics. (Can humans modify themselves enough, or in time, to "cure" their tendency to destroy everything around them?)
• Feel free to add an Agenda item here!
• Philip: continue discussion from last meeting: Optimism and pessimism about the future.

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Philip's notes from the meeting Mar 12, 2019

Attendees: Keith, Anne, Lin, Jed, Jess, Philip, Hank and Jane

I started by asking about Jed’s views of our (Boomer) generation. He said that his generation (Millennials) were caught in an economic crunch, especially with regard to housing. He said there is even some guilt about wanting more.

Vancouver has become a city of autocrats -- long time residents sitting on multi-million dollar properties, wealthy older people and people in their twenties with inherited wealth. One millennial is trying to establish a tech community on Gambier Island NW of Vancouver, offering cheap land for people wanting to establish small tech businesses or work remotely. Steven Pinker has shown that by many measures, such as the numbers of people in extreme poverty, things have improved over recent decades but the housing crunch in the cities in the developed world where the good jobs are plentiful is not one of them. Governments seem to working at cross purposes, working to rapidly increase the population while not ensuring enough housing is built.

Keith made interesting first hand observations on the rationing in Britain in the 1940’s. Both gasoline and meat, amongst other things, were strictly rationed. Jess observed that meat was used sparingly in Japan -- more like a garnish. Keith said we could go back to rationing to tackle climate change. In this way and others we should go to a “war footing" to drastically reduce our production of greenhouse gases.

Anne mentioned genetic manipulation and CRISPR and how exciting the new field of epigenetics is. The latter explains how some diseases start when an environmental factor such as a chemical turns on undesirable genes. Jess and I posed the question of the philosophical difference between eugenics and genetic manipulation.

Jess suggested we discuss the future of farming next time. Will the still growing population of humans continue to get enough food given that soil degradation, climate change and excessive monoculture all work to decrease production and resilience?

Anne closed by observing that the world is going to be unrecognizable in 50 years.

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Comment by Jess: I suggest reading "The Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi to get a glimpse of one plausible future. I'm a little swamped lately with various commitments "coming due" simultaneously, so I may not be able to provide much carefully researched data on farming practices; but I have lots of "soft data" to relate -- as do we all! Let's just do another "free-for-all" with Farming as a starting point, and see if we want to revisit that topic in more depth later.