The Future We Care For

I want my children to have a future they can look forward to. A future worth inheriting needs room for discovery and adventure. It also needs people who can depend on one another, obtain help when they need it, and have a meaningful say in the decisions shaping their lives.

This book grew from my curiosity about how far humanity might travel and my concern about whom we might leave behind. I am fascinated by better medicine, longer lives, and machines that help us understand difficult problems. I want to explore those possibilities while keeping the people whose needs are already urgent in view.

During my years in Thailand and through my work connected with Myanmar, I encountered questions that could not be settled by pointing to what humanity had achieved somewhere else. Knowledge might exist, yet remain out of reach. Someone might know what needed doing and still lack the equipment, training, money, or authority to do it. The distance between a possible treatment and an available treatment could become the distance that mattered most.

The people working within those limits taught me to pay attention to care as something sustained over time. A visitor can arrive for a few days and leave with a story. Others remain to do the work. As I write about my own recollections, I try to remember how much of their experience lies beyond the part I witnessed.

Before asking what we might do with the energy of a star, I want to ask what we do with the knowledge and resources already available to us. Both questions invite us to consider the lives affected by our use of power.

There are no reliable memories of the future. Some of the scenes in these pages are deliberately imagined, offered as ways of exploring a possibility or testing an assumption. I have tried to distinguish those scenes from personal recollection and from research. Where the evidence is limited, the uncertainty belongs in the account. Wonder becomes more interesting when it can survive an honest question.

I hope readers with different convictions will feel welcome here. My own interest in compassion has been shaped by faith and experience, but the practical questions reach across those differences. How can a discovery become help that someone can actually receive? Who gets to decide what happens next? How do we protect the freedom of the people we hope to help? We can disagree about ultimate explanations and still take these questions seriously together.

You do not need a background in astronomy, medicine, or artificial intelligence to join this conversation. I hope the book encourages you to question its arguments as well as consider them.

We can become more thoughtful about the powers we are developing and more attentive to the people who will live with their consequences. We can listen when someone tells us that our good intentions have missed what they need.

I would like our children, and people we will never meet, to inherit more possibilities than we did. I would also like them to inherit a world in which those possibilities are shared more generously. That hope is the reason for this book.

Stuart Corlett