How to Care About the Future

ByDan October 3, 2025October 9, 2025 October 9, 2025

What does it mean to “care” about something?

In order to care about the future, it’ll help us to open by discussing an event from the recent past.

How to Care for a Business

Situation – Eastman Kodak Company (1989): By the late 1980s, Kodak was number 18 on the Fortune 500 and had been the giant of photography for nearly 100 years. 

Looming Changes: They conducted research showing that digital cameras would likely overtake film photography, whether they liked it or not.

As the digital era approached, Kodak leadership basically had two options:

Option 1: Ignore or deny the looming changes

• Ask: How can we make SURE that film photography survives forever, and remains our biggest cash cow indefinitely?

Option 2: Take the changes in the world seriously

• Ask: What makes film photography special? What do we value about it that we want to survive, even if its form doesn’t stay the same?

On Politeness: It would have been so impolite to be the person in the Kodak boardroom asking to think about the future without film at all. So, the leaders collectively chose the polite failure of their business rather than the impolite hard discussions that would have been necessary to give themselves a chance to transform and embody a further form of what they once stood for.

(Note: For a vastly expanded exploration of business survival logic and its correlate to the survival of life itself, see the longer article on this topic: The Business of Value Itself.)

And as soon as they picked option 1, they sealed their fate. Within a single generation, film photography went from global domination to being far less than 1% of all photographs taken globally – a total victory for digital technology.

Philosophers like Epicurus or Lao Tzu (or Emerson) would say that in a long enough time horizon, all forms eventually fade away or transform, and in today’s fast-moving world of business and technology, most of us just sort of understand this intuitively.

In a changing world, stasis isn’t an option – unless you want to share Kodak’s fate, you have to embrace that transformation is necessary, and define and move towards a positive transformation.

If Kodak leadership had taken option 2 and asked “What do we value about it that we want to survive, even if its form doesn’t stay the same?”, they might have come up with some useful and inspired answers:

• Saving important memories
• Sharing beauty, humor, or other important human experiences
• Documenting facts
• Artistic expression

With any of these valued principles or ideas, Kodak could have conceived of a future beyond film where its most important values were carried forward, allowing Kodak to continue being useful in the world. Of course, their strategic direction might have been incorrect, but the most incorrect business decision was denying the necessity of change (a surefire path to destruction in a changing world).

In fairness to Kodak’s leadership, they had reason to defend film; they were vested in it. It was their entire business for a whole century, and thinking about change was very hard.

In addition, many of us smart modern people have benefitted from seeing more waves of creative destruction than the Kodak execs would have; we’ve seen the transition to the internet, to mobile, now towards AI.

To attempt to preserve the form of something is inferior to promoting the flourishing of that same something.

Most of us modern smart people just sort of know that:

“Caring” means preparing something for a necessary positive transformation

There are many contexts where we understand this intuitively:

• If you have a toddler, and the way you “care” for them is to encourage their continued toddler-dom, you’re not doing good for that child or for the world.
• If you have a business, and the way you “care” for that business is by maintaining exactly the same product suite and method of delivery, even when customer demands and supply chains and market forces shift, you’re not doing good for that business or for the world.

In the physical sciences, basically everything that is discovered is understood to be only a current best consensus, established and fortified explicitly for the purposes of being built upon or understood in a more profound and exacting way (like our transition from Newtonian physics to relativity, or our static model of the universe to the hypothesis of the Big Bang, etc).

Whenever humans don’t apply this definition of caring, it’s a kind of coping. It’s a kind of wilful denial of reality, and an attempt to escape into a static and familiar fantasy.

Kodak saw film as sacred and so didn’t want to change it – and we know how that turned out for them.

We could probably agree that if something sacred – or especially if something is sacred – we should care for it by taking seriously its necessary positive transformation.

And you’re probably considerering humanity to be sacred, right?

How to Care for Humanity

Situation – Humans (2025) – In 2025, humans are the very top of the food chain, the very pinnacle of volition and power among earth-life, and have been clearly dominant for ten thousand years.

Looming Changes: Many humans agree that many forces are pressing on us now that could easily bring about our destruction or transformation (see: Short Human Timelines) – whether we like it or not:

As a tremendous number of forces of change press on us, and as the AGI era approaches, humanity has two choices:

Option 1: Ignore or deny the looming changes

• Ask: How can we make SURE that humanity-as-it-is survives forever, and remains the very pinnacle of moral value and volition until the heat death of the universe?

Option 2: Take the changes in the world seriously

• Ask: What makes humanity and human civilization special? What do we value about it that we want to survive, even if its form doesn’t stay the same forever?

On Politeness: It is quite impolite to a human being who asks ardently about how value could be carried forward into the multiverse, even if humans are not the ones to carry it. So, humanity might collectively choose the polite sink into attenuation and destruction, rather than the impolite hard discussions that are necessary to give ourselves a chance at transforming and becoming something more.

Now the crossroad gets much more dire, and the consequences much larger than when we were merely talking about one photography business. It’s even bigger than our species. We’re talking about implications for the total light cone of sentient life into the future, and the continuation of all that we know to be valuable.

How to Care About the Future

We must face this choice squarely with the wisdom we already know:

“Caring” means preparing something for a necessary positive transformation

Clearly, option 1 would be coping, and would not be the kind of “care” that is warranted for something as sacred as humanity.

So what would option 2 (taking looming changes seriously) look like?

If we want to avoid Kodak’s fate, we can decide to do what Kodak’s leadership refused to do, namely:

1. We could look squarely at the state of things. What are the forces of destruction and transformation acting on our civilization and our hominid form, and how dire are their implications now? (
2. We could define what is valuable (i.e. define a Worthy Successor). What is valuable about humanity, biological life, and human civilization? They won’t survive in their present form (all permanence is false, permanence is a matter of degrees), but we can still determine what valuable qualities, traits, or powers we would like to see continue to expand and bloom into new, future forms on the constant waves of change.
3. We could chart a path to maintain what is valuable into the future. What kinds of innovation, standards, regulation, or coordination should we use to move us to a “positive transformation” future with more of what we want?

While it’s remarkably uncouth to openly discuss the transition to posthumanity (and to grapple with the inevitable attenuation of humanity), many leading thinkers have shared their ideas on this topic in the Worthy Successor interview series (see the full playlist on YouTube here).

Across my many Worthy Successor interviews with Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer, Richard Sutton, Michael Levin, and many others, there have been two qualities most commonly states as “must haves” for a desirable posthuman intelligence: (1) consciousness, and (2) autopoiesis (the capacity to continually expand potentia, as we have seen in nature from the “bubbling up” of new powers and form from single cells to humans beings). There may be other traits and qualities we could define, but these two are a great start, and discovering how to replicate and expand those important traits is one of our most important final imperatives.

I don’t expect we’ll have very much agreement on those three bullet points above.

But agreement isn’t what we should be aiming for.

If Kodak leadership could go back in time and find a way to give themselves a chance at transformation and survival, they wouldn’t have gone back in order to “agree.”

Remember, their failure (so common to those who try in vain to deny reality) was in being too polite, in not being willing to say the uncouth and hard things, to get the hard issues on the table to be hashed out, to build a positive pathway forward.

Agreement isn’t the point. The point is to (as we mentioned above) look squarely at the situation and trends, determine what is valuable, and determine how to move forward.

Ask yourself:

• Do parents completely agree about how to discipline their child? Is that process comfortable and serene every step of the way?
• Do Senators and members of Congress agree on matters of the economy, the military, or anything else? Is it all smiles and polite pleasantries in the halls of government?
• Do scientists working on hard problems naturally agree about what kind of research should be conducted next to achieve the breakthrough? Is there a constant ease and concord among scientists with different approaches or hypotheses?

The navigating of hard, consequential choices in response to hard realities is not comfortable or serene, and for this reason, people often settle for “stasis”, which is really settling for destruction and failure.

The purpose is not to generate “impoliteness,” the purpose is to get at the hard facts and make hard decisions, and if that involves bringing up uncouth topics, so be it. The greater good demands bypassing such stupid pleasantries; there’s work to be done.

“Caring” – when it takes the form of ensuring something’s positive transformation – will by its very nature sometimes be uncomfortable.

We’re mature enough to understand this in every other domain of life – and we must be mature enough to accept it in the domain of the trajectory of earth-life.

Given how precious this sentient life on earth is, and how amazing its powers and abilities as it has bloomed and climbed from worm to man… and as we face a present moment where we are charged with stewarding that flame of life forward… we absolutely cannot forget that:

“Caring” means preparing something for a necessary positive transformation