99 Unanswerable Questions and the Unintended Consequences of the Future We’re Creating
How do you handle questions that you can’t answer?
If, in the future, you found yourself on a jury, and you were tasked with determining the fate of a heinous criminal (think Ted Bundy), and you had the option to either sentence him to lethal injection or total amnesia, which would you decide?
With total amnesia the brain is totally wiped clean and the person would have to learn how to walk, talk, and feed himself or herself all over again.
The reason this is such a challenging question is because it gets at the heart of what we value in human life. Do we place more value on the life itself or the personality that exemplifies it?
Personally, I find questions like this to be hugely valuable because they force us to rethink the way we make decisions and what our choices today will mean for the future.
So ask yourself, “how do you handle a question that you can’t answer?”
We all approach tough questions differently, with some of us searching Google, others turning to a smarter friend, others turning to algorithmic tools, and still others using some sort of formula to list everything we know in hopes of discovering unique insights about ourselves.
But in many situations, we simply run into questions where no answer exists. These are what we call unanswerable questions, and there are tons of them.
We’ve all heard questions like, “What happens when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force?” or “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Yet, today’s technology is leading us into unchartered territory and the number of unanswerable questions is exploding around us.
Over the past century, we have made some astonishing leaps forward in science and technology. While this has given us the answers to questions our ancestors would never have believed we’d figure out, we still have many overarching questions that need to be worked on.
For this reason, I’ve spent the past few days jotting down some of the truly perplexing questions, most of which we may never be able to answer.
From the Beginning of Time
- Why does anything exist? In the beginning there was nothing. How did something come from nothing?
- How was the universe formed?
- Why was it created, and why like this?
- What existed before the universe?
- Was there ever a time when nothing existed or has something always been in existence?
- Are we alone in the universe?
The Concept of Time
- At what point did time begin?
- Did time exist before the universe was created, or did that come later?
- Does time only flow forward or are there exceptions?
- Will we ever be able to travel through time?
The technologies we create today will shape the world as never before!
Rethinking Physics
- A thousand years from now, which things will be possible and which ones will not?
- How big is the universe and is ours the only one?
- What effect will too much screen time have on us as a society 50 years in the future?
- Where does matter come from?
- What exactly is gravity?
- Why should we expect a universe full of chaos and randomness to be fair?
- Is karma real or just a human construct?
Understanding the Earth
- Is the Earth alive, as in a living, breathing organism?
- If we could make a map of the inside of the earth, what would it look like?
- Will it ever be possible to travel to the center of the earth?
- What effect does the molten center of the earth have on the surface temperature?
The Singularity
- What is the singularity and how will it affect me as an individual?
- Will the singularity happen in my lifetime?
- Will things be better or worse after the singularity?
Future Thinking
- Where does the future come from?
- Where does the “future” go after we experience it?
- Can human nature be changed, and should it?
- Are people more skeptical of people who claim to have answers or more skeptical of other skeptics?
- Will we ever discover humanoid life on other planets?
- What do you most want your future self to remember about you 20 years from now?
- What will be the biggest human advancement on planet earth during your lifetime?
In many ways, our trepidation about technology can be healthy!
The Fine Art of Introspection
- Where does an idea go when it’s forgotten?
- Is there such a thing as inherently bad knowledge, or is all knowledge value neutral?
- How much control do you really have over the course that your life has taken?
- Why are you here, doing what you’re doing, at this very moment in your life?
- Did you arrive at this point in your life because you subconsciously “willed it” or because you were destined to be here?
- Does anonymity encourage people to misbehave?
- Is it more or less difficult to be successful today?
Self-Examination
- How will the world change if we develop an accurate way of measuring talent?
- Is happiness a meaningful goal?
- Is it possible to know what is truly good and what is evil?
- Will the world be better off without “bad people?”
- How would you know if time had been altered in some way?
- Are there limits to human creativity?
- Will we ever have a definable form of measurement for the concept of “truth?”
- Is it possible for us as humans to comprehend the true depths of our reality and existence
Sensory Thinking
- How many things can be “sensed” outside the realm of human understanding?
- Will it ever be possible to “replay events” that happened in the past?
- Do today’s technologies make global conspiracies more or less feasible?
- Will the advancement of today’s technologies yield a net positive or a net negative result?
- Will it ever be possible to communicate with people in the past or in the future?
- Do people have a moral obligation to improve themselves?
- If someone altered your memory, how would you know?
Government
- Will the world be better off with relatively more countries or relatively fewer?
- Will we still have today’s style of nation-state countries 1,000 years from now?
- What forms of government will be better than democracy?
- Should we gamify citizenship?
- If people were given the option of starting a new country, what features, options or capabilities would make it more valuable than counties today?
- Is poverty an inevitable part of every social structure?
- If data scientists had the ability to accurately predict who was more likely to commit crimes in the future, how should society respond to that information?
- Will it be possible for countries to operate without prisons in the future? Perhaps a better way to phrase this, what comes after prisons?
The most challenging aspects of technological advances are often things that we don’t expect!
Reinventing Society
- Which major corporations will no longer exist 20 years from now?
- Will we ever be able to download our brains onto a computer storage device?
- Is there a limit to how smart one person can be?
- If you could invent one thing that would have the most significant impact on the world, what would it be?
- Should we terraform other planets if it means that we might be destroying undiscovered microscopic alien life?
- At what point is a genetically enhanced human no longer human?
- How long before human cloning becomes a viable option? What problems will it solve?
- If the human race was put on trial by an advanced group of extraterrestrials, how would you defend humanity and argue for its continued existence?
Personal Health
- Will we ever have an acceptable definition for perfect health?
- Are people today more healthy or less healthy than 20 years ago?
- What will the average life expectancy be 20 years from now?
- How long before the average life expectancy on planet earth is over 100 years?
- Will it ever be possible for someone to live forever?
- What exactly makes us human?
- Will we ever find a universal cure for cancer?
- What exactly is consciousness? Are animals also conscious?
Cryptocurrencies
- Will cryptocurrencies become a common form of currency in the future?
- How long will it be before cryptocurrencies replace 50% of national currencies?
- What comes after cryptocurrencies?
- If and when will universal basic income become a reality?
Flying Drone Tech
- Does the right to “bear arms” give me the right to own a drone that is armed?
- How long will it take for Chicago to average 50,000 drones flying overhead on a daily basis?
- How long before I can summon a drone to pick me up in front of my house and have it fly me to a destination three hours away?
- What percentage of passenger drones will have fly-drive capabilities in 2040?
Driverless Transportation
- At what age is it okay to put a child into a driverless car by itself?
- What will the fastest form of transportation be in 2050?
- Will people still own their own cars in the future?
- How long will it be before 50% of the cars on the road are driverless?
- Will all vehicles eventually become driverless?
- In what year will we reach “peak” transportation?
- Do we have a right to privacy in a shared driverless vehicle?
Artificial Intelligence
- Will it ever be possible to know everything?
- Will we ever have an ability to measure artificial intelligence the way we measure horsepower?
- Do we run the risk of becoming too dependent upon artificial intelligence?
- Since there is no such thing as a true game of chance, how long will it be before AI destroys our existing gambling industry?
- Can a society exist without laws?
- Should we develop ways to control emotions through technology?
- How long before AI causes a collapse of today’s stock exchanges?
Unanswerable questions are the breeding ground for unintended consequences!
Final Thoughts
After thinking through these questions, perhaps the most interesting one of all is simply, “What does this all mean?”
The short answer is that all unanswerable questions are the breeding ground for unintended consequences.
While it is unlikely that we’ll ever face a robot insurrection, artificial intelligence does pose a number of troubling questions. Who’s responsible for the decisions an AI-managed system makes? How many AI-managed systems are too many?
All of these unanswerable questions need to be wrestled with, rethought, and reworked as every emerging technology forces us to reconsider the dangers that lie ahead.
You begin the piece with a question: “How do you handle a question that you can’t answer?” In your concluding comments, you state, “. . . all unanswerable questions are the breeding ground for unintended consequences.” I think I understand your basic point, but I think this piece falls a bit short of the mark: that if we’re going to intelligently manage our collective futures, we need to think more deeply and explicitly about the various futures people propose for humanity. In order to do that, we need to delve into what I refer to as “the invisible un-s”: the unintended, undesirable, unanticipated and unrecognized consequences of futures we are either setting in motion or have already set in motion — often without realizing that we’re doing so. That means we have to get more deeply into what Berger and Luckmann referred to as “commonsense knowledge” — that body of knowledge that we assume everyone shares about how the ordinary world (especially the human social world) works on a day-to-day basis. We take for granted that such a body of knowledge exists, and those two perceptions — that everybody knows these things, and that it’s safe to take this knowledge for granted — effectively blind us to a number of possible, probable and preferable futures. But they also make the undesirable, unintended, unanticipated and unrecognized consequences of our actions invisible.
We can often turn what initially appears to be an unanswerable question into one that can be addressed if we ferret out the unspoken assumptions lurking beneath the question. As examples, I’ve identified six of the 99 questions posed and provided what I see as the unspoken assumption and a possible answer — or at least, a more relevant question. So I’ll provide the question number along with my comments.
24. Rewriting the question as “How will things be better and worse after the singularity” acknowledges that some people will be helped and others hurt should the singularity ever occur: it won’t be all bad or all good. A corollary question is “how will we know The Singularity has occurred?” There’s an unspoken assumption that The Singularity will be immediately obvious to all — but given how inundated we are with information today, how sure can we be that it hasn’t already occurred and we just haven’t yet noticed?
26. After experiencing it, “the future” moves in both directions: forward into the as yet unrealized portion of the future and backward into the as yet unsettled past. That is, we set things in motion to create particular futures, but the results of those actions reverberate far into the future. They settle in to our mutually constructed social realities, where the actions we took in the past are never wholly resolved and become the inadequately examined social constructions of what to expect in the future.
59. The original question assumes that there will continue to be unequal and likely inequitable distribution of the value of the goods and services produced and consumed in the future. Given that we don’t generally deeply question why that remains true, we have little reason to question why the historical pattern should change anytime soon. So a better way of stating the question might be, “How should the value of goods and services produced and consumed be distributed, and why should it be that way?”
63. The underlying assumption here seems to be that downloading the information content of our brains would somehow be desirable, so the immediate — and deeper — question would be, “Why would that be desirable?” But another question lurks around this one: what would we do with the information we gathered? And, of course, we’d have to ask who owned that information and who could authorize its use or release to the public. And maybe the deepest question of all might be, “Are you sure you’re willing to share your deepest experiences, your most intimate thoughts, and your darkest forebodings with the rest of the world?”
69. There seems to be an assumption that a group of advanced extraterrestrials would hold us to a higher standard that generations of humans who’d had to live with the consequences of our decisions would. So why ask how the ETs would judge us? Why not ask how our descendants would?
98. The unarticulated assumptions behind this question seems to be that emotions need to be controlled and that there is an acceptable range of emotions. The two problems I see here are that emotions are part of the human experience and that they are socially constructed from a variety of sensations. Different cultures express different emotions and have different standards for what constitutes acceptable displays of emotion and what does not. In order for technology to regulate our emotions, we’d have to decide on what constitutes universal “acceptable standards” of emotion. This would deny individuals the validity of their experience — they might not be allowed to feel what they feel — while, at the same time, privileging some cultures we deem “acceptable” while marginalizing those we don’t. While I’ll agree that behaviors sometimes need to be regulated for reasons of individual or public safety, emotions are a wholly different matter. Nobody has a right to tell me that I can’t be depressed, because depression is simply a part of my human experience. How I act upon that depression — as long as I harm neither myself nor others — is my own business.
Some of the questions are unanswerable because they involve category errors (of the “which colour is this mathematical formula?” type, for example). So, the idea of “nothing” existing befiore something did is probably one of these: if nothing existed, there would be no space or time, in other word non-existence.
Some are unanswerable because they involve uncertainties whose characteristics render them inherently unpredictable (the “singularity”) or highly contingent ( for example, contingent on butterfly effect type disturbances; or on parameters that we have only the roughest of estimates of).
Some involve a mix of normative issues and unclear specificities – unaccompanied children in driverless cars – involves moral choices and probably legal regulation, but also lack of clarity as to saftey and security of the vehicle, length of the journey, scope for oversight, and so on.
Maybe we could figure out ways of classifying the questions by such characteristics, and then cross-classify by question type and the domain areas that you’ve specified.
And then, some scenarios!