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.