Charting paths to possible futures
The Mimir Center for Long Term Futures Research conducts rigorous, foundational academic research on concerns for the long-term future of human civilization. Mimir aims to provide early insights into topics of long-term importance. We believe that it is both possible and meaningful to theorize about the future, even the distant future.
Our research agenda has seven main topics. These include questions of ethics, technology, decision theory, risk analysis, epistemology, and systems theory, and are unified by their long-term importance: getting early insights into these topics may help make decisions or set trajectories early enough to have an impact in the future. That in turn may help reduce loss of opportunities and provide a better understanding of the strategic landscape.
1. Long-term space governance
What can civilizations achieve when they solve the engineering problems associated with space settlement? What are the limits of what can be achieved, given known physics? How far away are we from important limits, and how do they impact near-term strategy and eventual value achieved? The focus is both on human civilization (what our full potential might include) and on spacefaring civilizations in general.
2. The climate crisis, planetary boundaries, and systemic vulnerabilities
The climate crisis is one of the most crucial challenges for present and future generations, but it is also part of an ensemble of systemic challenges to civilizational, political and planetary boundaries that pose a considerable risk to human civilization. How should planetary boundaries be defined, and how can we remain within them? To what extent is the climate crisis a systemic, social or political vulnerability? How do contained catastrophes, such as infectious diseases, influence climate risk?
3. Stagnation, social collapse, and durable disorder
Permanent social collapse is a potential existential risk that has been relatively neglected. Are there “natural” limits to the stability of civilizations and other complex social organizations? What actions can change these limits? We use macrohistory, cliodynamics and systems analysis to answer questions such as: Do collapses follow a generalizable pattern, or is each collapse unique? Are collapses preventable? What can be done to reduce the collapse risk of our (or other) civilizations? Which actions increase the risk of irreversible collapse? How important is it to maintain historical continuity, memory, or recognizable values?
4. Human-animal relations
The future presents enormous challenges with respect to humanity’s relations with non-human animals, both domestic and wild. Today, technology replaces most of the labor that domestic animals were once used for. What should their status be? Should we enhance their capabilities to integrate them into human civilization? How should we most efficiently prevent wild animal suffering caused by, for example, climate change? More generally, the size and composition of the wild animal population will change in the future; the risk that some species will be fully extinguished is high, while others will flourish. The development of animal welfare and animal population ethics can help us evaluate these risks and plan for eventual interventions.
5. Great uncertainty and decision making/strategic planning
Thinking about the long-term future is beset by great uncertainty. This is for the simple reason that the passage of significant amounts of time allows for many sources of error: new forms of social and political organization, scientific and technological developments significantly changing the course of human development, and the mere chance of contingent events going one way rather than another. How can one do long-term future studies in the face of such uncertainty? Which tools from decision theory and risk analysis are best suited to the study of the very long term? How should decision makers respond to great uncertainty about the future?
6. Personal identity and whole brain emulation
Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) is the logical endpoint of current work in computational neuroscience and connectomics: computational one-to-one models of entire brains. While full WBE is still decades away, progress in brain-mapping and brain/body simulation is ongoing. Whether it can actually be achieved remains to be seen, but it poses important philosophical, neuroscientific and ethical questions worth investigating well before it occurs. In particular, it and related neurotechnologies bring up questions about personal identity, conscious experience, and the ethics of experiments on artificial neural systems.
7. Risks and opportunities of novel technologies
The ethical and social implications of novel technologies can be considerable and unpredictable. We consider the likelihood and possible implications of widespread adoption of various emerging technologies at different levels of deployment; some have yet to demonstrate feasibility, some have recently shown proof of concept, and yet others are already ubiquitous, although newer more advanced applications are anticipated by many. What are the possible interactions between the adoption of specific innovations and global catastrophic risks? How can society and decision-makers prepare for these challenges?
