So, here I sit in my basement at 10:10 in the evening. I should be in bed, but I promised myself that I would do some writing tonight. But I don’t know what to write about. I’d prefer not to write depressing shit or complain so there goes a whole bunch of topics right out the window. Perhaps I should take advantage of the Interwebs and look for suggested blog topics online.

The Internet is an amazing thing. How did we ever get along without it. It’s like having the biggest library in the world at your fingertips, but it also allows you to be an author and have the whole world available to you as audience without the trouble of proving your worth to publishing companies. And, obviously, it’s not just the written word. We’ve all got access to our own mobile movie studios and movie theaters. It’s just amazing to this boy who grew up in Bethany, Missouri, where we got just one channel on our TV back in the early 1970s. And that didn’t come in terribly well since KQTV, Channel 2, was all the way down in the big city of St. Joseph.

The pace of change is so fast that it’s becoming impossible to predict what’s going to come next. I know some of the things that I hope for from the future though. May they come soon enough to do some good! I hope for medical advances in nano-technology and pharmaceuticals and advanced artificial intelligence that can cure the diseases that would otherwise be the death of my loved ones. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could inject nanobots into the blood stream of people with Alzheimer’s disease that could clean up those nasty prions that are robbing my father of his ability to think. Perhaps, IBM’s Watson will develop a cure for the peripheral neuropathy that has been slowly crippling my mother. Maybe many more of us can avoid the ravages of old age and live for hundreds of years by reprogramming our epigenetic code to stop shedding the telomeres that act as the ticking clock counting down to our death.

While hopeful for the miracles that technology could bring, I also worry that we won’t survive as a species long enough to see these advances come to fruition. Will some idiot hack into military drones or into our nuclear missile bases and send us back to the stone age? Or will Monsanto botch their latest GMO experiment and kill us all with a super-virus? Or will our Artificial Intelligences go all Skynet on us?

I’ve developed a habit over the last few weeks of listening to Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil hold forth on the future in a number of YouTube videos so I have hope that the world is becoming a better place, that we will become a multi-planet species, and that the Singularity will arrive soon and transform the human race from it’s ape-like irrationality into super-intelligent cybernetic beings. But because of the pace of change, it’s nearly impossible to predict what even the near future holds for us. Let’s just do our best to not fuck it up, alright?