My Hilbert’s List (Thanks, Seth!)
Seth Godin has been one of the most influential people in my life, certainly the single living person I’ve never met who’s had the greatest positive effect on me.
He’s posted daily, for free, for decades. A little more than six years ago, I was finding my feet after a bit of a crisis of meaning, and happened upon Linchpin at the library. The orange cover literally just popped out from a random shelf. This was my first introduction to his work, and it put some good wind in my sail. Shortly thereafter, I began reading Seth’s blog daily, and it has been an invaluable habit.
Following his lead, I decided starting in 2019 to give a bit of myself every day in literary form, and just realized the first day of the year was coming to an end… To tie it all together and kick it off, I’m taking a cue from a recent post that inspired me, and posting my own Hilbert’s List of 23 problems to for mankind to solve in the next century.
1. Annual crop-based agriculture replaced with perennial, regenerative agriculture
2. Replace factory meat and poultry farming with pasture-based, topsoil-building, carbon-sequestering, holistic management
3. Knowlege of the wisdom of ancestral diets is as common as Mediterranean, Whole30, paleo, [fill in the next popular diet]
4. Dependence on internal combustion a thing of the past
5. Plastic and Styrofoam packaging also goes the way of the dodo
6. Cities with vacant land issues adopt agroforestry
7. Cities develop generous policies to allow, and even employ themselves (once again), micro-livestock for land maintenance
8. Entrepreneurship more prevalent, and common among teenagers
9. Free public transportation
10. Communication and technology make government and other civic services completely transparent (and often obsolete)
11. Worldwide abolishment of slavery
12. Batteries manufactured from renewable sources
13. Anyone with a great idea for an application can express in plain talk, and AI will build the software to spec
14. Similar to 13, any physical item needed could be understood by AI and created (3d printing)
15. New building materials make personal construction of homes affordable, simple, beautiful, and attainable by all
16. Maslovian needs met across humankind
17. As a result of 16, individuals are able to explore new depths of our natural environment, inner- and inter-personal understanding
18. Unprecedented new forms of self-expression
19. Along the lines of 10, banks and insurance companies are obsolete
20. Regenerative cell therapy
21. Colonizing space
22. Understand and augment memory capacity
23. The education system as a whole designed to service students, instead of designing students that serve the system
This turned out to be a particularly difficult post to start off with! Honestly, I would say there’s a bit of a Luddite streak in me. Not to mention, I’ve recently watched Black Mirror (a little late to the game). As my imagination stretched out, the possible consequences made me feel quite uncomfortable… Maybe that makes this a successful exercise for me?
