Principled Uncertainty

GLOBAL CONSIDERATIONS today have a scale to them that makes other eras seem bashful. Climate change, global pandemic, artificial general intelligence, ecological collapse, biotechnology risk, overpopulation, molecular nanotechnology, and the decolonization of Earth and multiplanetary colonization hint at the range of opportunities and challenges. It’s a good time for futurists.

Jonathon Keats’ large-scale thought experiments about our collective society and its future have at last found their era. As a conceptual artist and self-described experimental philosopher, Keats examinations of deep time, Wall Street, religion, identity and immortality are ripe. It was two decades ago that Keats sat in a chair in a San Francisco gallery and sold his thoughts to patrons.

The price: one’s annual income divided by minutes. The Oakland Tribune branded him “too weird for Berkeley” in 2002 after he petitioned to pass a Law of Identity, but the world needs weird now. The same year, Keats fingerprinted visitors entering the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, and called the resulting marks “self-portraits.” Ahead of his time, Keats’ experiment seems evermore relevant as we contemplate temperature taking before entering our public institutions or workplaces, contact tracing, and governments that know which cities you’ve visited, with whom you’ve traveled, and where you ate. Our