Questions people ask me often turn into blogs.
I was recently asked about the particular innovation in government that I proposed 45 years ago. Random legislature.
The question was, is a random legislature, particularly beneficial in coping with future generations. The questioner meant, would a random legislature be more adept at thinking about future generations than other forms of legislature?
My answer is "no". No one, despite their do-good views or their do-good self description, such as Seven Generations, actually thinks about future generations.
This is not to say that people do not think about future generations and their grandchildren or populations sometime in the future. Stewart Brand is thinking about the world over a 10,000 year horizon and has built a clock for those who wish to think along those lines.
Because of the very simple law of physics, biology, and human behavior; there is really no such thing as the future. That law is the 'law of unintended consequences'. We live in a world that is so complex as to be incomprehensible. Any efforts on our part may have the desired outcome for a short period of time, but inevitably they will have consequences that are impossible to contemplate or anticipate.
If we were honest with ourselves we would say that means there is no future. Technically of course there is always a future. But in the sense that is noble, understandable or even a future that can be anticipated, is erroneous.
I personally do not think there is such a thing as the future. In Japanese, there is no future tense. The same is true in Hebrew. I rank the Japanese and the Jews among the more insightful populations on the planet.