SoylentNews

dryriver writes:

The BBC reports (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140627-how-our-descendants-will-hate-us):'How will the future view us? Tom Chatfield asked some of the world's best minds, and discovered that we will be seen as barbaric in ways we may not even realise. Far more interesting, we felt, is this question: how will our generation be looked back on? What will our own descendants deplore about us that we take for granted? Will our descendants abhor our refusal to banish nuclear weapons for example? Some possibilities are more obvious than others. Eating meat and factory farming may move towards the margins of acceptability, given the intensive use of resources and cruelty they represent. Another kind of profligacy the future might regret is the over-prescription of antibiotics. In terms of prejudice, meanwhile, our descendants may hopefully wonder how still-marginalised groups like transgender people ever faced intolerance; let alone how some parts of the world continued to criminalise homosexuality, reject equal rights for women, or hold some groups of workers in modern slavery. All this, of course, is really about what we ought to deal with right now; about those wishes we desperately hope to see fulfilled, and the kind of world we hope to leave behind. What, I wondered, would some of today's most influential thinkers make of my question?'