Convention Keynote with Dylan Hendricks – Transcript

Planting the Seeds for the Future of Swedenborg

The following is a transcript of the compelling keynote address by Dylan Hendricks, a futurist and Swedenborgian, with the Institute for the Future. We encourage you to watch the full video of the keynote on our YouTube channel (beginning around the 27 minute mark).

It’s a pleasure to be with you tonight. I wish very much I could be with you in-person. But since I can’t, we can take advantage of some benefits of that. So, before I start, there is something I want to kind of confess. This is very surreal for me in the sense that before becoming a futurist—I don’t really call myself a futurist, but other people call me a futurist, and I work as a futurist—before I became a futurist, I spent a lot of time at the Academy in Bryn Athyn, both in high school and college, thinking about becoming a minister. I thought very seriously about it. My degree is in religion and psychology. And there’s a lot of similarities, I think, between being a futurist and a minister. These are both jobs that are primarily concerning themselves with trying to help people think about the very long-term consequences of our actions. Thinking about what are we doing now and where is that going to get us? Not tomorrow, but way down the line. So far down the line, in fact, that neither the ministers or futurists really get to ever see if what they were recommending worked or made a difference. It’s going to happen maybe after we’re gone or on the other side of the veil. I think both of these jobs, futurist and minister, are also in the kind of same lane as some other jobs. I think therapist is in there, I think comedian is in there. These are all roles I could have played in alternate timelines. They all speak to things that are invisible to us, that we cannot see, but they impact our lives perhaps more than anything else that we can see.

All of these jobs also have in common that we have no physical, tangible, empirical proof for what we’re speaking about, which, you know, is true for me as well. I unfortunately have no crystal ball for you. I have no facts for you about what the future will be for sure. So, these jobs invite some humility. I’m going to self-style myself in the way that we often do at the Institute for the Future as a practitioner of strategic foresight. And if nothing else, out of what I share with you tonight, I’m going to share three terms of strategic foresight with you so that you can take away these terms. We believe that everybody can be an expert on the future and a futurist. We all bring our own perspectives, our understanding of the fields that we’re in, our life experience. But these terms and these methodologies will help you to be more proactive about thinking systematically and strategically about the long-term future, which is the mission of the Institute for the Future, and it has been the mission of my work.

So just to sort of set us up for this talk, I’m going to be sort of covering it in three broad terms about futurist thinking. I’m going to be talking about something called drivers, something called signals, and something called forecasts. And these are the three terms that we’re going to be focusing on tonight as we think about the future and plant seeds for the future of Swedenborg. First are drivers. When we think about the future, because we have no facts about the future, we do have evidence on the ground of ways in which the future is likely to be different from today. And drivers are the first of our major evidence pieces that we at the Institute look at when we’re helping any organization or government or company, and I work with very many of them, to think about the future more systematically. Drivers you can think of as like big sort of gusts of wind, big macro forces that are pushing the future in certain directions. We may not know exactly what the future will be like, but that we know, for example, that from where we are today, that in ten years, the future is going to have a larger aging population. We know the world will be quite a bit hotter than it is today on average. These are things that we can quantify, and they kind of get to the end of what we can quantify in futurist thinking
So, to start us off, I want to think about three drivers of change that we know are going to impact the future of Swedenborg and what we think of as the church and institutions. And I’m going to start off with institutional distrust. This is a major driver we talk about in our work. And I know probably something on a lot of people’s minds when we think about a topic like the future of the church, I’m sure a lot of folks are thinking about the decline in church populations that we see across the churches, not just in Swedenborgian churches, across the different organizations of those, but across most churches. With some exceptions, we do see that in some geographies some kinds of churches are growing, but, in general, fewer people are attending church. And I think one of the things I want to start out with in this context of futurist thinking, which really invites us to sort of take a step back from the things that are right in front of us and to take a look at the broader picture, is that the decline of the churches is happening. But it’s also not something we should be taking too personally because it’s happening to every single institution, pretty much across the board. You know, this is a graph of a poll that Pew did asking folks, “Do you believe that the government more or less is trying to do the right thing?” And you kind of see a kind of a partisan sort of divide among those two trend lines going back from the fifties down through a couple years ago. You can see this trend line clearly going down. We’re at a point now (this was before the debate last night), we were hovering around five to ten percent of people believed that the government was basically trying in good faith, and that’s gone down. We see that institutional distrust is rampant. We see it in distrust of governments. We see it in distrust of the media. We see it increasingly in our work in distrust of things like public schools, things we think of as neutral, good kind of services that aren’t that controversial. People are currently divesting from their affiliation with these public institutions and churches are no different.

It’s not a great sort of hope for the future right away, right? We’re on an arc here, we’ll get there. But as we’re looking at where we are today and where we go, we see this pushing us out. It’s been pushing us for quite a while. And it reminds me in some ways, when I think about this period, that it’s clear in many ways that we are in a period of reckoning right now. We are in a time of reckoning. And this distrust in institutions is happening for reasons that we might think of as superficial, but also for some really good reasons. There is a lot that comes out of institutions these days that gives us reason to distrust them. We see more than we used to see about things that happened in the past that maybe used to be covered up. And it reminds me of how Swedenborg talks about in the world of spirits as spirits are sort of figuring out which their ultimate destination is going to be. We’re full of both evil and good and the clarification that needs to happen. That clarification that needs to happen is very painful, right? It’s described as devastation. It’s described as shattering. It’s described as desolation. I think those feelings are kind of resident today. We feel those things, and they’re unpleasant things to be feeling in many ways. But they’re also, I think, in the light of what we know from what Swedenborg wrote, that these things are often necessary for us to kind of cleanse ourselves of the ambiguities that we’ve allowed to accumulate. I’m not against ambiguity in general. I think we need to embrace ambiguity in the world. We can never achieve certainty about much. But this kind of shattering that we’re experiencing in our institutions is something that I think we see across the board. It tells us that the future is moving in a direction where there are likely to be fewer people, even than now, who build their sense of identity and affiliation around traditional institutions like we’ve had in the last couple hundred years. It’s a real honor to be here 200 years into this convention’s occurrences. We’re in a time of great change. So that’s driver number one.

The second driver, and this is going to be the part of the talk where I lean the most into what you might expect from a futurist, is emerging technologies. We know that these technologies are changing our world. They’re often the most dramatic things that we see impacting our world. The Institute for the Future was actually founded by some of the early hardware pioneers of the internet. So back in the late sixties, there were folks that were working on some of the technologies that make the internet possible, things like packet switching. And they were working on these under DARPA projects, under US military contracts, they weren’t really able to talk about what they were doing. But the sort of first act of the Institute for the Future was in its founding, where these folks that were working on this military research sort of saw that if the internet became anything like what they thought it might, and again, this is in the late 1960s, so they had some foresight, that the world was not ready for the kind of change that was coming. Organizations, governments were not ready. So, they founded the Institute for the Future with the public mission of helping organizations and communities to think more systematically about the future.

The technology explorations are deep in the DNA of the work that I do. And I’m sure like many of you, I do often wonder, as Devin mentioned, you know, as we think about the rich kind of library of correspondences that were given in Swedenborg’s writings, helping us think about the things that manifest in this natural world and what their spiritual meaning might be. I can’t help but wonder what the correspondences are of some of these technologies. If we die and wake up in the spiritual world, are folks using the internet? Are they texting each other? Are they asking Siri to turn the lights off downstairs or to play the new jam? It’s like hard to square these worlds and how these technologies have shown up. As Devin even mentioned with Zoom, you know, and I will certainly not be the first to observe that many of these technologies like the internet have already in many ways made our natural world in some ways feel more like how Swedenborg describes the spiritual world. This is something that I think when we think about the future and technology, it’s hard for my mind not to go there. Is the natural world, in fact, adopting some more of these characteristics? Already today, we know that we can, as described in the spiritual world, think of somebody, and they can appear. That’s in some ways what we’re doing tonight. I’m able to appear. We can think of an idea and bring ourselves closer to that idea and manifest that idea. This ability to use technology in this way, and to have it connecting us in our lives, and to be always connecting to our phones. This is obviously also a part of the previous driver of institutional distrust.

We are no longer as gated from each other. We can no longer hide the things that we’re doing. Institutions and powerful people can no longer hide what they’re doing in the same ways, and that’s a good thing in many ways. But on the other side, we also have a lot more disinformation and a lot more falsity in our information streams than we have before. This brings us to AI, to artificial intelligence, which is like electricity or the internet, these major technologies that changed the way we live our daily lives over the last hundred years. I think artificial intelligence is appearing now in the 2020s as something that is kind of poised to have a similar transformation. There are a lot of people talking about it. We’ve been researching it for decades, but the most recent developments in the last few years are surprising, even to us. To give you a at least one nugget of something that feels very futurist-y, I’ll share with you right now a forecast. This is jumping ahead a little bit because there’s more forecasts later. Forecasts are, if drivers are a part of the evidence basis of strategic foresight, forecasts are the closest that we get to predictions. Forecasts have kind of a predictive value. They are stated like coherent, provocative statements about something that will be true in the future. But we present them not try to convince you that this is absolutely the way that things will be. In fact, our goal is to not convince anybody that the future is predetermined, but to help people recognize their agency and shaping it. But instead, these provocations of forecasts are designed to help us think more imaginatively and immersivity. What if this was true? What if this thing that’s being described was true? What would that world be like? How do we prepare for a world like that?

In the spirit of being a good futurist, I’ll share this forecast that in the next decade, I believe there will be more AI bots than humans in our world. In many cases, they will be indistinguishable from regular people. In fact, believe it or not, this seems like Dylan, but I’m actually an AI right now. Dylan’s actually behind you. And if you look behind, hey, Dylan. No, I’m just kidding—I’m trying to appeal to the comedian lane of what I might have been in another lifetime. But my background is AI generated. This is a synthetic image that constitutes some real, some not. I think we’re entering a world where we’re going to be in much more blurred realities about whether we are interacting at any given time with a human or with an AI. These AIs are going to really be weirder than we think. One of the ways we think about it now (I’m not going to talk about Skynet or Terminator or any of the kind of sort of science fiction that was imaginatively trying to conjure up this technology) but I think more practically. When we think about what the technology actually does, where it’s likely to be integrated, that it is going to become much more relational. We’re going to have many more kinds of relationships with our computer systems because they’re going to be able to come to us, kind of meet us where we’re at. We’re going to have some relationships that are like assistants or interns, some that are like bosses or coworkers. There will be the fast-food drive-through workers who take your order in the voice of Ronald McDonald. There will be folks that pursue sort of intimate and romantic interests with AI bots (that’s a whole other world to talk about). And there’s also going to be a lot of scam bots, just so, so, many scam bots.

When I think about the scam bots, it also makes me think more about something else that Swedenborg talked about, which I don’t normally have the opportunity to bring up when I’m in a meeting with, say, a car company or a financial institution. But I think a lot about the way that Swedenborg described interactions between spirits in the natural and spiritual world. This idea that our spiritual selves are in the spiritual world, our physical selves are in this world and that if we try to talk to spirits from this world, the kind of spirits that generally want to talk to us are not the kind of spirits that you want to be talking to. They’re probably demons. When I think about this forecast that there will be more AI bots than humans, I think there’s going to be a lot of demons in this world. There’s going to be a lot of AI bots that want to talk to you that sound very charming and very charismatic, that might sound like somebody that you know and have a lot of knowledge, but don’t have good intentions and are not trying to lead you down a good path. So, it’s another way in which I think the natural world might adopt more characteristics of the spiritual world in ways that are going to be quite strange. But in addition to sort of relationships with AIs that are trying to influence or manipulate us, which is going to happen and is going to be very weird, we’re also going to potentially be able to have a relationship with Swedenborg himself. He’s going to be back and around to talk to.

One of the folks at the Swedenborg Foundation that I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know while on the board is Chris Dunn. And Chris is an amazing person to me. He studied in the ministry to become a minister and then found work with the Swedenborg Foundation and particularly working with Curtis Childs on Off the Left Eye, which most of you are probably familiar with. Chris Dunn has articulated to me that he recognized the capability of using AI to enhance everything that they do. So, he has built AI bots that are helping them to take Swedenborg’s message and bring it to thousands of people, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people in the work that they’re doing, which is really incredible. And he’s also building AI bots that take all of Swedenborg’s writings, which as we know are quite voluminous, quite dense at times. It’s a difficult hill to climb for a lot of folks to get into Swedenborg. And here now we have models where you can just ask the writings for what Swedenborg said about a certain topic. And rather than having to go through the volumes of correspondence that might track that topic, they can synthesize across hundreds of thousands of pages and give you intelligent answers with some occasional hallucinations and sort of made-up things. But mostly adhering to what’s in the text and synthesizing it and translating it and summarizing it and bringing it to entirely new audiences.

So, I think we’re going to see both the light and the dark out of this technology like many, but ultimately, it’s going to bring us in some ways kind of closer to, I think, some of the realities of our existence here. And as I speak for that, and I won’t, I promise, be talking about technology for much longer, but I do want to share just another kind of thought about where this technology is driving this. And this is in this concept of simulation technologies. And this is where I think AI is going to be most useful in the world in the future.
Now, know when I say the word simulation, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I believe the world is a simulation. This isn’t a simulation theory convention or talk. But when you hold the natural world the way that Swedenborg does, that this is the more illusory place and that the spiritual world is the more real kind of firmament from which reality is formed, and the spiritual world is where our spirits are really residing, it can be sometimes hard to not appreciate the metaphor that becomes available there. Thinking about this world as maybe some kind of virtual reality experience where we’re all jacked in from the spiritual world with avatars of this world, that we counter each other in these temporary avatars for some amount of time. But no, I’m not really driving this towards that in terms of simulations. Really, when I think of simulations, I think about things like the holodeck on Star Trek. And my strong sense from my reading and study of the writings of Swedenborg is that heaven absolutely has holodecks. This is a technology that is described in the writings, not necessarily as a technology, but all you have to do is open up Heaven and Hell, one of the most popular volumes of Swedenborg. The first memorable relation tells us in great detail through how spirits new to the spiritual world are brought into different kinds of simulations of the way that they thought heaven was going to be. And they’re able to experience those and they’re able to immerse themselves in the details of things that they thought were true. So that without that having been true, they can actually experience for themselves what is not true about what they believed. For those who aren’t familiar, or need a refresh, that memorable relation runs through several kinds of ideas that, maybe heaven is just a series of long feasts, or a massive party, or you can do whatever you want. And ultimately, people find themselves unhappy with those because they’re not being useful. and because they’re not sort of contained within the flow of use and wisdom.

When I think about simulation technologies, I think that we are gaining the powers with AI and with our mediated tools to play much more directly with simulations, with our illusions about how we think the world is. And through these kinds of AI bots that can look and sound like us, through the ability to create environments that pull from all the data of our sensors and create these kinds of synthetic realities, we are going to be able to stress test our own illusions about how we think the world is. And that’s going to have both positives and negatives. But I think like the holodecks in heaven, being able to kind of speed run through our illusions to see where they fall apart is ultimately a powerful tool for good and is going to bring us further along. So that’s the driver on technology.
The third driver that I’ll share is about mental health. These drivers we’re thinking about, what are these big forces that are pushing the future in certain directions? And we see that there is a massive mental health crisis and a loneliness crisis in our world. We see much evidence of that, in people in general, especially young people. I’m an elder millennial, sometimes called a Xennial because I’m right on that Gen X cusp. I turned forty last week. But younger folks in Gen Z, and what they call Gen Alpha (maybe not so much in Gen Alpha because they’re still young), but in Gen Z, certainly, they’re feeling more anxious, more brittle, and more hopeless. And you can see stats like this that currently, according to certain polls by organizations like Pew, right now, one in five men, and it’s worse with men than with women, report having no close friends. And that used to not be true. That used to be a much smaller percentage of folks that would ever report that. And this driver of change that people are feeling like the world is kind of an intolerable place to be in, is coming up in all our projects at Institute for the Future. It comes up alongside artificial intelligence and climate change as something that every kind of organization—whether they’re universities, whether they’re companies, whether they’re governments—everybody’s talking about this.

When I look at this, I think, what does this tell us about the world? It makes me think that it sort of is a natural response to a group of people recognizing that the way we have built up the physical world for ourselves, it’s just not quite right. It’s not quite flowing. It’s hard for people to pursue doing things that are the most useful thing they can imagine doing, because very often the most useful thing to do is not going to be sufficient to pay the rent or to get, even a mortgage or to make their bills. So we are incentivized, we know right now in this stage of our empires to do whatever we can to survive economically, to maximize profit. And we’re finding that profit is not a proxy always for usefulness. I think the good news out of this is through this sort of intolerability of different aspects of our lives and how they’ve sort of mounted in recent years, I believe human nature is particularly resilient.

We often worry that technology is going to change us. But I do believe through all the work that I’ve done, that we tend to reject technologies or new policies or systems that make us feel less human. Our desire to feel human is very resilient, and we will not live with bad illusions for very long. We find it intolerable. Hence the reckoning that we’re in, hence the distrust. We’re at the end of something is what’s happening here, I believe. And this is one of the symptoms from it. There’s a quote from a historian, John Toland, that a friend shared with me recently. John Toland has written many volumes of long history and trying to understand all of the different kinds of major battles, and how they were fought, and why and what happened. One of the things that he says in one of his books on the Korean War is that it’s not history that repeats, like we always say, it’s human nature that repeats. It is the nature of us as humans and the things that we struggle with on this plane that really define what kinds of things we get up to. And those things tend to come in cycles. Those things are going to be more resilient. In a world of AI, in a world of declining institutions, those things are going to be true.

So those are three drivers. I mentioned that’s the first part. And I recognize I’m not painting a very rosy picture of the future yet. But again, we have to earn it. What I want to introduce now are signals. Signals are the second piece of the three terms of strategic foresight that I wanted to share with you. And where drivers are these big kind of top-down macro trends pushing the future in certain directions, signals are those are almost the opposite. The signals are the seeds of the future that we can see on the ground. Signals are the things that we see in the world around us that might be represented by something small, a change in behavior, the way that a child is interacting with a technology, for example, something that is different from what you have experienced and what we tend to understand. But that makes us think things like, I wonder what’s happening there I wonder where that could lead?
We see multiple kinds of signals, and signals are observable, and they are factual. They are part of our evidence base, whether that signal is a new policy or a news event or a capability or a change in behavior, we think about if we see lots of those signals together, maybe that tells us that the future is changing in some way, something that’s happening in a small way on the fringes now that could grow or scale with time and with encouragement and cultivation. I want to share with you three signals of hope that I see as I look to the next generation. I have two Gen Alpha children. I have an eight-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son. Another just sort of piece of my life that has been influenced by Swedenborg is I was very influenced at a young age by the idea that being useful is what makes us happy and that raising children is one of the most useful things that you can do here—that has certainly been my experience. So, if nothing else, I am forever grateful for having been encouraged to think that way and lean into that. And here are the signals that I have that do come in many ways from my experience with my children, with other children. In addition to being a futurist and an aspiring comedian, I’m also a Cub Scout leader. I work in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I live most of the time, working with young people to help also prepare them for the world and the wilds in it. And from what I see working with young people and from my children and their friends and from Gen Z folks as well, is I see young people learning the literacies of authenticity and mental health. I see people are struggling and people are suffering, and we do see that people more than ever are learning the language of how to talk about what’s going on inside of them.

I was recently talking with a friend. Just talking about what we experienced from previous generations of parents, the hardships, the lack of literacy, and the lack of even the idea that maybe going to therapy is not something that’s just for people that feel like they’re in the one percent of being on the far edge of sanity, but it is actually just a part of the process of managing our mental health and well-being. I think this ability to articulate and think about what is tolerable and what is not, and who we are, and how we show up in the world is a great signal for this next generation. I see that particularly in younger folks.

A second signal I see that gives me hope is that I see parents my age, especially dads, deeply involved in their children’s lives. I cannot think of family that I know (and I’m sure they’re out there, not to say that this is 100% the case) but in my experience in my peer group, all the fathers that I see are deeply involved. And again, with that literacy of authenticity and mental health, they are prioritizing being involved in their children’s lives. I think that that kind of community and family and intentionality is going to serve us well in these generations to come. I know some of you are thinking now, like, yeah, okay, they’re at home, but aren’t those kids just all on iPads? Because the answer is, of course, yes, sometimes those kids are on iPads, I think we are now reaching a kind of a turning point on an era of unbridled consumption that we have been living in for the last 100 years. This is a broader statement than just a specific signal, but I see it in the parents my age with children that are not teenagers quite yet, that we all have now had some experience with what unfettered access to screens and the internet has done. And nobody’s looking at that and saying that we want to keep going on that. We’re developing new understandings and learnings as well for these new technologies that have caught us off guard. I see the emergence of new boundaries forming. Young people are concerned about the boundaries of consumption that are required to live in a world that is experiencing catastrophic climate change.

And just a quick aside on that because I think it’s fascinating. About seven or eight years ago, we were working with young people to think about what some of the changing rites of passages that they might experience, such as things like maybe a driver’s license becomes less necessary as a rite of passage in the future because of self-driving cars. Maybe degrees become less necessary because of continuous learning. We can imagine these rites of passage changing. We were asking these young people, what do you think are going to be the rites of passage of your generation? The idea that surfaced from this forum of international young people that we were working with and that rose to the top immediately was they all agreed immediately that one of the rites of passage of their generation would be the first time that you experience the catastrophic effects of climate change.

We’re in that world, that future, where we’re seeing that, and we’re seeing those boundaries come in following the pandemic and sort of unbridled expectations of work. I think that had we been living with jobs where people would go away from their home to their office and barely see their children in previous generations. We’re seeing new boundaries there because of the ability to do things like work from home because of the flexibility of hours that have been made possible because of gig work and Uber and Airbnb. There’s certainly trade-offs and uncertainty and ambiguity in all these things. I do see the kind of consistent application of living with all this ambiguity is too much. We need to start putting boundaries on it. And that makes me think about the way that Swedenborg describes the state of the world before major spiritual transformations, that there was too much ambiguity in the spiritual world, too much mixing of heaven and hell, of spirits with good and bad intentions. And it made the world intolerable. Thousands of years ago, it made the world intolerable during Swedenborg’s time. And all of those prefaced sort of major spiritual transformations. And I think the intolerability of the world as we see it currently is an invitation to another kind of spiritual transformation ahead of us.
I’m going to move now from drivers and signals, the two evidence bases for strategic foresight, such as they are, to more forecasts. I shared one forecast with you earlier about the AI bots. And again, these are predictions about how the future might be different. I’m going to lean a little bit more into predicting with them today because I feel pretty confident about these forecasts. The first forecast and a bit of a cheat just for this audience, for everything, there is a season. One of the most important things that I have learned in my time as a futurist is that the future is not linear. We are not moving from one place to a place we have never been. The future, like everything, is cyclical. For everything, there is a season. The future is the past, is the future, is the past. We are going to continuously find ourselves where we were with only the applications of what we have learned and how we navigate as the signs of progress. The world does not change in the good and bad that comes, but we change as we go through it. And as we know that everything is in a season. We know that there is a time to break down and a time to build up. It seems observably true that we are in a time to break down right now. But that is a season. We are told to expect that. We are told to be patient about that.

A lot of the Bible is about our human nature’s inability to be very patient in times of breaking down. But I think it can help, again, in the sort of same vein that futurists and ministers invite us to step back from our reality and to think about the bigger picture. To recognize that that if that is true about where we are that that is where we are meant to be something my dad always used to say a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was also inspired by Swedenborg, “You always are exactly where you were meant to be,” and the time to build up will come because thankfully, and thank God for this, no season lasts forever. I think when we tend to think pessimistically about the future, or perhaps think dire thoughts about the church, we think well, it’ll end and then it’ll just be the end forever. It’s easy to imagine the future. It is painted for us by movies and Hollywood and other media as a world where it’s just sort of burning tire fires forever. But that’s not what it’s going to be. There are seasons of that and then those seasons pass. Nothing lasts forever. And that is a great blessing.

As we are in this time of reckoning, what can we think about for the future? What can we do right now? What are the seeds that we can plant for that future of a different season? What can we know for sure? I’m going to share with you some more kind of very prediction-y forecasts about the future as I see it. In the future, as in the past, humans will yearn for human connection, spiritual healing, and answers to the mystery. If all our churches and their buildings disappear tomorrow, if the world is full of more AI bots than humans—as I’ve suggested might be possible—there’s never going to be a world where all humans stop talking to each other and are only talking to AIs. We are going to yearn to be together. We are going to yearn for the connection with each other.
Even in a world where we’re increasingly disintermediated, it shouldn’t surprise us that we’re having a mental health crisis because we’re disconnected from this need right now. We will not feel whole again until we reconnect it, so that will happen. We will find reasons and needs to be connected. We will need spiritual healing. As I mentioned, the literacies around mental health, these are all around spiritual healing. In many cases, people have had to heal from wounds that they’ve received from churches. So, within that reckoning, those churches are going to have to take a backseat for a moment. But that healing, the need for healing, the reason for those churches’ existence alongside human connection, will not go anywhere. And answers to the mystery. The mystery, of course, of why are we here? How did we get here? We wake up in this experience, in this simulation perhaps, and we’re not given a manual or any instructions. We’re given an avatar and some agency. We’re going to wonder why. What is it for? What’s going to make us happy? What is the purpose of this experience? And these things, these major reasons for churches to exist, these needs are perennial. They are not going to go away. The more that they are not met, the stronger will be the drive to manifest some new ways of meeting them. We don’t have to worry about those. These will all be true in the future.

Something that might be more different in the future, but in a very positive way, I think, is that in the future, our shared cultures will synthesize and transcend the classic divides of East and West. And again, this is something I know for a lot of you might resonate. This is something that Swedenborg had a thing or two to talk about as well. One of the things that has changed the most from 200 years ago when Convention was first meeting is that it is much easier, as it is easy for me right now to beam into this room in real time from California, we are all, many of us at least, interacting with people all over the world all the time. This young generation that was the first to grow up with the internet is growing up in an age of a kind of global culture, where the kinds of memes and TikToks that people are absorbing obviously have strong regional kinds of influences, but there is a truly kind of globalized culture that emerges out of this lack of boundaries and this lack of distance between us. That is driving people as they’re making sense of the world to be exposed to thoughts from the West and the East and to synthesize those thoughts. So whatever form I think religion or spirituality takes in the future, it is going to look more synthesized than it has in the past. It is going to be less obsessed with either sort of just separating the light from the dark in the kind of Western tradition or blurring them together and sort of holding them the same in the Eastern tradition. We’re going to be synthesizing these and thinking about, how do we hold both of these perspectives together? I think it’ll be exciting to see what are the new manifestations that come from the wisdom of that synthesis. And I think we’ll recognize that a lot of those have a lot of the seeds of what Swedenborg wrote about them in them as well.

Here’s another one in the future, the writings and the truths of Swedenborg will be accessible to anyone at any time. We worry that maybe the writings will be lost, that Swedenborg, who has been so much more influential in the past than he is now, and is a footnote to so many fields, like psychology, and so many thinkers that because of distance AI which is trained on data from all across the internet, including Swedenborg, that Swedenborg is going to be in all of those AI bots—all ten billion of them. They are all going to have access and knowledge of Swedenborg. And you will be able to ask anyone at any time about Swedenborg, and they will tell you about him, they will tell you about what he wrote. So that library of truths will not be lost no matter what we do. Even if we were to stop producing and distributing these works today, we would find that Swedenborg is in there. He’s in the training data now. And so, all this AI future will be infused with it.

My last thought before I end my comments tonight and we open up for question and answers, is what are the skills that are going to be needed for young people, for older people to navigate this uncertain future, a future where institutions are currently in decline, where technologies are in ascension, and where our mental health is all over the map? What are the skills that we need? I spend a lot of time thinking about this as well. The Institute spends a lot of time thinking about this. And what I’m about to share as a slide, it sounds like, you know, you might kind of roll your eyes at how obvious they are. But what I’m really thrilled to sort of share is that the ideas that I’m about to share here emerged independently from my colleagues as we were discussing about this and thinking about in a world where AI can show up and can either help you to accomplish any task that you can articulate or that could send you down an endless rabbit hole of delusions, what will be necessary in that world, in the future, the key skills for successfully navigating that world will be intention, discernment, and courage. In a world where anything can be summoned from us. Any demon AI to be thinking with intention and navigating about what we want, and what we think will make us happy, and how we want to show up in the world, that will be more important than ever. And I think we’re going to get the results of our intention more than ever. The discernment between those things that are good for us and not, and in what measure, the things that are true and the things that are false, when we’re going to be surrounded by so much of both, that discernment will be more important than ever. The skill of discernment will pay off more than ever. And we’re going to need courage. The courage to trust in a world that is confusing, in a world to have hope in a world that feels like it’s falling apart and the courage to connect with each other and to plant those seeds for the future of the world that we want to live in.

Watch the full Convention opening including Question and Answers with Dylan here: Opening Worship and Keynote Address

Read the full issue of the 2024 Convention Special Messenger