Who are these “world leaders”? Destroyers, man. Not builders. Not creators. But destroyers. You see, I can’t accept that my fate be in the hands of such fucked-up people. Does that seem normal to you? Do you accept the idea that your fate, your last hour on this earth, might depend on some motherfucker sitting up in the White House in Washington or up in the Kremlin in Moscow? Should the fate of the whole world depend on whether or not one of those bastards’ pricks couldn’t get hard one night? Is that normal? Not to me, man! You see what I’m getting at? A handful of unnatural, unbalanced people are ruling this world. That’s why when I hear that the non-aligned bloc is trying to be a third solution, I can only shake my head. ‘Cause those people who call themselves non-aligned are unbalanced. Do you know what something which is non-aligned means? It means something which ain’t straight, man. Something crooked, unbalanced, an out-of-line people, you know!

I also told them that Africans have to start by feeling that we belong to any part of the continent. We should not limit our area of belonging to that small enclave cut out for us at the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Africa has to open her doors to every Black man in the world. Until Africa sees it that way, she won’t have made it yet, man.

As I said, everybody has a purpose in life. You have to know your purpose. And if you don’t know it, then you have to find it out by yourself.

Education today doesn’t allow people to know their purpose. It is meant to stifle that purpose. That’s why I am against the education the white man has brought to Africa. In Africa they make the child want to be doctor, lawyer, or engineer by force, you know. People are just not allowed to choose and go their own way. The white man’s way stifles creativity, man. See what I mean?

For this reason, even if you think that the absence of future generations is not a moral loss or that the end of civilisation would be a good thing (issues that I discuss in Part IV), it’s still very important to avoid AI takeover or the lock-in of bad values. There will be future generations of intelligent beings either way, and by preventing the takeover of the world by an AI with bad values, you are changing how good or bad the future is over the course of civilisation’s life span. That’s the main effect, rather than any impacts on civilisation’s life expectancy.

Positive moral change is not inevitable. It’s the result of long, hard work by generations of thinkers and activists. And if there’s any change that’s not inevitable, it’s concern for future people—people who, by virtue of their location in time, are utterly disenfranchised in the world today.

If we are careful and far-sighted, we have the power to help build a better future for our great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren— down through hundreds of generations. But we cannot take such a future for granted. There’s no inevitable arc of progress. No deus ex machina will prevent civilisation from stumbling into dystopia or oblivion. It’s on us. And we are not destined to succeed.

*Redreaming the World: For Chinua Achebe

“It is possible that a sense of beauty, of justice, of the inter-connectedness of all things, may yet save the human species from self-annihilation. We are all still learning how to be free. Freedom is the beginning of the greatest possibilities of the human genius. It is not the goal.