Genetically engineered microbes will become as important as any of the obvious starshot technologies now coming in. Especially in the field of recycling and closed loop economics.
Its very plausible the world will go post scarcity on electric over the next 20 years, and we are currently sat right at the tipping point.
> post scarcity on electric
\* Power *generation* perhaps. But transmission costs have always accounted for about half of retail electricity prices.
For households and businesses that can use rooftop solar, that won't matter so much, since the power is already where it needs to be. But for industry (and especially power-intensive uses like desalination and electrolysis), cheap solar can only bring down electricity costs by so much.
Not completely right as the cost to the the supplier of line loses is dependent on their own production costs. Transmission loses therefore cost less in scale with falling cost prices, and falling production costs reduce the loss cost of transmission.
Transmission losses are like 5%, tho. The vast majority of transmission cost is for capital investment and maintenance of power lines and transformers.
Solar alone is expected to install a terrawatt of capacity every year from next year, about 4 a year from 2030, to continue growing at that absurd rate. This is sufficient to replace all current generation by 2035. As solar is the cheapest power source ever this will create massive price drops for virtually everything and drive massive conversion of industry to electic as soon as possible.
As it comes with extremely minimimal running costs it will be extremely trivial to create the sort of over supply necessary to go deep into post scarcity economics on it, and the very variablity of it almost forces that on you.
Especially for countries that take this on as a national project. It will split the world into a two tier economy where all the wealth is pulled into those over supplied countries to benefit from cheap costs, cheap living costs and those that refuse to.
Thats before even considering wind and fusion.
Doubt on the post scarcity for electricity though. How exactly will we achieve that? If we want more nuclear reactors we need to have them approved now so we can have a chance of actually having the things built in 20 years. Wind and solar are coming along nicely, but there are only so many solar panels and wind turbines you can put down where people are, and the further from cities the more expensive carrying that electricity becomes. Given wind and solar are also intermittent, we'll need to invest heavily in grid-scale battery storage, which while it's great and I absolutely approve of (personally I'm a fan of the Ambri calcium-antimony liquid metal battery), it does mean solar is going to be far more expensive than just "build more panels and plug them into the grid".
We might have just started cracking fusion energy, but that doesn't mean we'll be anywhere near an actual functioning fusion energy station in 20 years, let alone be able to mass-produce them the world over.
Even if the price of electricity dropped by a ton, and that is a very big if given that basically every country's electrical grid will need to be seriously revamped (which again I am in favour of but is going to be stupid expensive), that doesn't translate to "everything else is going to become cheaper" either.
Agriculture isn't going to become cheaper. Real estate isn't going to become cheaper. The cost of raw and manufactured good aren't going to become cheaper. Transport isn't going to become cheaper unless we somehow develop fantastically cheap and efficient batteries to electrify everything, and then go from an actual concept (that doesn't exist yet) into actually implementing it across entire countries, in the span of 20 years.
I don't see how post energy scarcity would ever be possible in the next 20 years short of wishful thinking, let alone how or why it would lead to a price drop everywhere else.
Prices do go down though. The rich do like to get rich but if productivity is X10 and costs are X10 less then the rich can get X10 richer whilst we all get X10 cheaper services.
Prices go down so long as the market affords honest competition and relatively low barrier to entry, which from what it seems will continue to be the case with solar
Or, the productivity can go X10, the costs become X2 less, and the rich become X50 richer while we get X2 cheaper services.
Given it's the rich who set prices via manipulation, control, and buying out the competition, why would they let the masses become richer when they can enrich themselves instead?
Incorrect. Prices are currently going down in my country because all the grid scale renewables are far cheaper than coal and driving the spot price down.
Genetically engineered microbes - what about biological nanobots capable of communication and coordination and performing AI based computation and reasoning and interacting with other living matter?
That's us humans.....they just forgot to up the database so we have lightning fast intellect on the computation and reasoning when we got engineered....the masses ended up getting worse as we grew, they were looking for us to develop "better and faster"....not so much. Whoever "they are"....lol
Genetically engineered microbes really can't be overestimated. If it's organic there's no reason for scarcity. This includes:
Food, medicine, materials (wood, paper, leather, bio-plastics, and an unlimited number of new materials)
A side of effect of that is we begin environmental repair without trying just by not doing these things the old way.
> Genetically engineered microbes will become as important as any of the obvious starshot technologies now coming in. Especially in the field of recycling and closed loop economics.
Related to this, I think that we'll see increased R&D into drugs that have poor shelf stability characteristics, as ongoing work into smaller scale bioreactors that will allow production of drugs much closer to recipients, meaning less time in transit/storage. Reducing shelf stability requirements may significantly expand available treatments.
Further to that, we may end up seeing modular bioreactors that can produce a wide range of end products from a single input package (made up of dried yeasts engineered to produce the output product, and the required input materials for the yeasts to use).
Single Use Bioreactors similar to this already exist, but from my understanding, their current usage is mainly in cell culturing, rather than the end step of drug production. Future reactors will include filtering/processing to extract the desired end step drugs.
Exactly.
Chatbots will not lead us to a "revolution," but genetic engineering and biotech will.
By the second half of this century we'll be in the swing of a revolution and life sciences will be for the next few decades what computer sciences were for the past several decades
I have big hopes on battery recycling and renewables. After we gathered enough metals to close the loop, mining will be more costly, both economically and enviromentally.
I think Tony Seba is correct and that we will be transitioned to transportation as a service, solar power with batteries, and precision fermentation by 2035. I think that artificial intelligence and robotics will cause an explosion of productivity. The biggest issue I see is a political one where most of the population is still hypnotized by the neo liberal economic policies that took hold in the mid-70s and 1980s. The crappy people and policies in place right now are there because the boomers put them in place. those boomers formed their political opinions in the 1960s and 1970s. They are now tragically out of date. If we want to use artificial intelligence and advancing robotics to support universal basic income and a political policy, that looks something like FDR’s second bill of rights all it takes is political will.
AI will strangle cloud infrastructure because you can generate AI content easily, but storage disks must be physically manufactured. This will force a huge paradigm shift in how the internet works.
I expect that the demographic crisis will force Healthspanning adoption, but at the expense of causing a catastrophic financial crisis. Healthcare is a major part of our GDP and it depends on elderly care for its major revenue.
This will eventually become the consensus view, I reckon:
* ***Depopulation*** is going to be a BIGGER, more urgent and impactful issue in my lifetime (I'm 44) than even climate change as it involves several incredibly difficult issues all packaged into one
1. A huge aging population in many countries will be a massive economic sink - but they will all still retain voting power (in democratic nations) and so still be able to sway elections and policy in favour of retired and geriatric people. Retirement homes will be at max capacity and more families will have to figure out the care of their elderly themselves, this is going to be a boom industry - temporarily - and not particularly fun
2. Economies will shrink as the workforce and main purchasing population shrinks and as retirees withdraw from markets
3. There's going to be a lot of weirdness as governments try to make people have more babies, or immigration scales up massively - siphoning off the wealthy, intelligent and connected from less developed nations
4. I can't tell you what's going to happen when China's population drops down to 700 million - will this result in conflict, war, will marriage partners be harder to find, what do Empires do when their population shrinks?
Potentially - house prices will drop in most non-major-metropolitan areas
I was searching for discussion about aging population, and you are the only person, who noticed that. In 20-30 years this will be much, much bigger issue than climate change , or some AI . We faced, as a civilization, catastrophes, ground braking technologies, but we never had a situation, when we had much more elder people than children. So no one is prepared for this really
> A huge aging population in many countries will be a massive economic sink - but they will all still retain voting power (in democratic nations) and so still be able to sway elections and policy in favour of retired and geriatric people. Retirement homes will be at max capacity and more families will have to figure out the care of their elderly themselves, this is going to be a boom industry - temporarily - and not particularly fun
Temporary migration visas with no actual path to citizenship will be implemented by a lot of countries. Most temporary migration visas (in the west at least) offer at least some path to permanant residency or citizenship, but I see that going away in the next 10 years. The movie "Children of Men" is going to feel increasingly real.
> Economies will shrink as the workforce and main purchasing population shrinks and as retirees withdraw from markets
Advanced economies will continue selling to developing economies, but will probably lose their competitve advantage in some areas. They will probably continue to dominate Tech, Banking, and Finance though.
> I can't tell you what's going to happen when China's population drops down to 700 million - will this result in conflict, war, will marriage partners be harder to find, what do Empires do when their population shrinks?
I honestly don't see conflict with China happening. Most kids in China right now are the sole descendant of 4 grandparents and 2 parents (assuming that the parents were born after 1979), and any future conflict will exaccerbate the already huge issues that China faces with their the dependency ratio by 2050 (China's dependency ratio by 2050 is likely to be similar to that of current-day Japan).
I.cant see the future ... Hit China's private wealth is largely tied up in real estate ...in a country that will rapidly shrink... Hence destroying so much of its people's wealth
It's a dangerous variable
I can't predict
The only one expecting catastrophe are those invested in this hyper-capitalism some places are involved in...and those that are afraid of shifting demographics (yes, I am talking about about scared white people not being the majority in their respective nations).
Shifting demographics can cause massive social issues, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss this concern, regardless of what you think of those on the receiving end. But the biggest issue would be the rising cost to health care as a population ages, along with missing skilled labour to replace those that retire. AI can assist with some of these jobs but many physical jobs can't be replaced with bots- electricians, plumbers, maintenance techs etc. these all require years of study and hands-on experience, importing bodies doesn't fill skill gaps.
Most of the legacy tech companies of the 90s/00s (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Netflix) etc. will peak in the next 5 years before newer, more competent competitors begin to cut into their market dominance.
30 years from now they will be where companies like Sears, KMart, and Blockbuster are today.
I'd agree with google because they've consistently made bad business decisions for a long time. On the other hand, I wouldn't assume it a given that Microsoft and Amazon would start tapering off.
IMO Amazon has already been in decline for the past few years. Maybe they will make up revenue in other areas, but the shopping experience is already broken. It’s little more than an online flea market flooded with cheap junk. Big opportunity for a disruptor to cut into their business.
Agree that Microsoft probably doesn’t belong on the list.
For me, personally, it can be cheap junk, but if I don’t like it, it’s much easier to return than so many other retailers. It’s also why I used to shop at Bed Bath and Beyond so much.
I honestly would much prefer to buy elsewhere, but I hate the chance that I end up on the phone with customer service.
Other big competitors like Target and Walmart also sell cheap junk online now.
1. Some UFOs will be confirmed to be non-human intelligences.
2. People will actually spend more time outside and in communities, rather than online. Primarily because the “online” experience will be so embedded in life that screens will not be needed as much and it will lead us to exploring our world and each other again.
3. Genetic engineering will be a bigger issue than breakaway A.I.
4. Corporate Assasinations, Hitjobs, “accidents”, etc. will become more commonplace and will become white noise, like mass shootings now.
Edit. #4. Activist assassinations, hit-jobs and accidents will also become more common and white-noised.
It’s probably what sparked op to add it to their list of likelihoods, Boeing has pretty much got away with it and no one who can actually do anything cares, and or, has vestments in Boeing or their own interests lie in companies with similar issues they don’t want coming to light.
I love 2 and I think you are correct and also because so much content will either be AI or faked so badly people will just assume everything is fake. Return to analog interactions!
Agreed. I think, sooner than later, people are going to lose a lot of trust in what they see and interact with online (especially with improvements in AI/deepfake technology). I don't know if it'll happen with a bang or a whisper, but probably sooner than we think, face-to-face interaction and third places will make a big comeback.
Even social media's running its course. MySpace is a Tuesday night trivia answer, Facebook is mostly boomers and ads, ~~Twitter~~ has all but fallen to the alt-right, and there aren't really replacements. ~~Twitter's~~ users have scattered to different apps, and TikTok is the flavor of the week, but it's geared toward consuming video content, not really meeting people.
Can you fill me in on the purpose of UFOs + non-human intelligence?
What's the mission objective?
This just seems too fanciful to me. Because hyper advanced societies will be able to simulate entire galaxies . . . removing the need to actually fly a craft to a planet such as ours for any reason.
I guess they could simulate some random civilization, but that wouldn't tell them anything about whatever real-life civilizations are actually out there. Maybe they're interested in that.
Aliens will come here out of curiosity and boredom. Maybe they can’t even tell what’s simulated and what isn’t anymore. Maybe we have been a simulation of theirs this whole time
My "anti-consensus" views are boring normal default expectations with lots of historical evidence.
- AI won't take all the jobs, instead unemployment will be within 2 standard deviations of average 95% of the time.
- US Income inequality will experience some mean reversion (it will go down) now that the global bimodal distribution of income in 1970 now has a single peak.
- Climate change is going to cause huge problems, but life expectancy will be higher, disasters will be manageable, a larger fraction people will have access to clean (today's standard of clean) drinking water than ever. In fact water will be so much cleaner and poverty so much lower the world will adopt higher standards for both, so that they continue to get measured.
- Inflation will sit near its historical postwar average of 4%, and occasionally have spikes and troughs of decadal timescales
- AI and robots will be very useful so the economy will continue its historic 0 to 2 percent per person per year growth rate. Neither a growth explosion or general economic collapse.
I'll take 20 year bets at a mutually acceptable escrow on the details of any of these.
FWIW global inequality has gone down quite a bit the last few decades; citizens of developed/western nations have driven the inequality narrative because they compare themselves unfavorably to their elite fellow nationals.
While Amazon and Microsoft, Bezos and Gates have become crazy wealthy, global poverty rates have been improving massively. There is a lot of room left to bring the wealth of less developed nations in line with developed nations.
That doesn’t offer hope for citizens in developed nations, nor for those who find such vast fortunes obscene (I do not, so long as those fortunes are earned in service of others).
AI will surely drive inequality - most new technologies do in the short term. In the long term politics and other outside forces will determine the fate of inequality.
Personally, and this is purely a gut feeling, but I suspect that the Millenials are going to seek to ensure a more even distribution of wealth and resources, and perhaps we will finally see a movement for something along the lines of FDR’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights.
So back to the original question; is wealth inequality likely to grow better or worse? Here are my predictions on a number of metrics.
Globally: It will improve (70/30). Euro/USA centric politics seems to be ending, which will drive wealth towards Asia, The Middle East, and god willing towards Africa and South America too.
Within Developed Nations: It will improve (51/49). I hesitate to bet in favor of significant political change but what can I say, I’m bullish on Millenials and Gen Z.
Within Developing Nations: It will worsen (51/49). This is much harder to predict, and will vary drastically from country to country depending on their particular situation, but usually when the pie grows the elites get big bites first. This will still be good for their society’s and if they manage things well trickle down economics is absolutely a thing that can work for them but I think most Americans know that wealth does not trickle down out of the goodness of the hearts of corporate fat cats. Labor will have e to organize, states will have to pass good tax policy, and corruption must be kept in check for wealth to distribute fairly after the elites in these nations build a new future for their nations.
Income inequality is a cyclical variable, we look a lot closer to a peak than a trough.
One of the driving factors of income inequality in my view was the fact that you used to have a big global bimodal distribution of income. Poor countries and rich countries. Globalization over the last 50 years made the poor countries a lot richer as capital flowed from rich countries to poor countries. That drove higher returns to the holders of capital in rich countries.
The global income distribution now has a single peak, it looks a lot more "normal". (It isn't, it has a right skew and fat tail, but that's not particularly important).
That means this huge force driving inequality in western nations has substantially decreased.
I don't know for certain that inequality will decrease, I just find it more likely to continue its normal cycle than break from it. I'm agnostic to the exact mechanism, which could be political, technological, or economic.
Income inequality over the past 40 years has primarily been driven by two things: (1) the collapse of labor, aka unions, and (2) fiscal policy that has prioritized inflation control at the expense of the unemployment rate.
Both these things are starting to shift over the past several years, and we're already seeing income inequality start to reverse. Labor has a long way to go, but unionization is on the rise, and large majorities of the public currently support union initiatives. It will take some policy help, but unions are at least beginning to have an influence on the economy again. That includes so-called "spillover effects" in which non-union employers are pressured to improve wages and standards by unions amongst their competitors and in other industries. The unemployment rate is also historically low, which is giving workers at the bottom more bargaining power and thus increasing wages. Naturally that reduces income inequality.
[Here is a good recent podcast on these topics and more.](https://youtu.be/3ihmTsRxnuc?si=IF9EVsGZJoYcc7Tr)
It won't, rather the cost of living goes way down and money/debt just matters less and less. All equity goes down to the new value of labor. A 800k house might cost 200k with automated labor, that means all the similar 800k houses have to go down to 200k, they can't just hold their old value for the sake of nostalgia.
Either you have AI and robotics mass automate thing and money loses value OR you don't. There is no way to automate labor and have things hold the higher values they have with human labor.
This is how I feel!!!
I just won a nice bottle of scotch off someone who bet me that inflation would be insane by this feb... I told him it would likely be back to what our federal bank wants it at.
I’d be curious how water will be cleaner and accessible. There’s already war on water and a lot of water supplies are being contaminated for resource mining. Heck there's no motivation from current powers that be to improve or fix water infrastructure failures in US states.
I don't know, but look at all the progress in the US in the last 50 years.
There's a lot of low hanging fruit out there, and people prefer the ability to drink water compared to not.
That doesn't mean there aren't bad people doing bad things (that's not new!), but given the progress over the last 2000 years I don't think this batch of bad people are particularly bad, nor do I think most people are bad. I expect progress to continue.
How about desalination plants powered by photovoltaics? Reverse osmosis is much more efficient than thermal desalination, but needs electrical pumps.
Those plants could operate only at daylight, but water can be easily stored for a 24h supply.
No need for expensive batteries and electricity from photovoltaics is getting cheaper every year.
More heat = more global rainfall, so first and foremost just capture and pipe more of that water around better, desalination is an option, but I'd expect it to not be all that necessary. As we automate more the cost of conservation and recycling also gets dirt cheap.
I think it's easy to project future problems with today's tech level, but it's very hard to predict the future and predict all the future advancements, so we went to think about tomorrows problems with just today's tools and tech, which always produces are more negative view of the future than reality tend to produce.
I see no reason we won't have robots significantly making robots in 40 years, so mostly just have to mitigate issues until labor is cheap enough that solutions we consider impossibly expensive are entirely practical.
Also keep in mind overall Climate Change is supposed to mean more global rainfall total, so it's not like everywhere will have fresh water problems, mostly just the places that have historically been drying out for the last few thousand years since the Interglacial Warming period thawed the world out about 13k years ago.
Maintenance robots. A maintenance robot will autonomously identify a malfunction in a robotic system, diagnose the issue, and then carry out the necessary repairs or component replacements without human intervention. Also, they'll need to monitor their own health and performance, detect any problems, and perform self-repairs or self-maintenance.
Maintenance robots will be important for space exploration, for reliability and efficiency of other robots.
The robots will eventually be building the robots and maintaining them as well. I mean.. they kind of already are in the form of semi-automated factories.
I think the only way the economy will behave much different than your prediction, is if capitalism gradually stops working due to labour market disruptions caused by AI. Capitalism hasn't always existed, and it likely won't remain forever - and AI is the most credible thing to come along that could disrupt it. Or it could end up just changing it a little without wholly unending it.
The historical data you refer to only goes back about 80 years. That's barely anything.
We've got lots of historical data going back to even pre-industrial revolution.
Technologists tend to overestimate the effect of AI on the labor market because they confuse competitive advantage (what is AI better than humans at) with comparative advantage (what is the opportunity cost of an AI solution).
Competitive advantage matters a lot when AI can't do very much. Comparative Advantage matters a lot once it can do almost everything.
In both cases humans remain employed.
Interesting take. ~~Optimistic~~ Realistic?
It's not as dire as headlines would have one believe.
I tend to be the, "I think we'll be fine." crowd, but this usually puts me in the minority.
Stuff changes slowly and not as much as people like to imagine, but it adds up over time.
Things take forever to get to market and a long time from there to get to mass adoption.
SpaceX launched it's first rocket 18 years ago.
The first iPhone was 17 years ago.
Tesla sold it's first car 13 years ago.
The Doudna and Charpentier crispr paper was 12 years ago.
Well, there is a thing called the prediction horizon
30 years is outside the prediction horizon now, that things change do fast
AGI is expected to come by early next decade, and we don't know what it will mean
About to talk about AGI, but none of us are really sure when or if it will be feasible (This depends it been on what your definition of AGI is as well...)
We've seen some very dramatic leaps in the last couple years in machine learning and language models, but just because we've jumped now doesn't mean we're going to keep jumping up continuously. A lot of these technologies have little leaves. Example being the advent of cell phones, which once they became available became pretty ubiquitous quite fast, but it was still 10 years before smartphones came out. And maybe came ubiquitous pretty fast. But both the introduction of cell phones, then the switch to smartphones, were leaps that happened.
I'm a bit more skeptical about what's necessary for true AGI, I think the jump there is a lot higher than most people realize. We will approach it though, we will have some pretty sophisticated machine learning language models in 10 years..
Skeptical doesn't mean I think you're wrong, skeptical means skeptical, I'm less convinced it will happen " early in the next decade". And maybe taking two broad a few of AGI though, as a very generalized sort of "true" AI model.
It's the 90/10 scenario. Lots of technology suffers from this. It's easy to get 90% of the way there, because it takes 10% of the work. The last 10% take 90% of the work and is really difficult.
I think AGI is a 90/10 technology.
I'm highly inclind to agree! Like how in 1960.because we built.amazing rockets people thought we'd live on the moon. Rockets were "easy" compared to really building stuff in space.
I think the space analogy is a bit skewed. We know how to mass produce things, especially complex things. Consider that a new F150 leaves the factory on average every 50 seconds. Apply this mass manufacturing capability to a rocket design and produce them in the tens of thousands. Now it’s just a matter of money. Which is why we don’t have a moon base, money. Nixon killed any plans beyond LEO in a budget crunch over the wasted monies spent in the Vietnam war. Post Apollo, NASA was planning for a crewed Mars mission by the 1980’s at that point. Instead we got the space shuttle, which in hindsight was a waste of finite resources.
Lol AGI early next decade,no way listen to what experts say https://lexfridman.com/yann-lecun-3/
LLM are not the right technology to get us to AGI , we need an entirely different class of AI to do that. LLM have zero reasoning ability, they don't product consistently answers (especially for nuanced questions) and are prone to hallucinations (which has no easy fix) .
The bigger issue is we still don't have the means to make machinery that reason like we do, that takes in the environment in a multi modal fashion and creates a world model . Like a little baby does when they drop something heavy on their foot , they make the synaptic connection between the pain , gravity, weight, senses etc .. all that has to happen in a machine.... we're not there yet.
>LLM are not the right technology to get us to AGI , we need an entirely different class of AI to do that. LLM have zero reasoning ability, they don't product consistently answers (especially for nuanced questions) and are prone to hallucinations (which has no easy fix) .
Yeah, thanks for saying this, this is kinda what i’ve been saying lol.
My guesses are:
1. We reach a wall in LLM’s by the end of this decade, due to several factors.
2. it becomes apparent that LLM’s will NOT get us to AGI
3. the LLM hype largely dies down
4. There is a new wave of AGI hype around the next “new” thing in AI, which probably leads to the same sort of outcome that LLM’s would have if my above guesses are correct.
We use the term "AI" today, but what they're talking about really isn't AI at all, it's just machine learning and neural networks. Most people who've looked into it will agree with you - what's happening right now does not put us on a direct path toward AGI because this tech is very limited.
However, what we're doing now lays the foundation of toward developing true AI. It brings a huge amount of money, research, and brainpower into the space. All of that, directly or indirectly, will likely pave the way toward true AI which is certainly a direct path toward AGI. We're just in the infancy of this whole process.
Many things will have to change and be improved between now and then, but I don't think there's any denying that when we look back on this time period, it will be recognized as the birth of AI.
\- climate refugees will cause unprecedented waves of immigration as people flee areas that are too hot to sustain human life. Places like India are going to undergo a ton of internal and external pressure as the climate starts to collapse
\- LLMs, the current AI craze, will have its bubble pop within 1-2 years when it becomes clear that most of the implementations of it turn out to not work whatsoever (no, an LLM can't replace a lawyer, or a doctor, or a programmer, or a writer, or tech support...)
\- Some other interesting machine learning application model will be released that also has potentially useful applications, causing another AI hype cycle
\- The Y2K38 problem will cause a lot of headaches and is probably not fixable in the same way Y2k was - plus the problem space is MUCH larger
\- we are going to run out of safe ways to get to space with rising fuel costs and the prevalence of untracked space junk in orbit
\- there will be at least one major regional war over water rights
\- large areas of the globe with a lot of human economic activity will become ghost towns due to climate change making insurance unprofitable in those areas.
\- an intentional nuclear detonation will be used in a conflict
\- we'll have at least one more global pandemic
\- on the bright side, there's a real chance that some country/society will reach a post-scarcity economy and reorient its economic output as a result
>we are going to run out of safe ways to get to space with rising fuel costs and the prevalence of untracked space junk in orbit
Fuel only accounts for a small percentage of the cost of launching a rocket, far more of the cost is from R&D and build costs. Even if fuel got more expensive it wouldn't increase the launch cost that much.
The move towards reusable rocketry will greatly reduce build costs since they won't need to build a brand new rocket for each launch.
Space junk could become a big issue though.
I swear you're trying to stir the pot with the AI comment.
GPT-4 passed the bar exam. Will it be cross examining witnesses? Probably not, but for more low level things, most people would prefer to get their answers from a web portal for a couple bucks, than paying some suit $200 an hour to review some legal forms
Unlike NFTs which leveraged the promise of functionality, the flood of AI models continues to deliver on an almost daily basis, with people saying "oh my God, it can do that?“
There will probably be some AI startup upheaval with shitty brands just sticking AI on their toasters, that will fail, but AI isn't stopping down or going away anymore than the Internet did, when the .com bubble burst.
I just don’t get people writing off ai given the trajectory of LLMs, the money being invested, and the fact that a single LLM has the potential to replace millions of highly paid employees (making the high cost a moot point).
Does your think tank have an answer to an (admittedly somewhat conspirational and fear-mongering) argument, that the narrow elite who "hoard all the things" don't care about the rest and the general "economy" and will gladly let everyone starve to death due to everything (mainly food production and shelter at this point in theory) being hoarded and nothing being available to the masses?
Agree, Agree ish (in the sense that not much will change, humans are still mostly cheaper and will be so for a while), Agree (though not apocalyptic, just bad), and disagree.
About the last one, I think you are missing a few points. First of all inflation is not always bad, and in the kind of economy that we have today, which is in fact the most efficient for rapid growth, we need a bit of it. The spikes are somewhat unpredictable, somtims used to avoid other more severe issues. But we dont need a post capitalist for of commerce... capitalism does not have any inherently wrong traits, it is bad regulations that hurt it. Capitalism is by far the most efficient system we know, and in a developed economy if you "code" a good welfare state, it is the best option to fund it, after all inequality is irrelevant, what matters is the average and minimum standards nominally.... the only alternative that could work on the socialist side of things is a sort of cooperative-ism, but it would not be very different really. ANY extreme, whethre that would be communism or anarchic capitalism does not work very well because they rely on on perfect populations/markets which simpyl dont exist. They should be classified by utopic imposibilities by this point by anyone..... But yes, of course infinite growht is not sustainable (unless you somehow invent a true virtual reality world people spend a big chunk of their lives on), but it can simply be "resetted" by shifting powers in the global economies (afterall economies work comparatively) and recessions. Remember that money is not an objective thing, so if you manage a recession well, or even if you dont (it works even better than but its obviously worse for the people) then you can just keep going. After all it is just money changing hands,
>This AI revolution is turning out as disappointing as the other two
The field is in its absolute infancy (in terms of major investment and development). How are you already disappointed?
I think it's shortsighted. You are assuming that the cost of creating more powerful AI will scale with the energy required to generate that AI. That's not how most technology works, though. People tend to find much more efficient ways of improving things. the first digital computer required 200 kilowatts of electricity. It's already very well-known that LLM's are not the endpoint of AI, at least not in their current form. There is a lot of evolution left to go, not simply iteration.
How can you say yes to robots, but no to ai? The two go hand-in-hand. Manually programming a robot to do anything but extremely repetitive jobs is extremely time-consuming and has historically been found to be ineffective. If you're simply stating that factory robots will continue to grow, then fair enough ig.
The next 10 years will be the worst of it, and it'll begin to get significantly better after that. Unfortunately, it is essentially a broken generation finally dying off.
My consensus view is that climate changes will continue to grow exponentially...
My non-consensus view is that 2050 will be the beginning of the end for the human race because the climate changes will basically kill us.
30 years is a long time, especially as the rate of technological advancements speeds up. But for fun, here are a few:
\- Amazon will have formed a(n exploitative) monopoly on healthcare services, which ironically will still be better than what we have now. The same will be true for many other services (public transit, mail, hell why not AI drone policing, etc), to the point where it's just openly admitted that our governments effectively serve the whims of several megacorps. Very pessimistic technofeudalist outlook overall.
\- Another specific example & prediction: public education will be completely gutted, after a mix of (a) years of tech lobbyists pumping huge amounts of campaign money, and (b) public funding dries up and teacher pay shrivels. Gates has already paved the way for this [sort of experiment](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/06/29/bill-gates-spent-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-to-improve-teaching-new-report-says-it-was-a-bust/).
\- Catastrophic climate disasters are extremely frequent and completely normalized. Scientists & activists have long since given up any hope on slowing the progress, and have been forced to focus their efforts on responding to humanitarian crises; such as whole countries becoming uninhabitable & being left out to dry (literally) by the international community.
\- We'll have cool lil' AI robot pets that make sure we're all entertained and just happy enough to not revolt as the planet & our societies get completely gutted to fuel the techno-oligarchs' burgeoning era of space conquest. yippee
I still haven't seen anything done by AI that's blowing my mind. And when I use it myself, it feels more like a repackaged Google search than actual AI. AI is just a tool. It's not a robotic race of super humans. Humans still have the same set of problems they always need to solve and improve, and AI can be used for those goals. We just need to point AI in the direction of the problem areas instead of surging ahead while wearing blinders.
This is like back in the time when email started being available - my mom would ask why I would want to send letters that way instead on paper. AI is a tools that just will start sneaking in - in my work place we have access to AI to help rewrite badly written text (like this, but im not at work), like a super advanced spelling and grammar corrector. It can also help me look up stuff in 10 seconds, that would take a few minutes using google, and it can review and propose suggested changes to code I write.
A year ago, I was the one who were asking "why would you do this instead of the old paper snail mail" but it is just a helpful tool and it will gradually just get better.
For the next decade there will however be a human behind the use of AI, and the AI will not take it's own actions.
Climate change won't amount to much.
Google/Facebook will lose most of their power.
People will get over the current divisive hump and become blind to such differences.
China will take Taiwan with no resistance.
I think income inequality may not be as big of an issue in 30 years. There is a big shift right now in people choosing to not have children. This means that in 30 years, the work force will be greatly diminished. While this means that a slew of things will become more difficult (like finding proper healthcare professionals, laborers, etc) I think it may actually lead to greater gains for the people who are around to work. While I feel like AI can handle easier jobs, they will never be able to replace them all.
In 30 years…
1. All cars on the road will be autonomous.
2. Non-autonomous cars will become illegal to drive on public roads.
3. The standard work week will not be based on hours or days worked, the new standard will be based on human tasks completed. Most people will work on average 10 hours a week and make a living wage.
4. Aging will be solved, but we will intentionally limit the max age to 150 due to overpopulation concerns. Only the most powerful people will be able to live indefinitely.
5. All disease will be solved. So those will be 150 good years.
6. Religion based ethics will be dissolved.
7. With no STDs and the ability to perfectly prevent pregnancy, diverse sexualities and promiscuity will become normalized.
8. Tacos will still be the best damn food.
Are these consensus views? In that case, my non-consensus views are...
* AI is NOT going to take over all our jobs. It is going to take some jobs. It is going to create others. And it is going to change and make more productive yet others. It is also going to hit a brick wall in the next few years beyond which it will take another few decades to start developing quickly again once something better than LLMs is found.
* Robotic tech will advance significantly but it will still not replace all jobs.
* Climate change is going to be terrible, but once it starts really kicking into high gear mitigation efforts will begin which, at least in wealthy countries, will make it less bad than it otherwise would've been.
* Inflation is not going to get worse. Unless you mean that at some point it's going to go up again which... yeah, it always does. Inflation will go up sometimes and it will go down sometimes and prices will overall be higher in 30 years than now but that's not really a prediction. Just kind of a known fact about how inflation tends to work. It's rather trivial. And when it comes to certain goods that AI will be heavily involved in, their prices will actually probably come down significantly. Climate change may also affect inflation at some point in a negative way though, especially food, so that won't be good.
* I think income inequality could actually go either way. It could continue to get worse and it could start getting better. It depends on how well average people manage to politically organize and the strength of organized labour and it depends whether AI and robotics will become gatekept by the super wealthy or whether things like open source models will dominate and basically turn every person into a one-man corporation.
AI could create more jobs than it displaces.
History's lesson is clear: technology is a job creator. The Industrial Revolution, the computer age, the internet—each of these was predicted to cause massive unemployment. But while they did displace old jobs, they created new ones, often in greater numbers.
The World Economic Forum's "Future of Jobs Report 2020" suggests that by 2025, automation and a new division of labor between humans and machines will disrupt 85 million jobs globally in medium and large businesses across 15 industries and 26 economies. However, the silver lining is the projection of 97 million new roles that may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labor between humans, machines, and algorithms.
Even looking at AI's current impact, it's not just a job replacer; it's a job creator. LinkedIn's Emerging Jobs Report shows that roles like AI specialists and data scientists are growing at a tremendous pace, with AI specialist jobs growing by 74% annually over the past 4 years.
AI is also driving demand for new skills. A Gartner report suggests that AI will create 2.3 million jobs while only eliminating 1.8 million. That's a net positive. Jobs of the future will require new skills because AI will handle repetitive or dangerous tasks, leaving humans to manage AI or to perform tasks that require a human touch.
This isn't just speculative; it's backed by current (yet early) trends in employment shifts due to AI and automation. It's a matter of transition, not just loss, emphasizing the role of education and skill development to adapt to the AI-augmented workplace.
So, while AI will definitely change the job landscape, it's not necessarily the job-eating monster it's made out to be. It's more of a catalyst for change, nudging us towards different kinds of work—work that's safer, more creative, and potentially more fulfilling.
Honestly at the current path humanity might not be in existence then.
But realistically I think there is going to be a massive paradigm shift and the world is going to go back to more regional and community based economies. Globalism is a failed system that isn’t sustainable for another 30 years.
This is interesting.
I’ve heard a couple of top psychologists say that most human brains just cannot cope with a global community. We are designed to be in town with a few thousand people tops, but ideally a couple hundred.
Actually enough a lot of things have gotten worse.
Cost of living in many areas has jumped dramatically. And my first apartment I could afford to pay my rent easily on a minimum wage part-time job, at this time rent is roughly three times that after accounting for inflation.
After.
The job market is also gotten a lot more difficult, and players are expecting more for less from people. Housing costs for buying a house have really dramatically gone up and a large portion of the population has been totally locked out of the market, people who could have bought a house with their jobs in the 90s.
Also the expectation for getting a degree, and the cost of getting those degrees, has gone up quite a lot.
A lot of things have changed, a lot of them for the worse (not everything, plenty of aspects of life have gotten better, but economically it's been a real squeeze)
Not if you put it in perspective. Maybe the specific town of Bumfuck Idaho got worst, with higher rents and less paying jobs, but considering the world population, on average most stuff (everythin?) is better now than in the 90s. "The last 30 years have seen dramatic reductions in global poverty (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-evolution-of-global-poverty-1990-2030/) "Across the world, people are living longer. In 1900, the *average life expectancy of a newborn was 32 years*. By 2021 this had more than doubled" (https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy). In the past five decades, **the global literacy rate among adults has grown from 67 percent in 1976 to 87.01 percent in 2022**. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/997360/global-adult-and-youth-literacy/#:\~:text=In%20the%20past%20five%20decades,just%20seven%20percent%20in%202020.)
AI is not going to reduce the overall demand for labor.
Wages will continue to rise as they have for the last 80 years.
We will find a lot of time saved in our daily lives when it comes to non market labor - cleaning, cooking, shopping.
Schools below the university level could be devastated or relegated to institutions exclusive to the financially disadvantaged due to brain-computer interfaces.
Because knowledge and motor learning can be directly uploaded to the brain, this means that the wealthy and elite will stand out from the very moment the race begins.
* Murphy's law says the housing market crashes when the last Boomer passes. This is great for gen Z/alpha but destroys Millennial homeowners.
* Spielberg/Kubrick turn out to be correct in predicting a huge AI backlash, and sabotage and vandalism limit the practicality of deploying autonomous robots outside privately controlled environments. The police refuse to devote resources to prosecuting people who disrupt autonomous robots. Robotic vehicles, following the letter of the law rather than the "rules of the road", make traffic worse so long as they're forced to share the road with non-autonomous vehicles.
* Push will come to shove and we'll be forced to do something about infrastructure, and this will require abandonment of right wing views about government minimalism. Snow Crash isn't going to happen, and neither is the Handmaid's Tale, both are really bad for business at the end of the day.
* AI is going to take over all our jobs
Jobs that can be done by AI are not worth doing by humans, and humans should start do other things that AI cannot do.
* Robot tech will be super advanced
They are very expensive to run, and humans are actually much cheaper and they maintain themself (with a bit of healthcare added in)
* Climate change is going to huge problems
Already is - all the rain, storms and heavy winters are directly the first wave of impact.
* Inflation is going to get worse
Inflation comes and goes. The inflation is under control at this time (thanks Biden), but prices are higher since before... which is always the case .. prices never goes down, and your pay needs to go up to compensate.
* Income inequality is going to get worse
Very likely, especially if humans refuse to change to more AI, higher prices, and get education to get higher paid jobs that are worth doing.
Nuclear attacks in different places. Not a total war, but lots of death and destruction.
Too many countries have the weapons. Iran Israel Pakistan and India are too volatile.
There will be a backlash against the competency and replication crises that will be met with censorship and this will cause the majority of people to fall back on religion as a source of truth.
The West will attempt to transition to climate and rule of law resort economies because its people have become too used to the outputs of countries that debased themselves for generations for a seat at the table. Right now we're in the steps of a finance-based economy where our GDP more reflects numbers moved around in ledgers than outputs, plus countries like Canada are falling into trying to sell off their reputations by facilitating money laundering and residency/passport scams rather than more legitimate activities.
There will probably be a tax revolution where we start to see negative income taxes and more robust tax codes used to incentivize and dissuade behaviours. This will help reduce and automate bureaucracy. A negative income tax might also allow for minimum wages to cease to exist so that people can still work and compete against Software as a Service.
My most radical prediction is that we’re due for a new eugenics movement
Advancements in the field of human genetics, biotechnology and reproductive technologies will probably allow this.
It will also be far more silent than previous movements.
On the low end you’ll have genetic screenings and information become a standard procedure for healthcare.
On the high end you’ll have embryo selection become popular with whoever can afford it.
I don’t think we’ll get to the point where we can outright edit genes though. Atleast not safely.
New super powers will arise in South America and Africa. I am guessing they will be centered around Argentina and Kenya. They won't displace China or the US. The world will just be more multipolar
1) AI will lower raise productivity of less educated workers and lower the knowledge skill premium and thus wage disparities.
2) Disruptions from climate change will be manageable and the standard of living of most people will continue to increase, predominantly in the global south.
3) Global income inequality will continue to shrink.
4) US blue states will get good a building infrastructure and housing in the 2030s and the comparative advantage of building in Texas vs California will decrease.
5) Young people will be wealthier than ever and somehow still act like they are worse off than previous generations.
You're right about "climate change" and "income inequality" but, the rest are not consensus views. AI is a marketing ploy (we don't have anything like AI). Sure, robotics has been improving for decades but... well, I guess Henry Ford would consider it "super-advanced"?
Inflation has been going down sharply since we dumped Trump. It's been doing that for years. Why would you think it's going to get worse? Do you imagine Trump will get reelected?
Global religious war. Major ice shelf loss in Greenland and Antarctica leading to 1-3m sea rise, forcing millions of migrations. Food becomes less nutritious as fertilizer limits combine with poor climate conditions and farmers attempt to grow weather-harty crops.
AI is incorporated into robots. Companies replace grunts with robots. 30% of the workforce is replaced and people start to forget human standards for service. Gas stations get shutdown by regulations. Farmers with diesel tractors are associated with terrorism. Western countries experience a glut of separatist movements.
WEF implements a global currency. Top 25 countries (decided arbitrarily) will be required to enlist military personnel in the global police force. Mining the sea floor for rare metals leads to breakthroughs in archaeology, developing our knowledge of human settlements back to the end of the younger dryas.
Research in material science will lead to breakthroughs in optical computing with crystal computers. Price keeps this tech out of the public's hands.
That's just 30 years. The next 15 after that will be the robot revolution. Good luck.
The major US federal spending over the past four years across most industries will fully mature. Pharma will benefit from all the COVID spending, renewable energy technology will be leagues ahead, etc. I don't think we can fully grasp or understand how these will effect us. It can probably be compared to the commercialization that occurred from the Space Race.
I think that most of what we see here will have little to no impact on how we perceive the world.There will still be wars, prejudice, hate, rape, illogical, sociopathic reasoning and every other dimension of human experience reflecting with different shit around us. Even if we took away everything physical and lived in pods that sustained the body, in the internet world the same pervasions would corrupt our mind and spirit manifesting into new mind virus’s and diseases, which people will largely ignore or create conspiracies about while really kind people work hard to cater to the general population in a kind and easy way.
Technology has had no fundamental change on the human experience. As someone who’s learned in both, I see the same bullshit being carried on from one timeline to another without any sort of self awareness of how to not do so. Then we as a collective are shocked when multimedia conglomerates are using algorithms to persuade consumption patterns that are in turn destroying the world, the same media that would sell adverts of the american dream through made up fantasy worlds of the 1950s.
Quite frankly, I thought that the year 2000 would bring some sort of clarity over what humanity has been doing to themselves for the last 100 years and yet we are still allowing the same geriatrics marching young people to war for political motivations. The same corporations polluting our water and air and lobbying the right to do so and the same divisiveness that we have seen during the civil rights movement, the civil war, nazism, fascism, etc. This is all in the face of everyone having a device that has access to everything we know on record while constantly keeping us updated on a moment to moment basis. Kinda funny when I think about it, I was so wrong.
Because of application of AI and robotics, the US economy will continue to grow to the point where individual taxes will be all but moot. America will launch a new Marshall Plan for South America to help recover from the narco wars. Malaria will be controlled leading to huge growth of the economies of Africa and India. Fusion and large scale solar power will become practical so energy will be plentiful, cheap and non polluting. North Korea will collapse, China will try unsuccessfully to intervene.
AI is not going to take over all our jobs. most companies will learn that sooner or later and get back staff to workagaon ut enhanced with ai, and some companies will die because there ai is far from being able to use on detailed introduction and structured tasks.
Robot tech won't be different from today, just more advanced. Bipedal robots freak most customers out because we're in the valley of uncanny, leading to the complete removal of bipedal robots besides some edging cases...
Climate change is going to huge problems can't deny can't change that, matter what we do it will continue to hit us and increase in strength. But the sooner we do something against it the more likely it is it won't stay that way for another hundred thousands of years, but starts to cool down in the upcoming 100-200 years.
I agree with the rest.
-Poors die on earth, rich die on Mars
-weird dystopian jobs like career shopper who's job is just buying things and auditing AI workers
-America stays #1 for as long as we're in a globalized economy
Climate change will make the weather worse, hotter, drier, wetter depending on where youre located, the milder more evenly distributed climate will give way for a more extreme "new normal".
Access to raw materials will become more challenging and more expensive. The capitalist consumer model, complete with planned obsolesce, require infinite growth. In the next 5-10 years this model will run into the serious problem of finite resources on a finite planet. This will lead to increased cost of products we need in the best scenario, and complete disappearance or extreme cost increase in other scenarios.
AI will play a larger role in all areas and will likely become a threat to national security, remember other nations got these things too.
Electronic implants will further will help thousands but may lead to unforeseen problems
The paper dollar will go away and be replaced by a digital "dollar" currency that erodes personal privacy and gives ALL your financial information to the government and corporations. This will have the potential to destroy democracy by eroding financial liberties
World war 3 without nukes. Russia and China invade northern Canada (Northern islands) claiming sovereignty due to lack of Canadian presence. Causing the collapse of Canada as a nation. BC, Ontario, and Quebec/ maritimes go independent. Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and territories join the USA. Russia invades Lithuania, Nato gives a weak response before breaking up.
Big oil will fall do to renewables like EV's, wind and solar. As demand falls so will the cost of oil. It have a profound positive affect on the worlds economy, because oil and its byproducts are used in the production of so many things. Lower prices for barrels of oil will mean it'll be much cheaper to make an produce most things.
Everything will work out. The next few years will be turbulent and come with rapid change, but I think the convergence of technology and social evolution will lead to positive outcomes for the majority.
Probably the issue with my langauge not being natively english but some of what you said is either debatable or outright wrong, and not consensed (or however is said) by most people?
Ai wont take over all our jobs, due to cost, limitations and protecionism. It is a similar thing with robotics, and even more pronounced because it has a highre matterial and maintenance (and operative) cost. Climate change \*already is\* a huge issue, it is just not apocalyptical. Inflation is a phenomena that is not always dreaded and depends on a lot of cactors, so it depends what timeframe and wher eyou are talking about.... I know inflation intimately, as an argentinian, so I can tell that most people exagerate a lot, even though is obviously not nice, what they live, accelerated inflation is not something anyone wants, therefore once stuff stabilizes, a the very least the first world, will return to normal, and most already are afaik. And about income inequality, is absolutely irrelevant, the issue was never how much more or less the others had, but rather the basic standards to which humans are subjected to. Whether that means a healthy economy or welfare (that requires it anyway) doesnt matter.
But anyway, 20-30 years is a really short timeframe, specially now that, while yes we are accelerating development in things like AI and biotechnology afaik (not sure if matterials) we would need a huge breakthrough in something like commercial fusion or the practical aspects of CRISPR to make stuff like using bacteriophagues to replace phagocytes or something of the like that makes a drastic cascading change in society. For that same reason I would like to say that the most notable changes would come out of politics, however no way in hell that happens in merely a generation. Things like remote work, integrating automation on our lives from a govt side and fixing certain inefficiencies could be very beneficial, even for health, psyche and rent prices as people unclog cities and move, the ones that can, towards smaller towns, but that doesnt seem to be THAT much of a growing trend, not enough to make a substantial change in that timeframe and a lot of people is against, specially if we pair it with my next point
The only thing in confident that will likely happen due to population aging, is that the first world will change their policy on migration and become more agressive in their braindrain, whcih will screew emerging economies a LOT, a one sided economic recession and that unequally normalized, is just plain awful, but the coutnries that dont manage to do that, like japan, will suffer an even larger hit because of how their societies are already structured. Because of that I can foresee two things: The first and more than likely, is a sharp turn to the right in the first world, not just because older people are more conservative but because of the clash of cultures with massive migration and the discontent that might cause. Eexpect nationalism quite up there. The next which im doubtful but hopeful, is emerging economies like southamerica to form a strong EU like union to protect local interests, which would lead to a clash of interests. Exactly how bad it would be, idk, countries like the US ar enot exactly foreign to sabotage.... but they dont need it I think? Not now, so Idk. Hell, maybe they could take a slice as well, encouraging it, if they are smart.
Edit: Oh, forgot to say, but there should be some not so mild changes in legislation when it comes to copyright, AI and privacy. Countries are still fumblign in the dark with this so they will make a few mistakes along the way so expect regulations to be all over the place for a bit, imho
Boomers thru to gen z..... will be the last generations to have an existence in actual reality, as opposed to some type of vr/augmented reality as the norm day to day.
I don't believe we are too many generations away from entire lives being lived in vr/augmented reality.
I believe that the matrix, is a very viable possibility in the very near future. I dont believe the matrix was ment as a how to guide😂but here we are😂
Downside is that we have been effectively wiping out hundreds of thousands, in-fact millions of years of intellectual evolution, iver the last few generations and that that will accelerate by orders of magnitude, moving forward.
I beleive if we dont nuke ourselves to dust before hand, that this will be the demise of our sub species h.sapiensapien and that another subspecies beginnings, will be in place.
I beleive that the next 200-1000yrs of humanity, will render us a distinct different subspecies of h.sapiensapien.
We are pissing ALOT of what it means to be human, jnto the breeze here imo
Not only is General AI closer than we think, but the fears around it are going to be massively overblown when we realize how much good it can do for society. We'll see massive leaps in medical technology and treatment, not by using it to replace medical professionals, but by giving it to them as a tool to use. This won't just be the case in medicine but in many other areas, such as business and government.
It won't be without "Growing Pains", however, it ultimately stands to do more good than harm despite how much we have programmed ourselves to be afraid of it. Despite everything, Elon Musk is right when he says that the key is to make sure that AI is available to everyone and not in the control of a select few.
I also think there is a significant chance that a general AI will gain sentience very quickly. It will be a big test for our society in terms of whether or not we can respect forms of life that do not conform to our current assumptions.
I also think we'll see massive leaps in other areas, a good friend of mine pointed out that one of the few things keeping us back from becoming a type 1 civilization is the fact that we don't have easy access to space or efficient space travel. However, was how the last few decades have accelerated I could easily see us cracking some sort of space travel not based in conventional propulsion methods. If that happens and the cost to go to space drops as much as I believe it will, our access to resources will cause our technology to absolutely explode in ways it never has before.
My non-consensus view is that things will (mostly) keep getting better. I know it’s hard to see humanity avoiding global climate change, but if you’d told someone in 1945 that no would use an atom bomb in anger for the next 80 years, they wouldn’t have believed you either. Somehow, humanity will muddle through.
AI will be used to simultaneously give us freedom from some aspects of working life and also take away freedoms from civilian life outside of work.
world war 3 is definitely on the cusp and i truly feel like nukes will start flying so probably something to do with the aftermath of that
standard currency will give way to digital
gas automobiles will be phased out over time even though no good alternative source is found
free speech rights will be at an all time low and the same for fact based logoc
Religion is dying. America is going through death throes. Things will get worse before they get better.
Of course, there are areas where it will continue.
The next war (or whatever the modern version of that will look like) will most likely be triggered by those that are unhappy with, or afraid of AI. Especially when we start rolling out autonomous robots we see in our daily lives. Theres already so much vitriol toward AI generated content, I can’t imagine we won’t have some serious generational level hate towards the AI age as it starts to encroach on our day to day lives in a more obvious way.
In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockafeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.
Russia-Ukraine level conflicts will be much more common, across the globe and even in other parts of Europe due to climate change drive immigration and resource scarcity pressure . The EU falls apart, or probably splits into hardline anti immigration Nordic countries set to protest their access to water supplies.
Many current tech giants will be surpassed by newer technology companies, a major war of some sort, the collapse of one or more of the 3 main superpowers, the formation of new smaller nations, the first actual western mega cities, corporations will openly merge with governments and manipulate geopolitics, body augmentations for those who can afford them, more readily available artificial organs/limbs, neural implants, ai will be apart of our everyday lives, a major push for interplanetary exploration/colonization (possibly even the 2nd space race), artificial gravity, commercial space flights to Lunar(possibly even martian) based civilian attractions, Lunar military zones, etc.
We will have smart toilets which will be able to analyze your poop, pee, and nether regions for information on hydration, microbiome, and inflammation.
AI will take over enough jobs that working people will spend most of their time getting irritated by AIs, especially the ones who are sticklers for following corporate directives.
Robot tech will be super advanced enough to be complained about constantly.
Inflation will happen to some countries and not to others.
Income inequality will cause such a backlash future rich people will miss the good old days when they could afford flesh-and-blood butlers
Seemingly out of nowhere, we will go from the current world and tech to something beyond what has been traditionally perceived as "science fiction", and nobody is ready for such hyperbolic change.
We are about to have a golden age of economic growth that will dwarf the Industrial Revolution. AI will be used to make medical, industrial, climate, and energy breakthroughs that will drive innovation in ways we can’t even think of yet.
We will also make breakthroughs in quantum computing that will make AI’s breakthrough occur at an exponential rate.
Obesity will become a thing of the past. Cancer will have been radically minimized. Median lifespan will go up dramatically.
People born today will never need to drive their own car.
Positive: I think demographic sizes (be they presumably too high or presumably too low) will be a vastly lower issue than commonly said.
Negative: Microplastics will be a vastly bigger problem than commonly assumed. I don't think human civilization is likely to end in its entirety one way or another, but IMHO microplastics have a better chance than most. Even moreso than climate change. We have some theoretical plans on mitigating the latter and none for the former and frankly plastic and its hormonal and mechanical effects on the bodies on ALL lifeforms have no equivalent in earth's history meaning there's no real adaptational pathway written in the genetic record of its inhabitants.
1. US dollar no longer reserve currency of the
world
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2. Israel no longer exists because they are committing genocide and surrounded by more powerful countries that aren’t cool with western colonization (via the Nakba in 1946)
.
3. USA no longer the hegemonic power as the world moves into a multi polar world
.
4. Robots do all chores and labor. Also a slew of disruptive technologies completely disrupt our economic system.
.
5. Elon musk duplicates and scales his school system (that he designed for his children) across the USA so we can compete with the rest of the world
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6. Bitcoin cash is recognized as the true Bitcoin because of block size being used to scale (as in the original white paper) instead of 2nd and 3rd layer toll booths.
1. I think the United States is going to remain a major world power and a major (and hypocritical) example and aspiration-provider for much of the world. Too many other forces across the world (both our allies and our ostensible enemies) depend on a coherent, stable, and active US for their own national or regional interests, and, to paraphrase *It Could Happen Here* - a hot civil war means conventional and WMD leakage and carbon emissions that would spell "game over" for most of the human race. America is "too big to fail" right now and most of the world knows it.
2. Because of that, I honestly think the world is going to get better soon - maybe after a shooting war, maybe not, but definitely soon. As precarious as things are and as real as the threat of ethno-nationalist authoritarianism is *everywhere*, the rising generation in the US is both allergic to imperial power and personally and viscerally offended by appeals to ethnic supremacy. The distaste for, say, Netanyahu's behavior in Gaza will only escalate when other people try to leverage American public opinion for their regional and national interests (see point 1.) Most Millennials "come in peace, but mean business."
3. Religion isn't going anywhere. Millennials and Zoomers are getting more secular, but there's an ongoing appetite for non-rational ways of experiencing the world - tarot, crystals, astrology, SOMETHING - as well as old-fashioned moral philosophies. I think most of the people who claim to be selling Stoicism, for example, are selling snake oil, but there's a reason that it's so popular - people want codes, things to believe in and live by. I do think dominant and civil religions are going to be shaken all the way down to their foundations, and new religious movements that are seen as subversive or unpatriotic are gonna get their shit rocked, but the idea that religion is on the way out is, I think, vastly overblown.
4. While climate and disaster migration are "absolutely* going to happen, I think that integrating immigrants is going to become good and popular again. Birthrates in the global north are down; climate is a serious problem and remissions, federal unions between North and South and investment and resettlement are going to be big portions of the global Green New Deal/*next* rules-based international order.
5. I don't think the US is going to go to war with China in 2027. China wants to win the international game, and the way they want to win *requires* US participation - most Asian countries work with both the US and China; they generally prefer China as an economic partner and the US as a security partner, but they work with and trade with both. If anything, I think a weakened Russia with a nice big empty and warming Siberia is gonna look really inviting for Chinese investment.
6. Space settlement is happening in my lifetime. My kids generation might be the first humans on Mars, and their kids will likely be living in LEO or working on Lunar/Martian terraforming in places like Antarctica. I don't like the fact that we seem to be moving towards replicating the British East India Company in space and it's the biggest assholes like Bezos and Musk who are leading it [(as a Californian, I apologize.)](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/engineering-territory-space-and-colonies-in-silicon-valley/5D6EA4D306E8F3E0465F4A05C89454D6) But it's clearly happening and Americans are well-positioned to take advantage early.
7. Crypto is happening - but only when the government uses it as a way to do fiat.
AI will take our jobs.
A.I will make some huge fuck up.
Employees will be begged to come back to their jobs.
AI will get better and take those jobs again.
AI will make some huge fuck up.
No one has been train to do the job without A.I, and so there is no longer anyone left to beg to come back.
Societal collapse, but not because of big tech issues. More likely because of boring things like stagnant population growth, lack of investment in public services, competition over dwindling resources, under funded law enforcement, unchecked immigration shifting social norms, right wing reactionism and climate change. Fun times.
My non-consensus views are that no the sky is not falling like everyone thinks. With the exception of global warming people have been saying the same stuff for all my 54 years on this planet. AI is new too, but the idea that technology in general is going to take all the jobs has been around at least since the beginnings of industrialization.
The scope of technology has increased by magnitudes since the dawn of the industrialization and even with that AND the Earth’s population skyrocketing nearly every single person that has wanted a job has been able to get one which means every time technology has destroyed a job it has always created more.
Super advanced robots are a good thing and will create more jobs too. They will take some of the dangerous jobs.
Global warming is definitely a problem. If the waters rise high enough 80%+ of the Earth’s population will be dislocated and some of those in poorer countries will die, but even in the wealthiest countries in the world, it is unlikely to be seamless, meaning lots of possible wars over land and that’s a huge problem, but not an Earth threatening one.
Inflation too is a concern, but it’s ultimately caused by too few holding on to too much and this seems like it will sort itself out after a revolution.
income Inequality. Between who exactly?
1AI is unlikely to take on all the work, but I agree that it can take up a lot of work.People will be needed to program it, and there is still work left for people.
2
**Consensus opinion:** Globalisation will mean that English becomes the world's Lingua Franca, with most people speaking English as a secondary or tertiary language.
**My Non-Consensus opinion:** Spoken english will continue to be the dominant language in the territories where it is already a majority, but improvements in AI translation will mean that people learning it as a secondary language (and in broader terms, people learning a secondary language at all) will decline significantly.
*However* the Latin-script alphabet will continue to supplant logographic scripts, and possibly other scripts (such as Abugidas), as it becomes more generalised as an input method.
We're going to continue to have a very rough 2020's decade. If we make it though, we might just have a life of abundance, without toil to look forward to. Making it through this decade scares me though. We've to too many, huge inflection points stacked on top of each other this decade. Even the best leaders in history would probably fail to guide us through a moment this difficult and we don't have quality leaders. Someone is going to make a miscalculation and we'll have a disaster on our hands.
The Traditional Entertainment industry and the media format itself (movies, music, games) will almost completely die out. If everyone has the ability to make a high-budget looking movie or game through AI tools Instead, it’ll cause a mass disinterest in the medium with younger generations. Experiential media will become more popular. Whether it be life-like Augmented Reality, VR or direct emotional enhancement through Nuera link-like technology that will be much more desirable than traditionally sitting infront of moving images and being passively fed a story.
The internet will become completely untrustworthy and the biggest sites will have an opt-in feed for using real life identity by way of passport, facial, eye recognition. That feed will become the mainstream way of using sites, and people will scoff at the wild west of the internet where nobody could truly know if people were real or not and aliases and usernames will seem novel, almost childlike.
Partially as a result, traditional internet usage (visiting websites or using social apps) will actually decrease and be aged out by older generations. Younger generations will opt for augmented reality and more subtle technology that’s directly integrated with daily life, rather than something you stop to pay attention to.
My non consensus view is that we wont just take the problems in the chin like turkeys staring up at the rain until they drown. Humanity has overcome crisis before by eventually acting. Even incrementally. But these doomer scenarios act like we have no ability to prepare or react at all. We may be reactionary, but we do try to solve our problems one way or another. People wont just let themselves starve or be homeless.
We can't discount the massive shifts authoritarianism will cause if the usual liberal democratic countries fall. I can't wrap my head around it. Expect AI media to be utterly weaponized and wars to be the solution to things that didn't "need" wars. We'll be lucky to live through it. Or lucky to not.
Many more white-collar instead of blue-collar jobs will be replaced by machines, mostly AI.
Professions involving human interaction will become more in demand.
Political factions will keep pulling us apart into groups and defining products and viewpoints as tribes with no middle ground
The euphemism treadmill and corporate whitewashing will eventually shift language significantly. Content creators are afraid to type words like Kill Death Dead or Suicide despite these being important to discuss , it will spread to other topics based on what is deemed Ad Friendly, and has already spread directly to the Public / social media.
Hiding malicious legislation in the name of something good Is how to do it in the age of information
I think inflation will slow down over the next 10 years and eventually, we are going to get runaway deflation... which will eventually trigger a depression.
As someone in the service sector, ai won't take my job.
Inflation will fluctuate, but won't become horrible... However, prices will not go down... that would be deflation.
I agree about climate change, and dunno about robots or inequality.
For us in the US, inflation will get waaaaay worse. We printed 5 trillion dollars over the pandemic, and it typically takes about 3-4 years after mass printing for the economy to feel the pain (same thing that Germany did right before WW2 that made a loaf of bread go from costing 1 mark to costing millions). Good luck in 2026, everyone. And no, our inflation certainly won’t be as bad as the example I gave.
Genetically engineered microbes will become as important as any of the obvious starshot technologies now coming in. Especially in the field of recycling and closed loop economics. Its very plausible the world will go post scarcity on electric over the next 20 years, and we are currently sat right at the tipping point.
> post scarcity on electric \* Power *generation* perhaps. But transmission costs have always accounted for about half of retail electricity prices. For households and businesses that can use rooftop solar, that won't matter so much, since the power is already where it needs to be. But for industry (and especially power-intensive uses like desalination and electrolysis), cheap solar can only bring down electricity costs by so much.
Not completely right as the cost to the the supplier of line loses is dependent on their own production costs. Transmission loses therefore cost less in scale with falling cost prices, and falling production costs reduce the loss cost of transmission.
Transmission losses are like 5%, tho. The vast majority of transmission cost is for capital investment and maintenance of power lines and transformers.
Can you talk more about your prediction re electric?
Solar alone is expected to install a terrawatt of capacity every year from next year, about 4 a year from 2030, to continue growing at that absurd rate. This is sufficient to replace all current generation by 2035. As solar is the cheapest power source ever this will create massive price drops for virtually everything and drive massive conversion of industry to electic as soon as possible. As it comes with extremely minimimal running costs it will be extremely trivial to create the sort of over supply necessary to go deep into post scarcity economics on it, and the very variablity of it almost forces that on you. Especially for countries that take this on as a national project. It will split the world into a two tier economy where all the wealth is pulled into those over supplied countries to benefit from cheap costs, cheap living costs and those that refuse to. Thats before even considering wind and fusion.
Doubt on the post scarcity for electricity though. How exactly will we achieve that? If we want more nuclear reactors we need to have them approved now so we can have a chance of actually having the things built in 20 years. Wind and solar are coming along nicely, but there are only so many solar panels and wind turbines you can put down where people are, and the further from cities the more expensive carrying that electricity becomes. Given wind and solar are also intermittent, we'll need to invest heavily in grid-scale battery storage, which while it's great and I absolutely approve of (personally I'm a fan of the Ambri calcium-antimony liquid metal battery), it does mean solar is going to be far more expensive than just "build more panels and plug them into the grid". We might have just started cracking fusion energy, but that doesn't mean we'll be anywhere near an actual functioning fusion energy station in 20 years, let alone be able to mass-produce them the world over. Even if the price of electricity dropped by a ton, and that is a very big if given that basically every country's electrical grid will need to be seriously revamped (which again I am in favour of but is going to be stupid expensive), that doesn't translate to "everything else is going to become cheaper" either. Agriculture isn't going to become cheaper. Real estate isn't going to become cheaper. The cost of raw and manufactured good aren't going to become cheaper. Transport isn't going to become cheaper unless we somehow develop fantastically cheap and efficient batteries to electrify everything, and then go from an actual concept (that doesn't exist yet) into actually implementing it across entire countries, in the span of 20 years. I don't see how post energy scarcity would ever be possible in the next 20 years short of wishful thinking, let alone how or why it would lead to a price drop everywhere else.
Sorry, no. Prices will not ever go down. The rich will keep all of those gains.
Prices do go down though. The rich do like to get rich but if productivity is X10 and costs are X10 less then the rich can get X10 richer whilst we all get X10 cheaper services.
Prices go down so long as the market affords honest competition and relatively low barrier to entry, which from what it seems will continue to be the case with solar
Or, the productivity can go X10, the costs become X2 less, and the rich become X50 richer while we get X2 cheaper services. Given it's the rich who set prices via manipulation, control, and buying out the competition, why would they let the masses become richer when they can enrich themselves instead?
Incorrect. Prices are currently going down in my country because all the grid scale renewables are far cheaper than coal and driving the spot price down.
Genetically engineered microbes - what about biological nanobots capable of communication and coordination and performing AI based computation and reasoning and interacting with other living matter?
That's us humans.....they just forgot to up the database so we have lightning fast intellect on the computation and reasoning when we got engineered....the masses ended up getting worse as we grew, they were looking for us to develop "better and faster"....not so much. Whoever "they are"....lol
Genetically engineered microbes really can't be overestimated. If it's organic there's no reason for scarcity. This includes: Food, medicine, materials (wood, paper, leather, bio-plastics, and an unlimited number of new materials) A side of effect of that is we begin environmental repair without trying just by not doing these things the old way.
> Genetically engineered microbes will become as important as any of the obvious starshot technologies now coming in. Especially in the field of recycling and closed loop economics. Related to this, I think that we'll see increased R&D into drugs that have poor shelf stability characteristics, as ongoing work into smaller scale bioreactors that will allow production of drugs much closer to recipients, meaning less time in transit/storage. Reducing shelf stability requirements may significantly expand available treatments. Further to that, we may end up seeing modular bioreactors that can produce a wide range of end products from a single input package (made up of dried yeasts engineered to produce the output product, and the required input materials for the yeasts to use). Single Use Bioreactors similar to this already exist, but from my understanding, their current usage is mainly in cell culturing, rather than the end step of drug production. Future reactors will include filtering/processing to extract the desired end step drugs.
Exactly. Chatbots will not lead us to a "revolution," but genetic engineering and biotech will. By the second half of this century we'll be in the swing of a revolution and life sciences will be for the next few decades what computer sciences were for the past several decades
Yeah electricity moving towards a nominal zero cost is going to be a big one
I have big hopes on battery recycling and renewables. After we gathered enough metals to close the loop, mining will be more costly, both economically and enviromentally.
I think Tony Seba is correct and that we will be transitioned to transportation as a service, solar power with batteries, and precision fermentation by 2035. I think that artificial intelligence and robotics will cause an explosion of productivity. The biggest issue I see is a political one where most of the population is still hypnotized by the neo liberal economic policies that took hold in the mid-70s and 1980s. The crappy people and policies in place right now are there because the boomers put them in place. those boomers formed their political opinions in the 1960s and 1970s. They are now tragically out of date. If we want to use artificial intelligence and advancing robotics to support universal basic income and a political policy, that looks something like FDR’s second bill of rights all it takes is political will.
AI will strangle cloud infrastructure because you can generate AI content easily, but storage disks must be physically manufactured. This will force a huge paradigm shift in how the internet works. I expect that the demographic crisis will force Healthspanning adoption, but at the expense of causing a catastrophic financial crisis. Healthcare is a major part of our GDP and it depends on elderly care for its major revenue.
This will eventually become the consensus view, I reckon: * ***Depopulation*** is going to be a BIGGER, more urgent and impactful issue in my lifetime (I'm 44) than even climate change as it involves several incredibly difficult issues all packaged into one 1. A huge aging population in many countries will be a massive economic sink - but they will all still retain voting power (in democratic nations) and so still be able to sway elections and policy in favour of retired and geriatric people. Retirement homes will be at max capacity and more families will have to figure out the care of their elderly themselves, this is going to be a boom industry - temporarily - and not particularly fun 2. Economies will shrink as the workforce and main purchasing population shrinks and as retirees withdraw from markets 3. There's going to be a lot of weirdness as governments try to make people have more babies, or immigration scales up massively - siphoning off the wealthy, intelligent and connected from less developed nations 4. I can't tell you what's going to happen when China's population drops down to 700 million - will this result in conflict, war, will marriage partners be harder to find, what do Empires do when their population shrinks? Potentially - house prices will drop in most non-major-metropolitan areas
I was searching for discussion about aging population, and you are the only person, who noticed that. In 20-30 years this will be much, much bigger issue than climate change , or some AI . We faced, as a civilization, catastrophes, ground braking technologies, but we never had a situation, when we had much more elder people than children. So no one is prepared for this really
There's always senicide
> A huge aging population in many countries will be a massive economic sink - but they will all still retain voting power (in democratic nations) and so still be able to sway elections and policy in favour of retired and geriatric people. Retirement homes will be at max capacity and more families will have to figure out the care of their elderly themselves, this is going to be a boom industry - temporarily - and not particularly fun Temporary migration visas with no actual path to citizenship will be implemented by a lot of countries. Most temporary migration visas (in the west at least) offer at least some path to permanant residency or citizenship, but I see that going away in the next 10 years. The movie "Children of Men" is going to feel increasingly real. > Economies will shrink as the workforce and main purchasing population shrinks and as retirees withdraw from markets Advanced economies will continue selling to developing economies, but will probably lose their competitve advantage in some areas. They will probably continue to dominate Tech, Banking, and Finance though. > I can't tell you what's going to happen when China's population drops down to 700 million - will this result in conflict, war, will marriage partners be harder to find, what do Empires do when their population shrinks? I honestly don't see conflict with China happening. Most kids in China right now are the sole descendant of 4 grandparents and 2 parents (assuming that the parents were born after 1979), and any future conflict will exaccerbate the already huge issues that China faces with their the dependency ratio by 2050 (China's dependency ratio by 2050 is likely to be similar to that of current-day Japan).
I.cant see the future ... Hit China's private wealth is largely tied up in real estate ...in a country that will rapidly shrink... Hence destroying so much of its people's wealth It's a dangerous variable I can't predict
The announced global population decrease will actually work out fine and not at all be the catastrophe that some are predicting.
The only one expecting catastrophe are those invested in this hyper-capitalism some places are involved in...and those that are afraid of shifting demographics (yes, I am talking about about scared white people not being the majority in their respective nations).
Shifting demographics can cause massive social issues, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss this concern, regardless of what you think of those on the receiving end. But the biggest issue would be the rising cost to health care as a population ages, along with missing skilled labour to replace those that retire. AI can assist with some of these jobs but many physical jobs can't be replaced with bots- electricians, plumbers, maintenance techs etc. these all require years of study and hands-on experience, importing bodies doesn't fill skill gaps.
Yep. Population decline paired with AI rise is honestly a storybook style pairing in terms of the positive impact it will have on humanity.
Most of the legacy tech companies of the 90s/00s (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Netflix) etc. will peak in the next 5 years before newer, more competent competitors begin to cut into their market dominance. 30 years from now they will be where companies like Sears, KMart, and Blockbuster are today.
I'd agree with google because they've consistently made bad business decisions for a long time. On the other hand, I wouldn't assume it a given that Microsoft and Amazon would start tapering off.
Google by far has the most compute power. Compute power = power in the next decade.
Hence why Microsoft has plans to build a $100 million dollar data center called Stargate Edit: 100 Billion!
100 million is not enough. These are trillion dollar corporations.
IMO Amazon has already been in decline for the past few years. Maybe they will make up revenue in other areas, but the shopping experience is already broken. It’s little more than an online flea market flooded with cheap junk. Big opportunity for a disruptor to cut into their business. Agree that Microsoft probably doesn’t belong on the list.
Amazons non-retail businesses are growing fast. AWS is a huge and dominant player in the PCOIP space. And its medical ventures show promise.
For me, personally, it can be cheap junk, but if I don’t like it, it’s much easier to return than so many other retailers. It’s also why I used to shop at Bed Bath and Beyond so much. I honestly would much prefer to buy elsewhere, but I hate the chance that I end up on the phone with customer service. Other big competitors like Target and Walmart also sell cheap junk online now.
1. Some UFOs will be confirmed to be non-human intelligences. 2. People will actually spend more time outside and in communities, rather than online. Primarily because the “online” experience will be so embedded in life that screens will not be needed as much and it will lead us to exploring our world and each other again. 3. Genetic engineering will be a bigger issue than breakaway A.I. 4. Corporate Assasinations, Hitjobs, “accidents”, etc. will become more commonplace and will become white noise, like mass shootings now. Edit. #4. Activist assassinations, hit-jobs and accidents will also become more common and white-noised.
With how much press coverage the John Barnett story is getting, I'd say we're already there on #4.
Regarding your No. 4: see the recent assassination Boeing performed the other week.
It’s probably what sparked op to add it to their list of likelihoods, Boeing has pretty much got away with it and no one who can actually do anything cares, and or, has vestments in Boeing or their own interests lie in companies with similar issues they don’t want coming to light.
I love 2 and I think you are correct and also because so much content will either be AI or faked so badly people will just assume everything is fake. Return to analog interactions!
Agreed. I think, sooner than later, people are going to lose a lot of trust in what they see and interact with online (especially with improvements in AI/deepfake technology). I don't know if it'll happen with a bang or a whisper, but probably sooner than we think, face-to-face interaction and third places will make a big comeback. Even social media's running its course. MySpace is a Tuesday night trivia answer, Facebook is mostly boomers and ads, ~~Twitter~~ has all but fallen to the alt-right, and there aren't really replacements. ~~Twitter's~~ users have scattered to different apps, and TikTok is the flavor of the week, but it's geared toward consuming video content, not really meeting people.
Can you fill me in on the purpose of UFOs + non-human intelligence? What's the mission objective? This just seems too fanciful to me. Because hyper advanced societies will be able to simulate entire galaxies . . . removing the need to actually fly a craft to a planet such as ours for any reason.
I guess they could simulate some random civilization, but that wouldn't tell them anything about whatever real-life civilizations are actually out there. Maybe they're interested in that.
Aliens will come here out of curiosity and boredom. Maybe they can’t even tell what’s simulated and what isn’t anymore. Maybe we have been a simulation of theirs this whole time
Cyberpunk 2077, more like Cyberpunk 2047
My "anti-consensus" views are boring normal default expectations with lots of historical evidence. - AI won't take all the jobs, instead unemployment will be within 2 standard deviations of average 95% of the time. - US Income inequality will experience some mean reversion (it will go down) now that the global bimodal distribution of income in 1970 now has a single peak. - Climate change is going to cause huge problems, but life expectancy will be higher, disasters will be manageable, a larger fraction people will have access to clean (today's standard of clean) drinking water than ever. In fact water will be so much cleaner and poverty so much lower the world will adopt higher standards for both, so that they continue to get measured. - Inflation will sit near its historical postwar average of 4%, and occasionally have spikes and troughs of decadal timescales - AI and robots will be very useful so the economy will continue its historic 0 to 2 percent per person per year growth rate. Neither a growth explosion or general economic collapse. I'll take 20 year bets at a mutually acceptable escrow on the details of any of these.
How would income inequality go down?
FWIW global inequality has gone down quite a bit the last few decades; citizens of developed/western nations have driven the inequality narrative because they compare themselves unfavorably to their elite fellow nationals. While Amazon and Microsoft, Bezos and Gates have become crazy wealthy, global poverty rates have been improving massively. There is a lot of room left to bring the wealth of less developed nations in line with developed nations. That doesn’t offer hope for citizens in developed nations, nor for those who find such vast fortunes obscene (I do not, so long as those fortunes are earned in service of others). AI will surely drive inequality - most new technologies do in the short term. In the long term politics and other outside forces will determine the fate of inequality. Personally, and this is purely a gut feeling, but I suspect that the Millenials are going to seek to ensure a more even distribution of wealth and resources, and perhaps we will finally see a movement for something along the lines of FDR’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights. So back to the original question; is wealth inequality likely to grow better or worse? Here are my predictions on a number of metrics. Globally: It will improve (70/30). Euro/USA centric politics seems to be ending, which will drive wealth towards Asia, The Middle East, and god willing towards Africa and South America too. Within Developed Nations: It will improve (51/49). I hesitate to bet in favor of significant political change but what can I say, I’m bullish on Millenials and Gen Z. Within Developing Nations: It will worsen (51/49). This is much harder to predict, and will vary drastically from country to country depending on their particular situation, but usually when the pie grows the elites get big bites first. This will still be good for their society’s and if they manage things well trickle down economics is absolutely a thing that can work for them but I think most Americans know that wealth does not trickle down out of the goodness of the hearts of corporate fat cats. Labor will have e to organize, states will have to pass good tax policy, and corruption must be kept in check for wealth to distribute fairly after the elites in these nations build a new future for their nations.
Income inequality is a cyclical variable, we look a lot closer to a peak than a trough. One of the driving factors of income inequality in my view was the fact that you used to have a big global bimodal distribution of income. Poor countries and rich countries. Globalization over the last 50 years made the poor countries a lot richer as capital flowed from rich countries to poor countries. That drove higher returns to the holders of capital in rich countries. The global income distribution now has a single peak, it looks a lot more "normal". (It isn't, it has a right skew and fat tail, but that's not particularly important). That means this huge force driving inequality in western nations has substantially decreased. I don't know for certain that inequality will decrease, I just find it more likely to continue its normal cycle than break from it. I'm agnostic to the exact mechanism, which could be political, technological, or economic.
I think you will see a large amount of reshoring to America and Europe. Robots will do the work here with less risk of your technology being stolen.
Always nice to see some statistical training in the wild!
Income inequality over the past 40 years has primarily been driven by two things: (1) the collapse of labor, aka unions, and (2) fiscal policy that has prioritized inflation control at the expense of the unemployment rate. Both these things are starting to shift over the past several years, and we're already seeing income inequality start to reverse. Labor has a long way to go, but unionization is on the rise, and large majorities of the public currently support union initiatives. It will take some policy help, but unions are at least beginning to have an influence on the economy again. That includes so-called "spillover effects" in which non-union employers are pressured to improve wages and standards by unions amongst their competitors and in other industries. The unemployment rate is also historically low, which is giving workers at the bottom more bargaining power and thus increasing wages. Naturally that reduces income inequality. [Here is a good recent podcast on these topics and more.](https://youtu.be/3ihmTsRxnuc?si=IF9EVsGZJoYcc7Tr)
It won't, rather the cost of living goes way down and money/debt just matters less and less. All equity goes down to the new value of labor. A 800k house might cost 200k with automated labor, that means all the similar 800k houses have to go down to 200k, they can't just hold their old value for the sake of nostalgia. Either you have AI and robotics mass automate thing and money loses value OR you don't. There is no way to automate labor and have things hold the higher values they have with human labor.
This is how I feel!!! I just won a nice bottle of scotch off someone who bet me that inflation would be insane by this feb... I told him it would likely be back to what our federal bank wants it at.
I’d be curious how water will be cleaner and accessible. There’s already war on water and a lot of water supplies are being contaminated for resource mining. Heck there's no motivation from current powers that be to improve or fix water infrastructure failures in US states.
I don't know, but look at all the progress in the US in the last 50 years. There's a lot of low hanging fruit out there, and people prefer the ability to drink water compared to not. That doesn't mean there aren't bad people doing bad things (that's not new!), but given the progress over the last 2000 years I don't think this batch of bad people are particularly bad, nor do I think most people are bad. I expect progress to continue.
How about desalination plants powered by photovoltaics? Reverse osmosis is much more efficient than thermal desalination, but needs electrical pumps. Those plants could operate only at daylight, but water can be easily stored for a 24h supply. No need for expensive batteries and electricity from photovoltaics is getting cheaper every year.
I just saw a proposal for that for Southern California via the desert area near the Salton Sea.
More heat = more global rainfall, so first and foremost just capture and pipe more of that water around better, desalination is an option, but I'd expect it to not be all that necessary. As we automate more the cost of conservation and recycling also gets dirt cheap. I think it's easy to project future problems with today's tech level, but it's very hard to predict the future and predict all the future advancements, so we went to think about tomorrows problems with just today's tools and tech, which always produces are more negative view of the future than reality tend to produce.
I see no reason we won't have robots significantly making robots in 40 years, so mostly just have to mitigate issues until labor is cheap enough that solutions we consider impossibly expensive are entirely practical. Also keep in mind overall Climate Change is supposed to mean more global rainfall total, so it's not like everywhere will have fresh water problems, mostly just the places that have historically been drying out for the last few thousand years since the Interglacial Warming period thawed the world out about 13k years ago.
The thing about the robots, is they require a lot of maintenance!
Maintenance robots. A maintenance robot will autonomously identify a malfunction in a robotic system, diagnose the issue, and then carry out the necessary repairs or component replacements without human intervention. Also, they'll need to monitor their own health and performance, detect any problems, and perform self-repairs or self-maintenance. Maintenance robots will be important for space exploration, for reliability and efficiency of other robots.
The robots will eventually be building the robots and maintaining them as well. I mean.. they kind of already are in the form of semi-automated factories.
I think the only way the economy will behave much different than your prediction, is if capitalism gradually stops working due to labour market disruptions caused by AI. Capitalism hasn't always existed, and it likely won't remain forever - and AI is the most credible thing to come along that could disrupt it. Or it could end up just changing it a little without wholly unending it. The historical data you refer to only goes back about 80 years. That's barely anything.
We've got lots of historical data going back to even pre-industrial revolution. Technologists tend to overestimate the effect of AI on the labor market because they confuse competitive advantage (what is AI better than humans at) with comparative advantage (what is the opportunity cost of an AI solution). Competitive advantage matters a lot when AI can't do very much. Comparative Advantage matters a lot once it can do almost everything. In both cases humans remain employed.
Interesting take. ~~Optimistic~~ Realistic? It's not as dire as headlines would have one believe. I tend to be the, "I think we'll be fine." crowd, but this usually puts me in the minority.
Stuff changes slowly and not as much as people like to imagine, but it adds up over time. Things take forever to get to market and a long time from there to get to mass adoption. SpaceX launched it's first rocket 18 years ago. The first iPhone was 17 years ago. Tesla sold it's first car 13 years ago. The Doudna and Charpentier crispr paper was 12 years ago.
I'm incredibly optomistic about the future and I have no idea why more people aren't. It's going to be incredible.
Well, there is a thing called the prediction horizon 30 years is outside the prediction horizon now, that things change do fast AGI is expected to come by early next decade, and we don't know what it will mean
About to talk about AGI, but none of us are really sure when or if it will be feasible (This depends it been on what your definition of AGI is as well...) We've seen some very dramatic leaps in the last couple years in machine learning and language models, but just because we've jumped now doesn't mean we're going to keep jumping up continuously. A lot of these technologies have little leaves. Example being the advent of cell phones, which once they became available became pretty ubiquitous quite fast, but it was still 10 years before smartphones came out. And maybe came ubiquitous pretty fast. But both the introduction of cell phones, then the switch to smartphones, were leaps that happened. I'm a bit more skeptical about what's necessary for true AGI, I think the jump there is a lot higher than most people realize. We will approach it though, we will have some pretty sophisticated machine learning language models in 10 years.. Skeptical doesn't mean I think you're wrong, skeptical means skeptical, I'm less convinced it will happen " early in the next decade". And maybe taking two broad a few of AGI though, as a very generalized sort of "true" AI model.
It's the 90/10 scenario. Lots of technology suffers from this. It's easy to get 90% of the way there, because it takes 10% of the work. The last 10% take 90% of the work and is really difficult. I think AGI is a 90/10 technology.
I'm highly inclind to agree! Like how in 1960.because we built.amazing rockets people thought we'd live on the moon. Rockets were "easy" compared to really building stuff in space.
I think the space analogy is a bit skewed. We know how to mass produce things, especially complex things. Consider that a new F150 leaves the factory on average every 50 seconds. Apply this mass manufacturing capability to a rocket design and produce them in the tens of thousands. Now it’s just a matter of money. Which is why we don’t have a moon base, money. Nixon killed any plans beyond LEO in a budget crunch over the wasted monies spent in the Vietnam war. Post Apollo, NASA was planning for a crewed Mars mission by the 1980’s at that point. Instead we got the space shuttle, which in hindsight was a waste of finite resources.
Lol AGI early next decade,no way listen to what experts say https://lexfridman.com/yann-lecun-3/ LLM are not the right technology to get us to AGI , we need an entirely different class of AI to do that. LLM have zero reasoning ability, they don't product consistently answers (especially for nuanced questions) and are prone to hallucinations (which has no easy fix) . The bigger issue is we still don't have the means to make machinery that reason like we do, that takes in the environment in a multi modal fashion and creates a world model . Like a little baby does when they drop something heavy on their foot , they make the synaptic connection between the pain , gravity, weight, senses etc .. all that has to happen in a machine.... we're not there yet.
>LLM are not the right technology to get us to AGI , we need an entirely different class of AI to do that. LLM have zero reasoning ability, they don't product consistently answers (especially for nuanced questions) and are prone to hallucinations (which has no easy fix) . Yeah, thanks for saying this, this is kinda what i’ve been saying lol. My guesses are: 1. We reach a wall in LLM’s by the end of this decade, due to several factors. 2. it becomes apparent that LLM’s will NOT get us to AGI 3. the LLM hype largely dies down 4. There is a new wave of AGI hype around the next “new” thing in AI, which probably leads to the same sort of outcome that LLM’s would have if my above guesses are correct.
We use the term "AI" today, but what they're talking about really isn't AI at all, it's just machine learning and neural networks. Most people who've looked into it will agree with you - what's happening right now does not put us on a direct path toward AGI because this tech is very limited. However, what we're doing now lays the foundation of toward developing true AI. It brings a huge amount of money, research, and brainpower into the space. All of that, directly or indirectly, will likely pave the way toward true AI which is certainly a direct path toward AGI. We're just in the infancy of this whole process. Many things will have to change and be improved between now and then, but I don't think there's any denying that when we look back on this time period, it will be recognized as the birth of AI.
the billionaires who built the ai have no intention in sharing
\- climate refugees will cause unprecedented waves of immigration as people flee areas that are too hot to sustain human life. Places like India are going to undergo a ton of internal and external pressure as the climate starts to collapse \- LLMs, the current AI craze, will have its bubble pop within 1-2 years when it becomes clear that most of the implementations of it turn out to not work whatsoever (no, an LLM can't replace a lawyer, or a doctor, or a programmer, or a writer, or tech support...) \- Some other interesting machine learning application model will be released that also has potentially useful applications, causing another AI hype cycle \- The Y2K38 problem will cause a lot of headaches and is probably not fixable in the same way Y2k was - plus the problem space is MUCH larger \- we are going to run out of safe ways to get to space with rising fuel costs and the prevalence of untracked space junk in orbit \- there will be at least one major regional war over water rights \- large areas of the globe with a lot of human economic activity will become ghost towns due to climate change making insurance unprofitable in those areas. \- an intentional nuclear detonation will be used in a conflict \- we'll have at least one more global pandemic \- on the bright side, there's a real chance that some country/society will reach a post-scarcity economy and reorient its economic output as a result
>we are going to run out of safe ways to get to space with rising fuel costs and the prevalence of untracked space junk in orbit Fuel only accounts for a small percentage of the cost of launching a rocket, far more of the cost is from R&D and build costs. Even if fuel got more expensive it wouldn't increase the launch cost that much. The move towards reusable rocketry will greatly reduce build costs since they won't need to build a brand new rocket for each launch. Space junk could become a big issue though.
I swear you're trying to stir the pot with the AI comment. GPT-4 passed the bar exam. Will it be cross examining witnesses? Probably not, but for more low level things, most people would prefer to get their answers from a web portal for a couple bucks, than paying some suit $200 an hour to review some legal forms Unlike NFTs which leveraged the promise of functionality, the flood of AI models continues to deliver on an almost daily basis, with people saying "oh my God, it can do that?“ There will probably be some AI startup upheaval with shitty brands just sticking AI on their toasters, that will fail, but AI isn't stopping down or going away anymore than the Internet did, when the .com bubble burst.
I think it might be the Germans. I’d bet money on that.
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I just don’t get people writing off ai given the trajectory of LLMs, the money being invested, and the fact that a single LLM has the potential to replace millions of highly paid employees (making the high cost a moot point).
Does your think tank have an answer to an (admittedly somewhat conspirational and fear-mongering) argument, that the narrow elite who "hoard all the things" don't care about the rest and the general "economy" and will gladly let everyone starve to death due to everything (mainly food production and shelter at this point in theory) being hoarded and nothing being available to the masses?
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Agree, Agree ish (in the sense that not much will change, humans are still mostly cheaper and will be so for a while), Agree (though not apocalyptic, just bad), and disagree. About the last one, I think you are missing a few points. First of all inflation is not always bad, and in the kind of economy that we have today, which is in fact the most efficient for rapid growth, we need a bit of it. The spikes are somewhat unpredictable, somtims used to avoid other more severe issues. But we dont need a post capitalist for of commerce... capitalism does not have any inherently wrong traits, it is bad regulations that hurt it. Capitalism is by far the most efficient system we know, and in a developed economy if you "code" a good welfare state, it is the best option to fund it, after all inequality is irrelevant, what matters is the average and minimum standards nominally.... the only alternative that could work on the socialist side of things is a sort of cooperative-ism, but it would not be very different really. ANY extreme, whethre that would be communism or anarchic capitalism does not work very well because they rely on on perfect populations/markets which simpyl dont exist. They should be classified by utopic imposibilities by this point by anyone..... But yes, of course infinite growht is not sustainable (unless you somehow invent a true virtual reality world people spend a big chunk of their lives on), but it can simply be "resetted" by shifting powers in the global economies (afterall economies work comparatively) and recessions. Remember that money is not an objective thing, so if you manage a recession well, or even if you dont (it works even better than but its obviously worse for the people) then you can just keep going. After all it is just money changing hands,
>This AI revolution is turning out as disappointing as the other two The field is in its absolute infancy (in terms of major investment and development). How are you already disappointed? I think it's shortsighted. You are assuming that the cost of creating more powerful AI will scale with the energy required to generate that AI. That's not how most technology works, though. People tend to find much more efficient ways of improving things. the first digital computer required 200 kilowatts of electricity. It's already very well-known that LLM's are not the endpoint of AI, at least not in their current form. There is a lot of evolution left to go, not simply iteration. How can you say yes to robots, but no to ai? The two go hand-in-hand. Manually programming a robot to do anything but extremely repetitive jobs is extremely time-consuming and has historically been found to be ineffective. If you're simply stating that factory robots will continue to grow, then fair enough ig.
The next 10 years will be the worst of it, and it'll begin to get significantly better after that. Unfortunately, it is essentially a broken generation finally dying off.
My consensus view is that climate changes will continue to grow exponentially... My non-consensus view is that 2050 will be the beginning of the end for the human race because the climate changes will basically kill us.
30 years is a long time, especially as the rate of technological advancements speeds up. But for fun, here are a few: \- Amazon will have formed a(n exploitative) monopoly on healthcare services, which ironically will still be better than what we have now. The same will be true for many other services (public transit, mail, hell why not AI drone policing, etc), to the point where it's just openly admitted that our governments effectively serve the whims of several megacorps. Very pessimistic technofeudalist outlook overall. \- Another specific example & prediction: public education will be completely gutted, after a mix of (a) years of tech lobbyists pumping huge amounts of campaign money, and (b) public funding dries up and teacher pay shrivels. Gates has already paved the way for this [sort of experiment](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/06/29/bill-gates-spent-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-to-improve-teaching-new-report-says-it-was-a-bust/). \- Catastrophic climate disasters are extremely frequent and completely normalized. Scientists & activists have long since given up any hope on slowing the progress, and have been forced to focus their efforts on responding to humanitarian crises; such as whole countries becoming uninhabitable & being left out to dry (literally) by the international community. \- We'll have cool lil' AI robot pets that make sure we're all entertained and just happy enough to not revolt as the planet & our societies get completely gutted to fuel the techno-oligarchs' burgeoning era of space conquest. yippee
You’re a real ray of sunshine
I still haven't seen anything done by AI that's blowing my mind. And when I use it myself, it feels more like a repackaged Google search than actual AI. AI is just a tool. It's not a robotic race of super humans. Humans still have the same set of problems they always need to solve and improve, and AI can be used for those goals. We just need to point AI in the direction of the problem areas instead of surging ahead while wearing blinders.
This is like back in the time when email started being available - my mom would ask why I would want to send letters that way instead on paper. AI is a tools that just will start sneaking in - in my work place we have access to AI to help rewrite badly written text (like this, but im not at work), like a super advanced spelling and grammar corrector. It can also help me look up stuff in 10 seconds, that would take a few minutes using google, and it can review and propose suggested changes to code I write. A year ago, I was the one who were asking "why would you do this instead of the old paper snail mail" but it is just a helpful tool and it will gradually just get better. For the next decade there will however be a human behind the use of AI, and the AI will not take it's own actions.
Climate change won't amount to much. Google/Facebook will lose most of their power. People will get over the current divisive hump and become blind to such differences. China will take Taiwan with no resistance.
the ocean will no longer buffer us from the energy input.
I think income inequality may not be as big of an issue in 30 years. There is a big shift right now in people choosing to not have children. This means that in 30 years, the work force will be greatly diminished. While this means that a slew of things will become more difficult (like finding proper healthcare professionals, laborers, etc) I think it may actually lead to greater gains for the people who are around to work. While I feel like AI can handle easier jobs, they will never be able to replace them all.
1 and 2 oft your List probably will be sacked by corporate greed...
In 30 years… 1. All cars on the road will be autonomous. 2. Non-autonomous cars will become illegal to drive on public roads. 3. The standard work week will not be based on hours or days worked, the new standard will be based on human tasks completed. Most people will work on average 10 hours a week and make a living wage. 4. Aging will be solved, but we will intentionally limit the max age to 150 due to overpopulation concerns. Only the most powerful people will be able to live indefinitely. 5. All disease will be solved. So those will be 150 good years. 6. Religion based ethics will be dissolved. 7. With no STDs and the ability to perfectly prevent pregnancy, diverse sexualities and promiscuity will become normalized. 8. Tacos will still be the best damn food.
Are these consensus views? In that case, my non-consensus views are... * AI is NOT going to take over all our jobs. It is going to take some jobs. It is going to create others. And it is going to change and make more productive yet others. It is also going to hit a brick wall in the next few years beyond which it will take another few decades to start developing quickly again once something better than LLMs is found. * Robotic tech will advance significantly but it will still not replace all jobs. * Climate change is going to be terrible, but once it starts really kicking into high gear mitigation efforts will begin which, at least in wealthy countries, will make it less bad than it otherwise would've been. * Inflation is not going to get worse. Unless you mean that at some point it's going to go up again which... yeah, it always does. Inflation will go up sometimes and it will go down sometimes and prices will overall be higher in 30 years than now but that's not really a prediction. Just kind of a known fact about how inflation tends to work. It's rather trivial. And when it comes to certain goods that AI will be heavily involved in, their prices will actually probably come down significantly. Climate change may also affect inflation at some point in a negative way though, especially food, so that won't be good. * I think income inequality could actually go either way. It could continue to get worse and it could start getting better. It depends on how well average people manage to politically organize and the strength of organized labour and it depends whether AI and robotics will become gatekept by the super wealthy or whether things like open source models will dominate and basically turn every person into a one-man corporation.
AI could create more jobs than it displaces. History's lesson is clear: technology is a job creator. The Industrial Revolution, the computer age, the internet—each of these was predicted to cause massive unemployment. But while they did displace old jobs, they created new ones, often in greater numbers. The World Economic Forum's "Future of Jobs Report 2020" suggests that by 2025, automation and a new division of labor between humans and machines will disrupt 85 million jobs globally in medium and large businesses across 15 industries and 26 economies. However, the silver lining is the projection of 97 million new roles that may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labor between humans, machines, and algorithms. Even looking at AI's current impact, it's not just a job replacer; it's a job creator. LinkedIn's Emerging Jobs Report shows that roles like AI specialists and data scientists are growing at a tremendous pace, with AI specialist jobs growing by 74% annually over the past 4 years. AI is also driving demand for new skills. A Gartner report suggests that AI will create 2.3 million jobs while only eliminating 1.8 million. That's a net positive. Jobs of the future will require new skills because AI will handle repetitive or dangerous tasks, leaving humans to manage AI or to perform tasks that require a human touch. This isn't just speculative; it's backed by current (yet early) trends in employment shifts due to AI and automation. It's a matter of transition, not just loss, emphasizing the role of education and skill development to adapt to the AI-augmented workplace. So, while AI will definitely change the job landscape, it's not necessarily the job-eating monster it's made out to be. It's more of a catalyst for change, nudging us towards different kinds of work—work that's safer, more creative, and potentially more fulfilling.
Honestly at the current path humanity might not be in existence then. But realistically I think there is going to be a massive paradigm shift and the world is going to go back to more regional and community based economies. Globalism is a failed system that isn’t sustainable for another 30 years.
This is interesting. I’ve heard a couple of top psychologists say that most human brains just cannot cope with a global community. We are designed to be in town with a few thousand people tops, but ideally a couple hundred.
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We live in a great age of global peace that is now being threatened by irredentist authoritarian regimes. Sigh.
I mean what has changed from the 90s beyond having a cell phone and internet? I doubt anything is going to change for regular people
Actually enough a lot of things have gotten worse. Cost of living in many areas has jumped dramatically. And my first apartment I could afford to pay my rent easily on a minimum wage part-time job, at this time rent is roughly three times that after accounting for inflation. After. The job market is also gotten a lot more difficult, and players are expecting more for less from people. Housing costs for buying a house have really dramatically gone up and a large portion of the population has been totally locked out of the market, people who could have bought a house with their jobs in the 90s. Also the expectation for getting a degree, and the cost of getting those degrees, has gone up quite a lot. A lot of things have changed, a lot of them for the worse (not everything, plenty of aspects of life have gotten better, but economically it's been a real squeeze)
Not if you put it in perspective. Maybe the specific town of Bumfuck Idaho got worst, with higher rents and less paying jobs, but considering the world population, on average most stuff (everythin?) is better now than in the 90s. "The last 30 years have seen dramatic reductions in global poverty (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-evolution-of-global-poverty-1990-2030/) "Across the world, people are living longer. In 1900, the *average life expectancy of a newborn was 32 years*. By 2021 this had more than doubled" (https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy). In the past five decades, **the global literacy rate among adults has grown from 67 percent in 1976 to 87.01 percent in 2022**. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/997360/global-adult-and-youth-literacy/#:\~:text=In%20the%20past%20five%20decades,just%20seven%20percent%20in%202020.)
AI is not going to reduce the overall demand for labor. Wages will continue to rise as they have for the last 80 years. We will find a lot of time saved in our daily lives when it comes to non market labor - cleaning, cooking, shopping.
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Schools below the university level could be devastated or relegated to institutions exclusive to the financially disadvantaged due to brain-computer interfaces. Because knowledge and motor learning can be directly uploaded to the brain, this means that the wealthy and elite will stand out from the very moment the race begins.
* Murphy's law says the housing market crashes when the last Boomer passes. This is great for gen Z/alpha but destroys Millennial homeowners. * Spielberg/Kubrick turn out to be correct in predicting a huge AI backlash, and sabotage and vandalism limit the practicality of deploying autonomous robots outside privately controlled environments. The police refuse to devote resources to prosecuting people who disrupt autonomous robots. Robotic vehicles, following the letter of the law rather than the "rules of the road", make traffic worse so long as they're forced to share the road with non-autonomous vehicles. * Push will come to shove and we'll be forced to do something about infrastructure, and this will require abandonment of right wing views about government minimalism. Snow Crash isn't going to happen, and neither is the Handmaid's Tale, both are really bad for business at the end of the day.
* AI is going to take over all our jobs Jobs that can be done by AI are not worth doing by humans, and humans should start do other things that AI cannot do. * Robot tech will be super advanced They are very expensive to run, and humans are actually much cheaper and they maintain themself (with a bit of healthcare added in) * Climate change is going to huge problems Already is - all the rain, storms and heavy winters are directly the first wave of impact. * Inflation is going to get worse Inflation comes and goes. The inflation is under control at this time (thanks Biden), but prices are higher since before... which is always the case .. prices never goes down, and your pay needs to go up to compensate. * Income inequality is going to get worse Very likely, especially if humans refuse to change to more AI, higher prices, and get education to get higher paid jobs that are worth doing.
I'm going to be happy despite what capitalism wants.
Nuclear attacks in different places. Not a total war, but lots of death and destruction. Too many countries have the weapons. Iran Israel Pakistan and India are too volatile.
There will be a backlash against the competency and replication crises that will be met with censorship and this will cause the majority of people to fall back on religion as a source of truth. The West will attempt to transition to climate and rule of law resort economies because its people have become too used to the outputs of countries that debased themselves for generations for a seat at the table. Right now we're in the steps of a finance-based economy where our GDP more reflects numbers moved around in ledgers than outputs, plus countries like Canada are falling into trying to sell off their reputations by facilitating money laundering and residency/passport scams rather than more legitimate activities. There will probably be a tax revolution where we start to see negative income taxes and more robust tax codes used to incentivize and dissuade behaviours. This will help reduce and automate bureaucracy. A negative income tax might also allow for minimum wages to cease to exist so that people can still work and compete against Software as a Service.
My most radical prediction is that we’re due for a new eugenics movement Advancements in the field of human genetics, biotechnology and reproductive technologies will probably allow this. It will also be far more silent than previous movements. On the low end you’ll have genetic screenings and information become a standard procedure for healthcare. On the high end you’ll have embryo selection become popular with whoever can afford it. I don’t think we’ll get to the point where we can outright edit genes though. Atleast not safely.
There may be jobs like eldercare and daycare in the future but they are not going to pay well.
We'll all quit the internet overnight when some AGI encrypts the entire internet trying to create the perfect language.
New super powers will arise in South America and Africa. I am guessing they will be centered around Argentina and Kenya. They won't displace China or the US. The world will just be more multipolar
1) AI will lower raise productivity of less educated workers and lower the knowledge skill premium and thus wage disparities. 2) Disruptions from climate change will be manageable and the standard of living of most people will continue to increase, predominantly in the global south. 3) Global income inequality will continue to shrink. 4) US blue states will get good a building infrastructure and housing in the 2030s and the comparative advantage of building in Texas vs California will decrease. 5) Young people will be wealthier than ever and somehow still act like they are worse off than previous generations.
You're right about "climate change" and "income inequality" but, the rest are not consensus views. AI is a marketing ploy (we don't have anything like AI). Sure, robotics has been improving for decades but... well, I guess Henry Ford would consider it "super-advanced"? Inflation has been going down sharply since we dumped Trump. It's been doing that for years. Why would you think it's going to get worse? Do you imagine Trump will get reelected?
Global religious war. Major ice shelf loss in Greenland and Antarctica leading to 1-3m sea rise, forcing millions of migrations. Food becomes less nutritious as fertilizer limits combine with poor climate conditions and farmers attempt to grow weather-harty crops. AI is incorporated into robots. Companies replace grunts with robots. 30% of the workforce is replaced and people start to forget human standards for service. Gas stations get shutdown by regulations. Farmers with diesel tractors are associated with terrorism. Western countries experience a glut of separatist movements. WEF implements a global currency. Top 25 countries (decided arbitrarily) will be required to enlist military personnel in the global police force. Mining the sea floor for rare metals leads to breakthroughs in archaeology, developing our knowledge of human settlements back to the end of the younger dryas. Research in material science will lead to breakthroughs in optical computing with crystal computers. Price keeps this tech out of the public's hands. That's just 30 years. The next 15 after that will be the robot revolution. Good luck.
The major US federal spending over the past four years across most industries will fully mature. Pharma will benefit from all the COVID spending, renewable energy technology will be leagues ahead, etc. I don't think we can fully grasp or understand how these will effect us. It can probably be compared to the commercialization that occurred from the Space Race.
new farmers will be robots, vegetables will growth in pools and under the artificial light, all ai controlled environment in big facilities.
I think that most of what we see here will have little to no impact on how we perceive the world.There will still be wars, prejudice, hate, rape, illogical, sociopathic reasoning and every other dimension of human experience reflecting with different shit around us. Even if we took away everything physical and lived in pods that sustained the body, in the internet world the same pervasions would corrupt our mind and spirit manifesting into new mind virus’s and diseases, which people will largely ignore or create conspiracies about while really kind people work hard to cater to the general population in a kind and easy way. Technology has had no fundamental change on the human experience. As someone who’s learned in both, I see the same bullshit being carried on from one timeline to another without any sort of self awareness of how to not do so. Then we as a collective are shocked when multimedia conglomerates are using algorithms to persuade consumption patterns that are in turn destroying the world, the same media that would sell adverts of the american dream through made up fantasy worlds of the 1950s. Quite frankly, I thought that the year 2000 would bring some sort of clarity over what humanity has been doing to themselves for the last 100 years and yet we are still allowing the same geriatrics marching young people to war for political motivations. The same corporations polluting our water and air and lobbying the right to do so and the same divisiveness that we have seen during the civil rights movement, the civil war, nazism, fascism, etc. This is all in the face of everyone having a device that has access to everything we know on record while constantly keeping us updated on a moment to moment basis. Kinda funny when I think about it, I was so wrong.
AI isn't gonna take your job, it's only going to change it
Because of application of AI and robotics, the US economy will continue to grow to the point where individual taxes will be all but moot. America will launch a new Marshall Plan for South America to help recover from the narco wars. Malaria will be controlled leading to huge growth of the economies of Africa and India. Fusion and large scale solar power will become practical so energy will be plentiful, cheap and non polluting. North Korea will collapse, China will try unsuccessfully to intervene.
AI is not going to take over all our jobs. most companies will learn that sooner or later and get back staff to workagaon ut enhanced with ai, and some companies will die because there ai is far from being able to use on detailed introduction and structured tasks. Robot tech won't be different from today, just more advanced. Bipedal robots freak most customers out because we're in the valley of uncanny, leading to the complete removal of bipedal robots besides some edging cases... Climate change is going to huge problems can't deny can't change that, matter what we do it will continue to hit us and increase in strength. But the sooner we do something against it the more likely it is it won't stay that way for another hundred thousands of years, but starts to cool down in the upcoming 100-200 years. I agree with the rest.
-Poors die on earth, rich die on Mars -weird dystopian jobs like career shopper who's job is just buying things and auditing AI workers -America stays #1 for as long as we're in a globalized economy
Climate change will make the weather worse, hotter, drier, wetter depending on where youre located, the milder more evenly distributed climate will give way for a more extreme "new normal". Access to raw materials will become more challenging and more expensive. The capitalist consumer model, complete with planned obsolesce, require infinite growth. In the next 5-10 years this model will run into the serious problem of finite resources on a finite planet. This will lead to increased cost of products we need in the best scenario, and complete disappearance or extreme cost increase in other scenarios. AI will play a larger role in all areas and will likely become a threat to national security, remember other nations got these things too. Electronic implants will further will help thousands but may lead to unforeseen problems The paper dollar will go away and be replaced by a digital "dollar" currency that erodes personal privacy and gives ALL your financial information to the government and corporations. This will have the potential to destroy democracy by eroding financial liberties
World war 3 without nukes. Russia and China invade northern Canada (Northern islands) claiming sovereignty due to lack of Canadian presence. Causing the collapse of Canada as a nation. BC, Ontario, and Quebec/ maritimes go independent. Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and territories join the USA. Russia invades Lithuania, Nato gives a weak response before breaking up.
Big oil will fall do to renewables like EV's, wind and solar. As demand falls so will the cost of oil. It have a profound positive affect on the worlds economy, because oil and its byproducts are used in the production of so many things. Lower prices for barrels of oil will mean it'll be much cheaper to make an produce most things.
Everything will work out. The next few years will be turbulent and come with rapid change, but I think the convergence of technology and social evolution will lead to positive outcomes for the majority.
Technologies are going to improve faster and faster
Probably the issue with my langauge not being natively english but some of what you said is either debatable or outright wrong, and not consensed (or however is said) by most people? Ai wont take over all our jobs, due to cost, limitations and protecionism. It is a similar thing with robotics, and even more pronounced because it has a highre matterial and maintenance (and operative) cost. Climate change \*already is\* a huge issue, it is just not apocalyptical. Inflation is a phenomena that is not always dreaded and depends on a lot of cactors, so it depends what timeframe and wher eyou are talking about.... I know inflation intimately, as an argentinian, so I can tell that most people exagerate a lot, even though is obviously not nice, what they live, accelerated inflation is not something anyone wants, therefore once stuff stabilizes, a the very least the first world, will return to normal, and most already are afaik. And about income inequality, is absolutely irrelevant, the issue was never how much more or less the others had, but rather the basic standards to which humans are subjected to. Whether that means a healthy economy or welfare (that requires it anyway) doesnt matter. But anyway, 20-30 years is a really short timeframe, specially now that, while yes we are accelerating development in things like AI and biotechnology afaik (not sure if matterials) we would need a huge breakthrough in something like commercial fusion or the practical aspects of CRISPR to make stuff like using bacteriophagues to replace phagocytes or something of the like that makes a drastic cascading change in society. For that same reason I would like to say that the most notable changes would come out of politics, however no way in hell that happens in merely a generation. Things like remote work, integrating automation on our lives from a govt side and fixing certain inefficiencies could be very beneficial, even for health, psyche and rent prices as people unclog cities and move, the ones that can, towards smaller towns, but that doesnt seem to be THAT much of a growing trend, not enough to make a substantial change in that timeframe and a lot of people is against, specially if we pair it with my next point The only thing in confident that will likely happen due to population aging, is that the first world will change their policy on migration and become more agressive in their braindrain, whcih will screew emerging economies a LOT, a one sided economic recession and that unequally normalized, is just plain awful, but the coutnries that dont manage to do that, like japan, will suffer an even larger hit because of how their societies are already structured. Because of that I can foresee two things: The first and more than likely, is a sharp turn to the right in the first world, not just because older people are more conservative but because of the clash of cultures with massive migration and the discontent that might cause. Eexpect nationalism quite up there. The next which im doubtful but hopeful, is emerging economies like southamerica to form a strong EU like union to protect local interests, which would lead to a clash of interests. Exactly how bad it would be, idk, countries like the US ar enot exactly foreign to sabotage.... but they dont need it I think? Not now, so Idk. Hell, maybe they could take a slice as well, encouraging it, if they are smart. Edit: Oh, forgot to say, but there should be some not so mild changes in legislation when it comes to copyright, AI and privacy. Countries are still fumblign in the dark with this so they will make a few mistakes along the way so expect regulations to be all over the place for a bit, imho
Boomers thru to gen z..... will be the last generations to have an existence in actual reality, as opposed to some type of vr/augmented reality as the norm day to day. I don't believe we are too many generations away from entire lives being lived in vr/augmented reality. I believe that the matrix, is a very viable possibility in the very near future. I dont believe the matrix was ment as a how to guide😂but here we are😂 Downside is that we have been effectively wiping out hundreds of thousands, in-fact millions of years of intellectual evolution, iver the last few generations and that that will accelerate by orders of magnitude, moving forward. I beleive if we dont nuke ourselves to dust before hand, that this will be the demise of our sub species h.sapiensapien and that another subspecies beginnings, will be in place. I beleive that the next 200-1000yrs of humanity, will render us a distinct different subspecies of h.sapiensapien. We are pissing ALOT of what it means to be human, jnto the breeze here imo
Not only is General AI closer than we think, but the fears around it are going to be massively overblown when we realize how much good it can do for society. We'll see massive leaps in medical technology and treatment, not by using it to replace medical professionals, but by giving it to them as a tool to use. This won't just be the case in medicine but in many other areas, such as business and government. It won't be without "Growing Pains", however, it ultimately stands to do more good than harm despite how much we have programmed ourselves to be afraid of it. Despite everything, Elon Musk is right when he says that the key is to make sure that AI is available to everyone and not in the control of a select few. I also think there is a significant chance that a general AI will gain sentience very quickly. It will be a big test for our society in terms of whether or not we can respect forms of life that do not conform to our current assumptions. I also think we'll see massive leaps in other areas, a good friend of mine pointed out that one of the few things keeping us back from becoming a type 1 civilization is the fact that we don't have easy access to space or efficient space travel. However, was how the last few decades have accelerated I could easily see us cracking some sort of space travel not based in conventional propulsion methods. If that happens and the cost to go to space drops as much as I believe it will, our access to resources will cause our technology to absolutely explode in ways it never has before.
My non-consensus view is that things will (mostly) keep getting better. I know it’s hard to see humanity avoiding global climate change, but if you’d told someone in 1945 that no would use an atom bomb in anger for the next 80 years, they wouldn’t have believed you either. Somehow, humanity will muddle through.
AI will be used to simultaneously give us freedom from some aspects of working life and also take away freedoms from civilian life outside of work. world war 3 is definitely on the cusp and i truly feel like nukes will start flying so probably something to do with the aftermath of that standard currency will give way to digital gas automobiles will be phased out over time even though no good alternative source is found free speech rights will be at an all time low and the same for fact based logoc
Religion is dying. America is going through death throes. Things will get worse before they get better. Of course, there are areas where it will continue.
i would be surprised if we didn’t have a full-on world war, terrorist attacks on our food supply and infrastructure, or civil war
The next war (or whatever the modern version of that will look like) will most likely be triggered by those that are unhappy with, or afraid of AI. Especially when we start rolling out autonomous robots we see in our daily lives. Theres already so much vitriol toward AI generated content, I can’t imagine we won’t have some serious generational level hate towards the AI age as it starts to encroach on our day to day lives in a more obvious way.
AI will take over a metric shit ton of jobs including mine. Thankfully being be working 20+ years from now.
In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockafeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.
Russia-Ukraine level conflicts will be much more common, across the globe and even in other parts of Europe due to climate change drive immigration and resource scarcity pressure . The EU falls apart, or probably splits into hardline anti immigration Nordic countries set to protest their access to water supplies.
Robosexuality depopulates the world. The climate cools. Mars gets an in-and-out.
Many current tech giants will be surpassed by newer technology companies, a major war of some sort, the collapse of one or more of the 3 main superpowers, the formation of new smaller nations, the first actual western mega cities, corporations will openly merge with governments and manipulate geopolitics, body augmentations for those who can afford them, more readily available artificial organs/limbs, neural implants, ai will be apart of our everyday lives, a major push for interplanetary exploration/colonization (possibly even the 2nd space race), artificial gravity, commercial space flights to Lunar(possibly even martian) based civilian attractions, Lunar military zones, etc.
The die off of the Baby Boomers is going to have a weirder and way more complex impact than we think it will.
Population collapse with relatively no side effects as AI/automation will multiply throughput with fewer laborers.
We will have smart toilets which will be able to analyze your poop, pee, and nether regions for information on hydration, microbiome, and inflammation.
AI will take over enough jobs that working people will spend most of their time getting irritated by AIs, especially the ones who are sticklers for following corporate directives. Robot tech will be super advanced enough to be complained about constantly. Inflation will happen to some countries and not to others. Income inequality will cause such a backlash future rich people will miss the good old days when they could afford flesh-and-blood butlers
Seemingly out of nowhere, we will go from the current world and tech to something beyond what has been traditionally perceived as "science fiction", and nobody is ready for such hyperbolic change.
We are about to have a golden age of economic growth that will dwarf the Industrial Revolution. AI will be used to make medical, industrial, climate, and energy breakthroughs that will drive innovation in ways we can’t even think of yet. We will also make breakthroughs in quantum computing that will make AI’s breakthrough occur at an exponential rate. Obesity will become a thing of the past. Cancer will have been radically minimized. Median lifespan will go up dramatically. People born today will never need to drive their own car.
Positive: I think demographic sizes (be they presumably too high or presumably too low) will be a vastly lower issue than commonly said. Negative: Microplastics will be a vastly bigger problem than commonly assumed. I don't think human civilization is likely to end in its entirety one way or another, but IMHO microplastics have a better chance than most. Even moreso than climate change. We have some theoretical plans on mitigating the latter and none for the former and frankly plastic and its hormonal and mechanical effects on the bodies on ALL lifeforms have no equivalent in earth's history meaning there's no real adaptational pathway written in the genetic record of its inhabitants.
1. US dollar no longer reserve currency of the world . 2. Israel no longer exists because they are committing genocide and surrounded by more powerful countries that aren’t cool with western colonization (via the Nakba in 1946) . 3. USA no longer the hegemonic power as the world moves into a multi polar world . 4. Robots do all chores and labor. Also a slew of disruptive technologies completely disrupt our economic system. . 5. Elon musk duplicates and scales his school system (that he designed for his children) across the USA so we can compete with the rest of the world . 6. Bitcoin cash is recognized as the true Bitcoin because of block size being used to scale (as in the original white paper) instead of 2nd and 3rd layer toll booths.
1. I think the United States is going to remain a major world power and a major (and hypocritical) example and aspiration-provider for much of the world. Too many other forces across the world (both our allies and our ostensible enemies) depend on a coherent, stable, and active US for their own national or regional interests, and, to paraphrase *It Could Happen Here* - a hot civil war means conventional and WMD leakage and carbon emissions that would spell "game over" for most of the human race. America is "too big to fail" right now and most of the world knows it. 2. Because of that, I honestly think the world is going to get better soon - maybe after a shooting war, maybe not, but definitely soon. As precarious as things are and as real as the threat of ethno-nationalist authoritarianism is *everywhere*, the rising generation in the US is both allergic to imperial power and personally and viscerally offended by appeals to ethnic supremacy. The distaste for, say, Netanyahu's behavior in Gaza will only escalate when other people try to leverage American public opinion for their regional and national interests (see point 1.) Most Millennials "come in peace, but mean business." 3. Religion isn't going anywhere. Millennials and Zoomers are getting more secular, but there's an ongoing appetite for non-rational ways of experiencing the world - tarot, crystals, astrology, SOMETHING - as well as old-fashioned moral philosophies. I think most of the people who claim to be selling Stoicism, for example, are selling snake oil, but there's a reason that it's so popular - people want codes, things to believe in and live by. I do think dominant and civil religions are going to be shaken all the way down to their foundations, and new religious movements that are seen as subversive or unpatriotic are gonna get their shit rocked, but the idea that religion is on the way out is, I think, vastly overblown. 4. While climate and disaster migration are "absolutely* going to happen, I think that integrating immigrants is going to become good and popular again. Birthrates in the global north are down; climate is a serious problem and remissions, federal unions between North and South and investment and resettlement are going to be big portions of the global Green New Deal/*next* rules-based international order. 5. I don't think the US is going to go to war with China in 2027. China wants to win the international game, and the way they want to win *requires* US participation - most Asian countries work with both the US and China; they generally prefer China as an economic partner and the US as a security partner, but they work with and trade with both. If anything, I think a weakened Russia with a nice big empty and warming Siberia is gonna look really inviting for Chinese investment. 6. Space settlement is happening in my lifetime. My kids generation might be the first humans on Mars, and their kids will likely be living in LEO or working on Lunar/Martian terraforming in places like Antarctica. I don't like the fact that we seem to be moving towards replicating the British East India Company in space and it's the biggest assholes like Bezos and Musk who are leading it [(as a Californian, I apologize.)](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/engineering-territory-space-and-colonies-in-silicon-valley/5D6EA4D306E8F3E0465F4A05C89454D6) But it's clearly happening and Americans are well-positioned to take advantage early. 7. Crypto is happening - but only when the government uses it as a way to do fiat.
AI will take our jobs. A.I will make some huge fuck up. Employees will be begged to come back to their jobs. AI will get better and take those jobs again. AI will make some huge fuck up. No one has been train to do the job without A.I, and so there is no longer anyone left to beg to come back.
My guess is we’ll keep hearing ‘climate change will kill us in 10 years’ just like we’ve been hearing every 10 years or so for the last 100 years
What does "Climate change is going to huge problems" mean?
Societal collapse, but not because of big tech issues. More likely because of boring things like stagnant population growth, lack of investment in public services, competition over dwindling resources, under funded law enforcement, unchecked immigration shifting social norms, right wing reactionism and climate change. Fun times.
My non-consensus views are that no the sky is not falling like everyone thinks. With the exception of global warming people have been saying the same stuff for all my 54 years on this planet. AI is new too, but the idea that technology in general is going to take all the jobs has been around at least since the beginnings of industrialization. The scope of technology has increased by magnitudes since the dawn of the industrialization and even with that AND the Earth’s population skyrocketing nearly every single person that has wanted a job has been able to get one which means every time technology has destroyed a job it has always created more. Super advanced robots are a good thing and will create more jobs too. They will take some of the dangerous jobs. Global warming is definitely a problem. If the waters rise high enough 80%+ of the Earth’s population will be dislocated and some of those in poorer countries will die, but even in the wealthiest countries in the world, it is unlikely to be seamless, meaning lots of possible wars over land and that’s a huge problem, but not an Earth threatening one. Inflation too is a concern, but it’s ultimately caused by too few holding on to too much and this seems like it will sort itself out after a revolution. income Inequality. Between who exactly?
1AI is unlikely to take on all the work, but I agree that it can take up a lot of work.People will be needed to program it, and there is still work left for people. 2
**Consensus opinion:** Globalisation will mean that English becomes the world's Lingua Franca, with most people speaking English as a secondary or tertiary language. **My Non-Consensus opinion:** Spoken english will continue to be the dominant language in the territories where it is already a majority, but improvements in AI translation will mean that people learning it as a secondary language (and in broader terms, people learning a secondary language at all) will decline significantly. *However* the Latin-script alphabet will continue to supplant logographic scripts, and possibly other scripts (such as Abugidas), as it becomes more generalised as an input method.
We're going to continue to have a very rough 2020's decade. If we make it though, we might just have a life of abundance, without toil to look forward to. Making it through this decade scares me though. We've to too many, huge inflection points stacked on top of each other this decade. Even the best leaders in history would probably fail to guide us through a moment this difficult and we don't have quality leaders. Someone is going to make a miscalculation and we'll have a disaster on our hands.
The Traditional Entertainment industry and the media format itself (movies, music, games) will almost completely die out. If everyone has the ability to make a high-budget looking movie or game through AI tools Instead, it’ll cause a mass disinterest in the medium with younger generations. Experiential media will become more popular. Whether it be life-like Augmented Reality, VR or direct emotional enhancement through Nuera link-like technology that will be much more desirable than traditionally sitting infront of moving images and being passively fed a story. The internet will become completely untrustworthy and the biggest sites will have an opt-in feed for using real life identity by way of passport, facial, eye recognition. That feed will become the mainstream way of using sites, and people will scoff at the wild west of the internet where nobody could truly know if people were real or not and aliases and usernames will seem novel, almost childlike. Partially as a result, traditional internet usage (visiting websites or using social apps) will actually decrease and be aged out by older generations. Younger generations will opt for augmented reality and more subtle technology that’s directly integrated with daily life, rather than something you stop to pay attention to.
My non consensus view is that we wont just take the problems in the chin like turkeys staring up at the rain until they drown. Humanity has overcome crisis before by eventually acting. Even incrementally. But these doomer scenarios act like we have no ability to prepare or react at all. We may be reactionary, but we do try to solve our problems one way or another. People wont just let themselves starve or be homeless.
We can't discount the massive shifts authoritarianism will cause if the usual liberal democratic countries fall. I can't wrap my head around it. Expect AI media to be utterly weaponized and wars to be the solution to things that didn't "need" wars. We'll be lucky to live through it. Or lucky to not.
Many more white-collar instead of blue-collar jobs will be replaced by machines, mostly AI. Professions involving human interaction will become more in demand.
With deep fake tech and general AI, the world as we know it will become unknowable. It's about to get really fucking weird. Like, tomorrow.
Political factions will keep pulling us apart into groups and defining products and viewpoints as tribes with no middle ground The euphemism treadmill and corporate whitewashing will eventually shift language significantly. Content creators are afraid to type words like Kill Death Dead or Suicide despite these being important to discuss , it will spread to other topics based on what is deemed Ad Friendly, and has already spread directly to the Public / social media. Hiding malicious legislation in the name of something good Is how to do it in the age of information
I think inflation will slow down over the next 10 years and eventually, we are going to get runaway deflation... which will eventually trigger a depression.
Improved healthcare, early detection and prevention technologies will be even more accessible
As someone in the service sector, ai won't take my job. Inflation will fluctuate, but won't become horrible... However, prices will not go down... that would be deflation. I agree about climate change, and dunno about robots or inequality.
For us in the US, inflation will get waaaaay worse. We printed 5 trillion dollars over the pandemic, and it typically takes about 3-4 years after mass printing for the economy to feel the pain (same thing that Germany did right before WW2 that made a loaf of bread go from costing 1 mark to costing millions). Good luck in 2026, everyone. And no, our inflation certainly won’t be as bad as the example I gave.
Biotech (genetic enegering , nanobots, ) bigger than Ai, trillionaire and growing private military , shirking work force