I think you’re absolutely right. But while we’re daydreaming about the future, I think it’s more likely we’re going to irreversibly fuck the planet well before we realize beautiful technological utopia. And if fucking the planet doesn’t kill (all of) is, it’s going to leave us irreversibly broken. Inequality will reach staggering levels. Further advances will not be for the benefit of all, but the enrichment of the few.
The technologically enabled cities of 100 years from now are not beautifully interconnected reorganized and optimized. They will be literal fortified pockets of safety - gated neighborhoods with autonomous access control. Those living here spend most days completely within the walls. These pockets are surrounded and vastly outnumbered by slums. Ones whose inhabitants have neither inter-generational wealth nor the means to accumulate even a fraction of what it would take to rise beyond their lot. The labor market has long ago dried up with the onset of more efficient and profitable automation. The inhabitants here are the first to bear the brunt of climate-induced emergencies. Hundreds of thousands regularly die at once as bouts of famine, disease, and natural disasters strike with increasing frequency.
These people subside exclusively on the regular allotment of their sovereign governance. And not all of the governments of the world are quite so motivated to maintain a standard of living. Much of Asia and Eastern Europe has largely unified under or become a puppet state to a single authoritarian state. The European Union has condensed westward and hardened, closing off borders in an attempt to maintain sovereignty amid influx of climate refugees. The United States is an aggressive corporate republic, under which the only legislation to pass in decades is related to military spending, border security, and population monitoring in the name of antiterrorism. Policy is now largely decided in the courts, which corporations have found is the shortest path to pushing their agenda, and also the most reliably fruitful, given enough lawyers and money.
Parts of the Middle East are permanently uninhabitable, and the bits of the Amazon that have not been clear cut are now beginning to succumb to changing climate forces. Sea level has risen considerably, and pacific island and Caribbean nations have been all but wiped out, as their governments realized it no longer made sense to rebuild year after year.
Those living in the slums have access to sophisticated VR/AR technology at affordable rates, even compare to their minimal dole and the informal barter/trade economy that has redeveloped. They create as much content as they consume, in an effort to find some foothold they can capitalize on and create wages.
We vastly underestimate the effectiveness of warfare. Highly mobile drones will be able of surgically eliminate threats in seconds. Direct conflict is rare and pointless. Nation states will focus their efforts on undermining infrastructure of their enemies, or isolating entirely. Information warfare will no longer exist to a meaningful degree because the nations themselves will have near unrestricted control over the information their populace consumes. The military and police will have blurred or fully merged in most governments. Revolts will be put down with ease and erased from public memory.
Education is perhaps perplexingly accessible, to a point. AI tutors work one on one with students, who now are considered anyone under the age of 25. The entrenched elite have access to private cutting edge versions of the same, and if you know the right people you may be able to send your children to a Luddite school, where children learn from physical books and corporeal teachers.
