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The World in 2076

newscientist.com

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Re: The World in 2076

#31

Post by bluetomcat »

hbt wrote: post #19

The anti-innovation backlash is the most likely thing to happen. Today, politicians are winning the populace by lamenting on unfair trade deals, globalism and foreigners taking jobs. Those jobs are not coming back, if they are, certainly not to humans. We will see a growing class of people who are economically useless. (read Professor Yuval Noah Harari new book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History…

> We will see a growing class of people who are economically useless.

Should we build our society on the imperative that every citizen must be "economically useful"? If production of basic goods and services is automated to such a high degree that only a small portion of people are needed to develop and maintain this machinery, aren't we just creating artificial, unproductive niches by trying to employ every citizen?

Re: The World in 2076

#32

Post by drinchev »

As older as I get ( 30 now ) I feel more and more the world is going to dystopia, rather than utopia.

Instead of having a world-wide federation, we will most probably have a period of dissonance around the nations where people will close more and more inside their borders, until they feel they have the power of their lives in their hands again.

I know you won't like it, but I will blame unregulated capitalism for this one. Media is so sensational, because they know nobody will watch / read anything that has a boring title. Social networks are becoming click-junky. Advertisement is fraudulent on a lot of levels. Globalization, instead of making poorest people not so poor has made rich people richer and so on. And no wonder this tendency is going worse with such a high-priced education.

Re: The World in 2076

#33

Post by zardo »

Cyph0n wrote: post #22
eliben wrote: post #7

It's curious how these predictions always turn out to be based on the current technology, pushed to its limits. Kinda like sci-fi from the 1950s predicts advanced space travel but barely any computers in the early 21st century.

I could have sworn that Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov both had computers in their sci-fi universes, but now that I try to think about it, you're probably right. The closest thing I can think of to a computer is HAL from 2001.

They had computers, but they usually remained gigantic expensive machines. They could forsee supercomputing, but not personal computing.

Re: The World in 2076

#34

Post by branchless »

bluetomcat wrote: post #31
hbt wrote: post #19

The anti-innovation backlash is the most likely thing to happen. Today, politicians are winning the populace by lamenting on unfair trade deals, globalism and foreigners taking jobs. Those jobs are not coming back, if they are, certainly not to humans. We will see a growing class of people who are economically useless. (read Professor Yuval Noah Harari new book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History…

> We will see a growing class of people who are economically useless. Should we build our society on the imperative that every citizen must be "economically useful"? If production of basic goods and services is automated to such a high degree that only a small portion of people are needed to develop and maintain this machinery, aren't we just creating artificial, unproductive niches by trying to employ every citizen?

There are two types of economically useless people:

1. those superseded by tech who are incapable of adding "value" as defined by our current economy

2. those using the state to appropriate labour, such as banks using their monopoly on credit creation to force up land prices to extract labour

We should be focusing on taxing rentier activity to provide for the former in order to obliterate the latter.

Land value tax must be used to fund a basic income.

Re: The World in 2076

#35

Post by mason240 »

tsaprailis wrote: post #5

Though it's always fun to read/watch such predictions, chaos theory suggests we have absolutely no clue as to what the future will look like. The black swan is a nice book explaining why predictions generally fail.

When I was a middle schooler in the 90s my grandpa would bring over stacks of old Popular Mechanics magazines from the 50s-70s that were predicting what life would be like in future decades.

I think it gave me a good perspective when reading these same kinds of predictions made today. For the most part, they complely missed on the existence, much less the impact, on things like social media.

It was easy to predict the physical nature of small, hand-held computing devices, but their actual impact on how society functions was missed.

Even watching "realistic" contemporary sc-fi like The Expanse, they focus on the physical aspect of how realistic space colonization would work with slow space travel, but completely ignore the role of AI and drones. Will we even need real people to live on an asteroid city, even if Mars is colonized?

Re: The World in 2076

#36

Post by mason240 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #18
gagege wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't. Look at predictions about the future from 1916. They're the definition of quaint.

I've gotten the opposite impression. There was a set of drawings from 1910 predicting Paris in 2010. There were some obvious whiffs, but it broadly predicted automation, remote audio/video communications, and other things.

Predicting advances in technology are easy. What's hard is predict is it's impact on society.

How many people in 1950 would have guessed that social media would be a thing?

Re: The World in 2076

#37

Post by Cyph0n »

zardo wrote: post #33
Cyph0n wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could have sworn that Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov both had computers in their sci-fi universes, but now that I try to think about it, you're probably right. The closest thing I can think of to a computer is HAL from 2001.

They had computers, but they usually remained gigantic expensive machines. They could forsee supercomputing, but not personal computing.

But you have to hand it to them, they and many of their contemporaries did an amazing job building the tech for their futuristic worlds. You could read Foundation or Childhood's End now and you probably wouldn't notice that they were written in the 50s.

Re: The World in 2076

#38

Post by guard-of-terra »

goalieca wrote: post #23
guard-of-terra wrote: post #9

This one is funny: > The world in 2076: The anti-science backlash has begun Science is like fashion. We (as a society) might be pro-science in 2025, anti-science in 2040, pro-science again in 2055 and finally begin to recover from anti-science in 2076. In other words, this one might change very very fast. There might be much more options, like "everybody likes science but it grinds to halt" and "science is loudly dis…

Countries that turn their back on science will fall behind.

Will there still be competition for progress?

Re: The World in 2076

#39

Post by mason240 »

mobiuscog wrote: post #10
guard-of-terra wrote: post #8

Right now I'm more concerned about society changes than technology changes. Will we make democracy work for the average citizen? Will they have control of their data? Do we get to preserve our culture and the rights deriving from it given the continuing mass migration? Will we figure out basic income? If not, what's the job all those people are going to hold? Will we stop concentrating people in a few attractive mega…

You'll have to decide what an 'average' citizen is, first.

I think the "average" person on earth is 35 year old Indian male.

Re: The World in 2076

#40

Post by ant6n »

tsaprailis wrote: post #5

Though it's always fun to read/watch such predictions, chaos theory suggests we have absolutely no clue as to what the future will look like. The black swan is a nice book explaining why predictions generally fail.

"...The way our statistical analysis works, the farther into the future you go, the more accurate the projection. It's based on a kind of non-linear dynamics, whereby small fluctuations tend to factor out over time." - Julien Bashir
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