China US cold war at some point of time ? In 5 - 10 years China may become powerful enough to be able to bully all nations bar US to pursue its interests. Economic colonisation of weaker states in Africa and elsewhere (e.g. Pakistan) by China will lead to interesting geopolitical scenarios.
My forecast for near future geopolitics is grim as collateral damages will happen in most countries, first world or not, west or not.
I am also pessimistic about open initiatives (open source, open data, open standards etc) as benefiters will exponentially overweight contributors, to a point contributors will sick of people eating free lunches. It may also become more and more illegal to disclose security risks and software vulnerabilities.
I'm hopeful for a more cooperative human centric future. I think we have the technology to replace old systems and ideas. Things are getting better more then they're getting worse for so many people and I really want to see that pattern accelerate to the point all preventable disease is addressed and access to medical care is universal, there is no risk of famine due to technology advances in food production, there is no war, for obvious reasons. And on the other hand, I worry that human beings will mostly be dead and areas that are currently landlocked will be a costal town for the few remaining rich people who have replaced the need for the lower classes by automation. But mostly the former
At a global level things are undoubtedly getting much better, in terms of human quality of life. Hundreds of millions of people are rising out of poverty, violence is on the way down, women’s and minority rights are expanding in most of the world, and most of this is happening in developing nations that need it the most.
I worth though that we are doing thus by passing the costs down to future generations. Fur a techie analogy, it’s like looking at the balance sheet if Blackberry in 2008. Profits were on the way up, at a raw financial level they were doing better than ever, but there core business was rotting away.
> costal town for the few remaining rich people who have replaced the need for the lower classes by automation
In this scenario there will be no industry left to speak of to support the automation. The remaining people, regardless of their initial wealth, will not be rich.
Massive unrest due to climate change, leading to waves of mass immigration, humanitarian disasters, atrocities, genocide and a rise in authoritarianism.
Came to write exactly this. When we start to feel the real effects of climate change in a mass scale, our survival instinct will kick in and the world will be in a chaos. With all the weapons of mass destruction, guns and deteriorating social fabric, entropy might and probably win against our human order. Once the population numbers reduce through war and famine we could recover like the world did after ww2. Who knows.
Our window to escape this future in narrowing. Here in the UK 3 years of Brexit arguments have sucked up all the oxygen. While on the other side of the Atlantic a science denier is squatting in the White House.
“I expect our global supply chain to collapse before we reach 2030. With this collapse, we won't be able to produce most of our electronics because it depends on a very complex supply chain that we won't be able to achieve again for decades (ever?).”
I might disagree with the given date, but I think some sort of industrial collapse will probably happen in the next century, basically because the earth has finite resources, and we have been consuming them at an unprecedented rate in the human history. Added to the climate change, it will lead to a massive unrest that we are not ready to deal with.
Rebuilding computing could really turn out surprisingly difficult: the first time "we" did it, hardware manufacturing was bootstrapped by the type of customer epitomized by "world market for about five computers" and then gently followed the price/demand curve until we reached cheap smartphones. If it had to be repeated, all the potential customers on the beginner-friendly end of said curve will have access to vastly superior legacy hardware. The kind of customer that was amongst the first who could afford computers in the original ramp-up would be the last who could afford increasingly rare remnant hardware after a supply chain collapse (the same problem that makes it impossible to bootstrap a domestic anything industry when you don't already have one, all the deep-pocketed buyers can afford superior imports). Basically "Saddam's PlayStation 2 supercomputer" turned reality.
The ecosystem has collapsed, humanity's last holdout - the salesforce.com trailhead Antarctica bunker is lifeless and silent, but hope is not lost - the probe holding Elon Musk's semen journeys onward to alpha proxima.
Changing attitudes to advertisements and the upcoming generation's obsession with "authenticity" will push all brands and ads further into "lifestyle"-type presentation. Every furniture store and potato chip company will have social accounts for sharing memes.
Brand loyalty will merge deeper into the human experience, and in the 50-100 year timescale few living humans will be able to conceive of brands and products as separate from their personal identity. Boundaries between socio-economic groups will become more strongly reinforced along product lines (I believe this has already begun - see the Chik-fil-A/Hobby Lobby protests and reaction, or the reaction from both sides to Nike's support of Colin Kaepernick, and other recent corporate "woke" behavior).
Much more of the written words we consume in any form (newspaper, online opinion articles, listicles, etc) will be secretly sponsored, written by and for the benefit of a particular product, brand, or interest group. Even seemingly unrelated things, like local news, will be used to manage global brand visibility at scale as ML's ability to write comprehensibly comes into its own and articles are produced algorithmically.
Similar algorithmic information delivery systems will be used to drive even more granular opinion influence for things like state and county elections. Exploitation of outdated laws and regulations, and things like gerrymandering, will become even worse than we could have imagined as the tools to locate and predict vote probabilities at the individual level becomes even more powerful.
I think a lot of applications will be built without the need for developers, significantly reducing the number of professional developers needed.
Also, testing will be fully AI automated, other than some initial configuration there won't be the need to write tests manually.
Anything that can be done by robots and AI will be done by robots and AI. Things like driving, house cleaning and cooking (at least for restaurants) will be fully done by robots.
I’ll take the opposite side of that prediction - driving, cooking, and cleaning will be part of the jobs that people compete to get, as the data entry and middle management jobs get wiped out.
I don’t think anything that involves physical variations (I.e. manual labor in differing environments) will be automated for a long time.
- The Great Dieoff near the equator. Large parts of India and the Middle East become uninhabitable. Hundreds of millions die. The countries further from the equator do not let them in. World population will be lower than it is now. Most of the dieoff will be older people.
- US loses Miami and New Orleans to sea level rise, but otherwise does OK.
- "Machines should think, people should work" - computers will be doing many management jobs, including direct supervision. Physical robots will still be niche.
- More strongmen. Types like Putin, Netanyahu, Li Keqiang, and Trump will be the new normal.
- Intense surveillance, with behavioral tracking and evaluation, is the new normal. Government and business will cooperate in this.
- Energy will not be a problem. Some materials will be more expensive, but no mined material exhaustion in the next 50 years. Except for water.
- Food will only be a problem where water is a problem.
- Many antibiotics will stop working. There will be alternatives in the developed world, but they will cost more and be more complicated and custom.
Certainly not within 50 years, but this is based on projected wet-bulb temperatures around the equator. The limit for human survivability is the equivalent of 35C at 100% humidity.
"A sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F) is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature our bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it. Thus 35 °C (95 °F) is the threshold beyond which the body is no longer able to adequately cool itself. A study by NOAA from 2013 concluded that heat stress will reduce labor capacity considerably under current emissions scenarios.
A 2010 study concluded that under a worst-case scenario for global warming with temperatures 12 °C (22 °F) higher than 2007, the wet-bulb temperature limit for humans could be exceeded around much of the world in future centuries. A 2015 study concluded that parts of the globe could become uninhabitable. An example of the threshold at which the human body is no longer able to cool itself and begins to overheat is a humidity level of 50% and a high heat of 46 °C (115 °F), as this would indicate a wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C (95 °F)."
It’s a little less than 50 years away by now, so the schedule is clearly getting tight, and it is also a huge undertaking, so nothing should be taken for granted, but given current technology, it might actually be possible for a human to walk on the surface of the moon by July 20 2069.
The war on general purpose computing will arrive, finish quickly and be won by the totalitarians.
Normal computers will not be permitted to produce code. All developers will have to submit passport and dna before being allowed to work. Computers capable of producing code will be accounted for centrally, it will be illegal to own one without a licence.
Cash will be done away with by the following means or similar:
- Demographic projections say that we'll be reaching "peak human" where depopulation starts happening, and the urbanisation of humanity should be just about finished. So that should end real estate as being a valuable investment; it becomes a liability where liveable accommodation goes derelict because there's no-one to live in it.
- If we have fusion power, even if the reactor is the size of a battleship, every country's military will have a space program.
- Transportation continues to become cheaper, faster and more autonomous. There's no point in owning anything any more because you can rent it and have it delivered as quickly as you could get it out of a cupboard. You just pay a flat monthly fee depending on what levels of luxury you want, and that entitles you to whatever you need.
Significant dislocations of coastal population will cause shifts in demographics and voting. Some regimes will fall because of it, the UN Charter on refugees will be amended.
Resentment against entrenched industry shills and oligarchy will lead to extra judicial acts of revenge. The actors behind this will not coalesce the way religious fundamentalism has, but will be understood as a common root cause much as luddism was.
A new small C conservatism will replace radically economic reductionism of the Chicago school kind, massive public works and Keynesian intervention will predominate. Low tax regimes will find the cost of corporatism in health and lifestyle terms counter productive, extreme wealth taxes and punishments for evasion will be international.
Literacy will not fall, but writing will be uncommon.
Google will be remembered fondly before dismemberment. Facebook will be regarded as an aberation. Religions will compete on TV. Access to intelligent agents (not aware ai but ubiquitous use of ai derived optimisation and machine learning based systems) will be almost a right, where access to data is a right, albeit only if identified. Use of VPN and data hiding will be a first class felony in itself and linked to some kind of precrime with presumption of innocence lost.
Music(Songs) at-least in English language would be largely, completely machine generated.
Reasoning: songs leading the charts are mostly written by same lyricists, music is largely dependent on auto tunes, repetitive sections, machine learning algorithms for audio processing is growing at a fast rate.
Possibly true for the horrendous muzak-like audial otyughs known as chart music. People will never cease to make artistically meaningful music, though.
True story: inspired by some dude on the internet, I thought I'd try my hand at "predictions". I made a post with my technology predictions for the next 10 or 15 years (not 50, I'm not THAT naive).
I don't have a personal website, so I placed that post on Google+, to have it for future reference. Boy, do I suck at predictions.
Of course I would forget that.. that's kinda' the point of storing it somewhere where I could go back to it, many years later (also I wanted somewhere where it was stored with a verifiable timestamp so that I could share it X years later and make it obvious that it's not something I made up on the spot, but something that I truly predicted years ago)
(I'm pretty sure one of them was around the idea that "data science will be the new 'computer science' in terms of job attractivity", but I honestly forgot the others. There were something like "20 things" or anyway a fixed number of predictions, some that I felt were bolder and some that were "safe bets").
98 comments
[ 41.3 ms ] story [ 565 ms ] threadI am also pessimistic about open initiatives (open source, open data, open standards etc) as benefiters will exponentially overweight contributors, to a point contributors will sick of people eating free lunches. It may also become more and more illegal to disclose security risks and software vulnerabilities.
I worth though that we are doing thus by passing the costs down to future generations. Fur a techie analogy, it’s like looking at the balance sheet if Blackberry in 2008. Profits were on the way up, at a raw financial level they were doing better than ever, but there core business was rotting away.
In this scenario there will be no industry left to speak of to support the automation. The remaining people, regardless of their initial wealth, will not be rich.
All because of our greed.
Let me quote https://collapseos.org/why.html here :
“I expect our global supply chain to collapse before we reach 2030. With this collapse, we won't be able to produce most of our electronics because it depends on a very complex supply chain that we won't be able to achieve again for decades (ever?).”
And a related discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21183805
I might disagree with the given date, but I think some sort of industrial collapse will probably happen in the next century, basically because the earth has finite resources, and we have been consuming them at an unprecedented rate in the human history. Added to the climate change, it will lead to a massive unrest that we are not ready to deal with.
Brand loyalty will merge deeper into the human experience, and in the 50-100 year timescale few living humans will be able to conceive of brands and products as separate from their personal identity. Boundaries between socio-economic groups will become more strongly reinforced along product lines (I believe this has already begun - see the Chik-fil-A/Hobby Lobby protests and reaction, or the reaction from both sides to Nike's support of Colin Kaepernick, and other recent corporate "woke" behavior).
Much more of the written words we consume in any form (newspaper, online opinion articles, listicles, etc) will be secretly sponsored, written by and for the benefit of a particular product, brand, or interest group. Even seemingly unrelated things, like local news, will be used to manage global brand visibility at scale as ML's ability to write comprehensibly comes into its own and articles are produced algorithmically.
Similar algorithmic information delivery systems will be used to drive even more granular opinion influence for things like state and county elections. Exploitation of outdated laws and regulations, and things like gerrymandering, will become even worse than we could have imagined as the tools to locate and predict vote probabilities at the individual level becomes even more powerful.
Also, testing will be fully AI automated, other than some initial configuration there won't be the need to write tests manually.
Anything that can be done by robots and AI will be done by robots and AI. Things like driving, house cleaning and cooking (at least for restaurants) will be fully done by robots.
I don’t think anything that involves physical variations (I.e. manual labor in differing environments) will be automated for a long time.
- US loses Miami and New Orleans to sea level rise, but otherwise does OK.
- "Machines should think, people should work" - computers will be doing many management jobs, including direct supervision. Physical robots will still be niche.
- More strongmen. Types like Putin, Netanyahu, Li Keqiang, and Trump will be the new normal.
- Intense surveillance, with behavioral tracking and evaluation, is the new normal. Government and business will cooperate in this.
- Energy will not be a problem. Some materials will be more expensive, but no mined material exhaustion in the next 50 years. Except for water.
- Food will only be a problem where water is a problem.
- Many antibiotics will stop working. There will be alternatives in the developed world, but they will cost more and be more complicated and custom.
Almost all demographic predictions say this will happen, and that's without any major catastrophe.
Any particular data/research to support this particular assertion?
"A sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F) is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature our bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it. Thus 35 °C (95 °F) is the threshold beyond which the body is no longer able to adequately cool itself. A study by NOAA from 2013 concluded that heat stress will reduce labor capacity considerably under current emissions scenarios.
A 2010 study concluded that under a worst-case scenario for global warming with temperatures 12 °C (22 °F) higher than 2007, the wet-bulb temperature limit for humans could be exceeded around much of the world in future centuries. A 2015 study concluded that parts of the globe could become uninhabitable. An example of the threshold at which the human body is no longer able to cool itself and begins to overheat is a humidity level of 50% and a high heat of 46 °C (115 °F), as this would indicate a wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C (95 °F)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Wet-bulb_...
Normal computers will not be permitted to produce code. All developers will have to submit passport and dna before being allowed to work. Computers capable of producing code will be accounted for centrally, it will be illegal to own one without a licence.
Cash will be done away with by the following means or similar:
https://blogs.imf.org/2019/02/05/cashing-in-how-to-make-nega...
In geo-politics, USA will not be the sole superpower anymore:
* China will continue to regain its historical prominence/prestige
* EU will seek more and more independence from the US
* Turkey will look to form its own union of states in the Eastern Mediterranean (kind of a neo-byzantine/neo-ottoman empire)
* Brazil and India will continue to do well
* Russia and Iran's future not so certain
I think the transition will probably be relatively smooth, but we'll have to wait and see.
- If we have fusion power, even if the reactor is the size of a battleship, every country's military will have a space program.
- Transportation continues to become cheaper, faster and more autonomous. There's no point in owning anything any more because you can rent it and have it delivered as quickly as you could get it out of a cupboard. You just pay a flat monthly fee depending on what levels of luxury you want, and that entitles you to whatever you need.
Resentment against entrenched industry shills and oligarchy will lead to extra judicial acts of revenge. The actors behind this will not coalesce the way religious fundamentalism has, but will be understood as a common root cause much as luddism was.
A new small C conservatism will replace radically economic reductionism of the Chicago school kind, massive public works and Keynesian intervention will predominate. Low tax regimes will find the cost of corporatism in health and lifestyle terms counter productive, extreme wealth taxes and punishments for evasion will be international.
Literacy will not fall, but writing will be uncommon.
Google will be remembered fondly before dismemberment. Facebook will be regarded as an aberation. Religions will compete on TV. Access to intelligent agents (not aware ai but ubiquitous use of ai derived optimisation and machine learning based systems) will be almost a right, where access to data is a right, albeit only if identified. Use of VPN and data hiding will be a first class felony in itself and linked to some kind of precrime with presumption of innocence lost.
I wonder if this is already a reality for some. I can't remember the last time I had to write more than my name.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/27/what-goes-up-p...
Economic inequality would increase manifolds. There will be less poverty but a whole lot of people struggling for basic healthcare & jobs.
Automation, Robots & AI will be an integral part of society.
Virtual worlds might be as important as real ones. Virtual real estate might be worth more than physical real estate.
People will be dumber as no real problems or creative jobs to work on.
E-sports might be more popular than actual sport.
Some cities might be lost due to sea leval rise.
Reasoning: songs leading the charts are mostly written by same lyricists, music is largely dependent on auto tunes, repetitive sections, machine learning algorithms for audio processing is growing at a fast rate.
I don't have a personal website, so I placed that post on Google+, to have it for future reference. Boy, do I suck at predictions.
(I'm pretty sure one of them was around the idea that "data science will be the new 'computer science' in terms of job attractivity", but I honestly forgot the others. There were something like "20 things" or anyway a fixed number of predictions, some that I felt were bolder and some that were "safe bets").