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 feel it's unfortunate articles like these don't put more emphasis on climate change, and instead still keep up the narrative that we will innovate ourselves out of the problem. There is not reason to believe we will, and I expect society as a whole to already be heavily impacted by climate change by 2076.<p>The more people are talking about the fact that human civilization won't survive 4 degrees of warming in a 100 year time span (current projection by 2100), maybe the more society will see that although innovation is important, it's even more important is that we all accept to give up things deemed indispensable today.<p>Since that might not happen, 60 years time from now the future might look a lot more dystopian than this article would suggest.
The anti-innovation backlash is the most likely thing to happen.<p>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.<p>We will see a growing class of people who are economically useless. (read Professor Yuval Noah Harari new book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_Tomorrow" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_...</a> )
And, no, the answer is not basic income. It's intelligence augmentation.<p>Intelligence is the only valuable currency nowadays and we are not acquiring enough of it fast enough compared to the machines.<p>Our only tool for intelligence augmentation is still education. Not good enough at all. It's already impossible to keep up; let alone learn something from scratch at a late stage in life and be expected to contribute something significant enough to derive long term economic advantage that can't be taken by a machine or globalists.<p>I think all other issues will fix themselves or reach a natural equilibrium (overpopulation, climate change etc.). But lack of intelligence is our doom.
As older as I get ( 30 now ) I feel more and more the world is going to dystopia, rather than utopia.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Right now I'm more concerned about society changes than technology changes.<p>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 megacities surrounded by population desert? Will we stop preying on young like we do today? Perhaps when there'll be no young to speak of? What'll happen to religions? To parenting?
Some of these are science predictions, and some are economics predictions.<p>Here's my take:<p>- Replicator is unlikely. The machine that makes everything is like the drug that cures everything and the man who knows everything. We already have specialist replicators, specialist drugs, and specialist professors. For the same reason, we won't get a generalist AI, just a bunch of very good specialists.<p>- James Webb will tell us within a few years whether there's lots of life or none. Some realisation about just how likely life is will happen as we use the JWT to scan various planets.<p>- Similarly with superconductivity, we'll either find a way to do it, or a reason why it can't be done.<p>- Economics: the revolution here is how society changes when there's a bunch of old people around, mostly healthy and mostly skilled. I suspect people will want to be able to retrain, and so the old model where there was only time (opportunity cost) to go to school when you were young will change. It probably already has for some people.<p>- Tech/Econ: society will have thought hard about giving everyone a decent living while the tech people build just about everything.
Link to a page about their special issue, though it does have a TL;DR of each article. Seems that they are almost equally split between utopia (energy is free and we can make everything) and dystopia (everyone is becoming anti-science and oh about that nuclear war...)
One of the best ways to get me to sign up for a magazine I've ever seen! Great tantalizing content list all in one place followed by an article with a paywall a bit beyond the fold.
This one is funny:<p>> The world in 2076: The anti-science backlash has begun<p>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 disapproved but a lot of fruitful private research goes on"
Every decade brings a technology movement that steers the path of humanity in a certain direction. Nobody would've predicted the rise of social media (yes, including Snapchat, Instagram, Pokemon Go)and how much of the humanity gets consumed by it, thereby derailing us from the track we were on the decade prior to it.