Dude, you make Schopenhauer look like Pollyanna. Given that half the world is on fire and the rest is underwater, I’m kinda surprised by your reliance on linear tech projections. Even a car two meters from a cliff’s edge could have been following a linear trajectory for miles. Don’t know how far into the future I’d feel comfortable extending that line.
Here are a few additional projections that might be worth considering. By 2050, the world’s arable land will be exhausted (we thought we had until 2070, but like most of our worst-case scenarios, that turned out to be delusionally optimistic). Malaria will be resident in the Baltic. People will remember Covid as the Good Old Days, back when there were these things called “coral reefs”; Nipah, after spending a few decades on local tour around Bangladesh and Indonesia, will finally hitch a ride to the EU and start racking up higher kill rates than smallpox. This will actually be just as well, since a new strain of wheat rust, immune to all known fungicides (and currently spreading quietly through the Middle East) will have decimated the planet’s grain supply so there won’t be a lot of food to go around anyway. Nipah will be but one act in an ongoing festival-o’germs; it’s estimated that we haven’t even identified 99% of the zoonotic diseases out there, much less developed countermeasures.
Iceland will fail to scale up their carbon-sequestration technology by the the 624 million times necessary to even balance out daily global emissions at 2017 levels, never mind making a dent in the backlog we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Species will continue going extinct at a rate of 130,000 per year, and climbing. The Powers That Be will continue to not do anything significant to rein in emissions (the “economic recovery” we’re all celebrating post-covid is being powered mainly by coal, and has already more than wiped out the modest dip we managed when the planet slowed down last year), but there’s not much they could do anyway since even cutting our emissions to zero tomorrow would still result in a 3-5C temperature rise in the Arctic by century’s end, thanks to methane tipping points.
Granted, that’s looking ahead past 2050. But I’d argue that even 2050 is probably too farsighted, given that business-as-usual models suggest global societal collapse ten years earlier than that. That’s roughly the point at which our population peaks, after which it will crater by 40-50% over the following seventy years or so. And keep in mind that grim as this may seem, so far the observed reality has consistently proven worse than the worst-case scenarios we tried to predict them with. Sea level rise, ice-cap shrinkage, firestorm frequency and intensity have all been far worse than expected. (That “heat dome” that caused Lytton to burn to the ground a few weeks back? None of the models saw that coming.)
I see I haven’t made any prognostications about cool stuff like AI and neuroengineering, so I’ll finish off with one. The Zero-pointers will have safely buggered off to their fortresses in New Zealand or their recommissioned missile silos in the Colorado Rockies or their luxury Apocalypse Submarines, there to wait out the collapse in international waters. The rest of us, driven by desperation and a thirst for vengeance, may try to storm those battlements and get a bit of payback before we sink into the quagmire—but thanks to advances in AI, the weaponized drones deployed by the Muskovites and the Zuckerborg will be more than capable of mowing us down, without even requiring any flesh-and-blood minions to operate them from within the barricades.
Absolutely love this Peter. Very not pollayanna-ish. I think this is all a pretty viable vision - and I suddenly find myself wanting of canned goods. By far the biggest missing prediction on my original list is the impacts of climate change. There's a couple reasons for that (substack has an implicit space limit based on when gmail cuts off emails as being too large). Personally I actually think the really bad (like daily life affecting) results of climate change will be *after* 2050, like between 2050-2100, but my confidence in my own predictions regarding climate change are actually very low (and I'm open to arguments we are already, today, experiencing some really bad effects). But in the meantime I will be buying some mesh nets and cardboard cutouts to fool the Zucker-bots.
Grr. Bangladesh and Indonesia will be as rich as Uruguay and Portugal are, respectively, now. They will have world-class institutes of virology. They will live as long as we do now. We will not have gotten rid of diseases, but when one appears that is new to humans, an mRNA vaccine (or a vaccine or treatment based on principles not yet known) will start eradicating it a few weeks or months lager. Based on the accuracy of past forecasts along the lines of thinking you advocate, I believe exactly none of your forecasts.
Is this the Peter Watts who wrote Blindsight? Wow. Now if I meet writers like this in the comment section of Erik, I'm gonna subscribe for sure. Blindsight is one of my all-time favorite SciFi books, right next to Lem, Tiptree Jr. and Simmons for me. I loved that person with the impeded brain that never picked up any human emotional clues, but had to rationally look for them and learn about them in order to pick them up, if at all. And of course, if I remember correctly, those aliens which synchronized with our nerves so they could change position undetected by us humans.
And if anyone else wonders how good SciFi by Peter Watts is, Lightspeed Magazine has a new shortstory by him in their current issue (#154, March 23 ➜ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/issues/mar-2023-issue-154/). The story by Peter Watts ("Contracting Iris") is going to be online on March 16.
OK, so I need to explain, maybe. Been 10 years ago or so, I think, that I read it. I found it great because of the insights into the human condition that I got from listening to that brain-handicapped empathy observer. He (?) was almost not-human, but he tried so much to understand and be a normal human. In this it came close to the introspection into the human condition that I found in Lem or Tiptree Jr. (Tiptree Jr. focussed on female characters mostly and I wonder how anyone ever bought that male pseudonym).
I may take the Simmons reference back. But then your book fascinated me as much as his do, and I thought there were many very original ideas in there (as I said: the way the aliens synchronized with our nerve impulses, for instance) which Simmons has, too. But then Simmons wrote epic space operas. Yours was not. So maybe not Simmons-like.
And I understand the set up of the team that includes a vampire might put off straight SciFi fans, for it is more mystery or fantasy then. I liked it anyway, for the vampire had a function for the plot.
Gaza, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq all have very high TFRs, and I don't believe we'll even see a 4% cut in global per capita GDP in any decade of the 21st century. Predictions of environmental disaster in a way that's actually notable to most people never seem to pan out. I do accept another, deadlier pandemic is quite likely within the next few decades.
"Predictions of environmental disaster ... never seem to pan out."
I quite agree. We've already got permafrost melting to a depth that wasn't predicted to happen until 2070. Arctic sea ice loss and sea level rise have both been worse than worst-case predictions dating from less than a decade ago (according to a 2018 paper in Nature, damage from flooding is shaping up to be three times as bad as previously calculated. I already mentioned the west-coast "heat domes" that went utterly unpredicted by the best models previously available.
So damn right our predictions of environmental disaster tend to not pan out; the observed reality, when it catches up with the prediction, tends to be even worse.
As for taking solace in metrics like GDP, well, when the laws of physics run up against an RPG whose central tenet is "endless growth from a finite resource base", I'm pretty sure which one's coming out on top. Those who describe conventional economics as a form of brain damage are clearly on to something.
That would be quite a coincidence, but fission is pretty promising for dramatically reducing carbon emissions, and that might be enough. A climate "apocalypse" is, after all, one end (and far from the most likely outcome) of a wide range of forecasts.
I believe you are mischaracterizing Robin Hanson. He states in his conclusion that the world described in the book has less than a 0.1% chance of coming true. It's more of a thought experiment than a prediction.
I am 61 and don't feel as you say you will. I also expected a moon colony way back by the 1980s and it never happened! There may be more exploration, but colonies will be very expensive. I doubt soft totalitarianism will really be tolerated in the USA, but it will in societies that were never very liberal minded. I agree with the main point that the world will look a lot like it does today, though you do not mention climate change, likely to impact travel and energy usage and what you say about inequality seems contradictory, more for social care but a bigger difference between poor and rich...perhaps more so in some places than others.
So many people have said exactly this (that I'm overestimating how drained I'll feel), so I'm inclined to believe you. Perhaps it's a function of my first novel - it took a *lot* out of me. I still feel depleted. So extrapolating that I'd be psychologically some sort of shrunken wizened creature after a couple more books. But maybe that won't be the experience each time.
Some interesting points about futurists. As well as missing climate change (which will in many ways probably result in divides similar to our current ones, at least until 2050), I think the predictions about education and shopping are wrong because they assume they're primarily about consumption. People have been predicting mega-universities for years, and while books are easily bought online, clothes aren't.
I teach online due to COVID, and the overwhelming majority of students and teachers can't wait to get back to face-to-face learning, because learning is social and the technology can't compete with seeing everyone in a room at once, without fractional delays. Some people can learn without the motivation of a social environment, but many can't, and a lot of the experience of a tertiary education is about being on campus. And shopping in person is fun and social. Some industries will lose physical shops, but many won't. Education and shopping will be more like e-books, prophesised to take over the world but now one of a range of options and still less popular than physical books.
This futurist mostly agrees with you. I hope in 1 but I have strong doubts. Love the last paragraph. At 63, I haven’t done yet all I wanted to do, and I am working on it. Same for your future 2050 self I guess.
Are there any trends you think will reverse? Seems like all your predictions are of current trends continuing. But if you approached it that way in 1992, you'd also have guessed that crime would have increased almost to the point of societal collapse, teen pregnancy would have increased from then-recent historical lows (this seems like an example where it's hard to say current trends will continue - is the current trend measured over the last few years or the last few decades? Would change your answer on that one), and perhaps AIDS would be killing a huge number of people. If anything political conservatism would have seemed like the future - just getting off 12 years of Republican presidents, and 20 out of 24 years, with the guy who was going to finally win for the Democrats being a centrist.
I hope you don't seriously believe that you will be depleted of books at 62, since I just started a career as a writer at 65. (That is when my first commercial book came out, not when I started writing it.) We are going to have an awful lot of old people around, a resource we never had until right about now, and we'd better think seriously about how to use that resource productively. We can't afford to just sit on our haunches (an increasingly uncomfortable position anyway at my age) and live off the fruit of the technological tree.
the single most important thing that will impact and inform all of those areas of society is the environmental jackpot [climate change/biodiversity loss/desertification/mass extinction] but it's mentioned nowhere here :(
See Peter Watts’s (a very good sci-fi writer) comment about precisely this. To be honest I’m of the opinion that the effects of climate change will hit hardest post-2050 but I’m open to the idea it will be a lot sooner.
Since I was born in Manhattan in 1926, I have seen this world move through major changes that makes me very cautious about easy prediction. The rate of technology advances is quite different today than when I grew up in the 1930's and saw my first TV at the 1939 World's Fair. Even Heinlein' and Asimov said nothing about computers and H.G. Wells with his time machine had not speculated on the possibilities of artificial intelligence. This world today has not even taken seriously the climate threats since fossil fuels are set to double in the next decades and the prospect of current civilization under two more decades of vast planetary changes where even the fundamental possibility of growing enough food is quickly disappearing and most recently the whole shipping industry that cannot meet current vital demands makes the future look like a very bad joke.
A Martian colony may have some feasible but still rather primitive transportation possibilities but it has little if any concept of the highly integrated hugely variable and fragile life forms on this planet where life such as fungus and microbial living things provide the massive supports that we larger animals almost entirely neglect to acknowledge as vital to our existence and the existence of all other forms of life on the planet, Mars is totally sterile and, perhaps initially, some form of underground reproduction of Earth environment might be possible but it is a huge enterprise that might have marginal success after a century of dangerous struggle and huge support from planet Earth. But the social instabilities that are clearly evident in current social organizations today in the solvable fight against Covid-19 indicates that even the best we can manage is not enough to save the poorer nations from unspeakable tragedy. A quick setup of a Martian colony that might survive seems unlikely considering the open foolishness today everywhere on our planet.
Heinlein in his novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress did visualize an artificial intellect but it was merely a mechanical human mind with no prospect of the superior possibilities which frighten anyone of an AI vastly more powerful than a human.
Wow, 96 or 97 years old sir. Congrats on the long experience. It seems you were just old enough to make America's entry into WWII. Thanks for your insights...I agree with all our struggles to do well on earth, how can we imagine doing well on Mars. But I feel there may be things we just can't see yet that we will benefit from leaving earth...it seems like an inevitable journey of exploration, just as we needed to discover all of this planet and all those great explorations...I just hope colonialism won't repeat.
'Mostly online' education is a bit like mostly air-breathing education. Yes, of course it will be mostly online, but what does that mean?
This is a very productive article, and I like it a lot. I disagree with a lot of it, which is one of the reasons I like it a lot. One point worth making: the Canadian Forces futures people discovered, about a decade ago, that they had real difficulty communicating their futures work to their customers. They solved this problem by hiring a science fiction writer to produce their written material. The result was very engaging, readable, *good* science fiction, based on their work.
Bad futures communication often comes from weak futures work (and you've given us some really sharp examples). Good science fiction includes good futures work, almost by definition. This means that it's unfair to compare bad futures communication to science fiction 'without the plot'. Instead, compare bad futures communication to *bad* science fiction 'without the plot'.
Fascinating piece, but I have to argue with #5 though, about a "mostly storeless" future. You may be right, and I am no retail expert, but you did say you were going to base your forecasts on "current trends." Well, BLS says number of retail establishments in 2001 was about 1 million (1.05 actually), then in post-recession fell to... 1 million (1.025), and then rose by the end of 2020 to... 1 million (back to 1.05 actually). I don't see a "current trend" there. So you must be predicting a change to the trend, yes? I am not saying you are wrong, just don't see a trend here.
I think that's quite fair Glenn, but the trend I'm judging from is actually the speed of deliveries, which are significantly increasing. While I think cute downtowns will still be around in 2050, I think almost everything outside of them will be significantly downscaled and shuttered. The trend I am judging from is the progress in robotics, delivery-speed, and drones, rather than directly extrapolating from store closings. So in this I do expect a significant drop off that wouldn't be apparent from just the trend in number of retail establishments.
Makes sense to me! For a future version (nice turn of phrase I did there!) of this article, it might help to make that more explicit, as in "The trends behind this prediction are X and Y and the reason they have had no impact on store counts yet is Z." (LIke I always wonder why, how after a decade of Uber etc., car ownership (in terms of vehicle/household) has not gone done... and in cities like NY and LA has even gone up!). One would also need to wrestle around with why digital natives like Casper and Warby Parker and Wayfair and maybe even Amazon are opening physical stores. Okay, enough nattering on by me.
The likeliest scenarios per my read of persistent trends have energy becoming more expensive in the future. For a few reasons: 1) Increasingly scarce and uneconomically extractable fossil fuels (today, the Energy Return on Investment of fossil fuels is a small fraction of what it was a century or even a generation ago, as all the new finds are offshore, in oil sands, or otherwise more difficult and less efficient to extract and refine). 2) The externality of fossil fuel consumption has gotten exponentially more intense (i.e. Climate Change), constraining their use. 3) Renewable alternatives to burning oil are (often) cheaper for electricity generation, but not for transport, and certainly not for heavier industrial applications. Unless we can crack and then scale out nuclear fusion, no existing renewable energy technology will have the low cost, stability, and energy density that fossil fuels have. So, energy will get more expensive in a way that we're not used to and that every aspect of our contemporary existence is predicated on. With higher energy prices, you completely flip the logic of the design of everything.
The implications for retail commerce are many, but one of them is that to-you-door-online-delivery-of-everything isn't viable. So, ironically, we're returned again to the hub-and-spoke model of delivering goods to depots and points-of-sale. That is to say, stores. We might even return to the much more enduring pre-industrial model of the temporary market town. When energy and shipping are more expensive, just-in-time delivery makes less sense. Globalized supply chains make less sense. By contrast, warehousing/storage and distributed production make more sense.
16, 17. This is what current trends seem to indicate.
But now that we are talking about China etc., I think you skipped one important thing:
My prediction, based on current trends, is that the US and the West will become *much* less important than today in the global scheme of things on the planet.
Therefore, I think you should qualify many of your prediction with “in the US and the West.” Things can and I think will be different elsewhere.
Fascinating post Erik, agree with most of these (though I'm not quite as pessimistic on culture/totalitarianism).
I think the Mars colonies is the only big miss on your list. Futurists in the 1950's also had absurdly grand hopes for Space that never materialized (cities on the moon etc.), and I suspect we're in the same spot today with our own predictions.
One important note: everything in prediction seems to take WAY longer than we think. Look at Kubrick's 2001 or Blade Runner (set in 2019!). Both were absurdly off in their optimism for space travel by those years.
For my own position: I'm extremely bullish inner space (VR), moderately bearish Outer Space.
VR seems seductive, fun, full of possibility and easy to think of a dozen applications. Space is difficult, expensive, hostile, and ambiguous in its benefits (what does a Mars colony actually do for us on Earth?) apart from some symbolic pride as a feat of scientific achievement. Especially consider the hostile terrain/atmosphere of Mars in general - not an attractive prospect to live in.
Nice of him to link it. Tyler Cowen’s great, I just think contrawise to some of his predictions in a brief article he once wrote. His full views are likely more complex than what’s there, and hedged and flexible, as all human views ultimately are. My philosophy of writing on the internet is that it’s pretty low-bandwidth. Meaning that, in order to find if we truly disagreed or were just emphasizing different things by phrasing it very differently, we’d have to interact in-depth.
Brilliant piece and some wonderful insights! I hope you are I are both around in 2050 to re-read it. Also, as a "futurist," I appreciated your insights on how and why futurists can go astray on our "predictions" about the future. One trick I try to apply to myself is to go back and revisit my old writings and analyze why I was wrong.
Dude, you make Schopenhauer look like Pollyanna. Given that half the world is on fire and the rest is underwater, I’m kinda surprised by your reliance on linear tech projections. Even a car two meters from a cliff’s edge could have been following a linear trajectory for miles. Don’t know how far into the future I’d feel comfortable extending that line.
Here are a few additional projections that might be worth considering. By 2050, the world’s arable land will be exhausted (we thought we had until 2070, but like most of our worst-case scenarios, that turned out to be delusionally optimistic). Malaria will be resident in the Baltic. People will remember Covid as the Good Old Days, back when there were these things called “coral reefs”; Nipah, after spending a few decades on local tour around Bangladesh and Indonesia, will finally hitch a ride to the EU and start racking up higher kill rates than smallpox. This will actually be just as well, since a new strain of wheat rust, immune to all known fungicides (and currently spreading quietly through the Middle East) will have decimated the planet’s grain supply so there won’t be a lot of food to go around anyway. Nipah will be but one act in an ongoing festival-o’germs; it’s estimated that we haven’t even identified 99% of the zoonotic diseases out there, much less developed countermeasures.
Iceland will fail to scale up their carbon-sequestration technology by the the 624 million times necessary to even balance out daily global emissions at 2017 levels, never mind making a dent in the backlog we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Species will continue going extinct at a rate of 130,000 per year, and climbing. The Powers That Be will continue to not do anything significant to rein in emissions (the “economic recovery” we’re all celebrating post-covid is being powered mainly by coal, and has already more than wiped out the modest dip we managed when the planet slowed down last year), but there’s not much they could do anyway since even cutting our emissions to zero tomorrow would still result in a 3-5C temperature rise in the Arctic by century’s end, thanks to methane tipping points.
Granted, that’s looking ahead past 2050. But I’d argue that even 2050 is probably too farsighted, given that business-as-usual models suggest global societal collapse ten years earlier than that. That’s roughly the point at which our population peaks, after which it will crater by 40-50% over the following seventy years or so. And keep in mind that grim as this may seem, so far the observed reality has consistently proven worse than the worst-case scenarios we tried to predict them with. Sea level rise, ice-cap shrinkage, firestorm frequency and intensity have all been far worse than expected. (That “heat dome” that caused Lytton to burn to the ground a few weeks back? None of the models saw that coming.)
I see I haven’t made any prognostications about cool stuff like AI and neuroengineering, so I’ll finish off with one. The Zero-pointers will have safely buggered off to their fortresses in New Zealand or their recommissioned missile silos in the Colorado Rockies or their luxury Apocalypse Submarines, there to wait out the collapse in international waters. The rest of us, driven by desperation and a thirst for vengeance, may try to storm those battlements and get a bit of payback before we sink into the quagmire—but thanks to advances in AI, the weaponized drones deployed by the Muskovites and the Zuckerborg will be more than capable of mowing us down, without even requiring any flesh-and-blood minions to operate them from within the barricades.
Killer robots. That’s pretty cool, at least.
Absolutely love this Peter. Very not pollayanna-ish. I think this is all a pretty viable vision - and I suddenly find myself wanting of canned goods. By far the biggest missing prediction on my original list is the impacts of climate change. There's a couple reasons for that (substack has an implicit space limit based on when gmail cuts off emails as being too large). Personally I actually think the really bad (like daily life affecting) results of climate change will be *after* 2050, like between 2050-2100, but my confidence in my own predictions regarding climate change are actually very low (and I'm open to arguments we are already, today, experiencing some really bad effects). But in the meantime I will be buying some mesh nets and cardboard cutouts to fool the Zucker-bots.
You know I barely scratched the surface. You should come up here to TO so I can regale you at length over beers about how wrong you are.
Yes! You can be sure I'll take you up on this at this point, as I've got plenty of covid-delayed visitations and possible conferences in the area.
Grr. Bangladesh and Indonesia will be as rich as Uruguay and Portugal are, respectively, now. They will have world-class institutes of virology. They will live as long as we do now. We will not have gotten rid of diseases, but when one appears that is new to humans, an mRNA vaccine (or a vaccine or treatment based on principles not yet known) will start eradicating it a few weeks or months lager. Based on the accuracy of past forecasts along the lines of thinking you advocate, I believe exactly none of your forecasts.
Is this the Peter Watts who wrote Blindsight? Wow. Now if I meet writers like this in the comment section of Erik, I'm gonna subscribe for sure. Blindsight is one of my all-time favorite SciFi books, right next to Lem, Tiptree Jr. and Simmons for me. I loved that person with the impeded brain that never picked up any human emotional clues, but had to rationally look for them and learn about them in order to pick them up, if at all. And of course, if I remember correctly, those aliens which synchronized with our nerves so they could change position undetected by us humans.
Yeah, I'm that guy. Pretty heady company you lump me in with. Not sure it's deserved, but I'll take what I can get.
And if anyone else wonders how good SciFi by Peter Watts is, Lightspeed Magazine has a new shortstory by him in their current issue (#154, March 23 ➜ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/issues/mar-2023-issue-154/). The story by Peter Watts ("Contracting Iris") is going to be online on March 16.
I, for one, can't wait.
OK, so I need to explain, maybe. Been 10 years ago or so, I think, that I read it. I found it great because of the insights into the human condition that I got from listening to that brain-handicapped empathy observer. He (?) was almost not-human, but he tried so much to understand and be a normal human. In this it came close to the introspection into the human condition that I found in Lem or Tiptree Jr. (Tiptree Jr. focussed on female characters mostly and I wonder how anyone ever bought that male pseudonym).
I may take the Simmons reference back. But then your book fascinated me as much as his do, and I thought there were many very original ideas in there (as I said: the way the aliens synchronized with our nerve impulses, for instance) which Simmons has, too. But then Simmons wrote epic space operas. Yours was not. So maybe not Simmons-like.
And I understand the set up of the team that includes a vampire might put off straight SciFi fans, for it is more mystery or fantasy then. I liked it anyway, for the vampire had a function for the plot.
Gaza, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq all have very high TFRs, and I don't believe we'll even see a 4% cut in global per capita GDP in any decade of the 21st century. Predictions of environmental disaster in a way that's actually notable to most people never seem to pan out. I do accept another, deadlier pandemic is quite likely within the next few decades.
"Predictions of environmental disaster ... never seem to pan out."
I quite agree. We've already got permafrost melting to a depth that wasn't predicted to happen until 2070. Arctic sea ice loss and sea level rise have both been worse than worst-case predictions dating from less than a decade ago (according to a 2018 paper in Nature, damage from flooding is shaping up to be three times as bad as previously calculated. I already mentioned the west-coast "heat domes" that went utterly unpredicted by the best models previously available.
So damn right our predictions of environmental disaster tend to not pan out; the observed reality, when it catches up with the prediction, tends to be even worse.
As for taking solace in metrics like GDP, well, when the laws of physics run up against an RPG whose central tenet is "endless growth from a finite resource base", I'm pretty sure which one's coming out on top. Those who describe conventional economics as a form of brain damage are clearly on to something.
Survivorship bias.
Haha Peter Watts - what the heck are you doing here? Hi!
What am I doing here? Bitching and moaning, as usual. Isn't it obvious?
But carbon capture powered by fusion may come JUST SOON ENOUGH in time to save us all from the climate apocalypse!
That would be quite a coincidence, but fission is pretty promising for dramatically reducing carbon emissions, and that might be enough. A climate "apocalypse" is, after all, one end (and far from the most likely outcome) of a wide range of forecasts.
I believe you are mischaracterizing Robin Hanson. He states in his conclusion that the world described in the book has less than a 0.1% chance of coming true. It's more of a thought experiment than a prediction.
I am 61 and don't feel as you say you will. I also expected a moon colony way back by the 1980s and it never happened! There may be more exploration, but colonies will be very expensive. I doubt soft totalitarianism will really be tolerated in the USA, but it will in societies that were never very liberal minded. I agree with the main point that the world will look a lot like it does today, though you do not mention climate change, likely to impact travel and energy usage and what you say about inequality seems contradictory, more for social care but a bigger difference between poor and rich...perhaps more so in some places than others.
So many people have said exactly this (that I'm overestimating how drained I'll feel), so I'm inclined to believe you. Perhaps it's a function of my first novel - it took a *lot* out of me. I still feel depleted. So extrapolating that I'd be psychologically some sort of shrunken wizened creature after a couple more books. But maybe that won't be the experience each time.
Some interesting points about futurists. As well as missing climate change (which will in many ways probably result in divides similar to our current ones, at least until 2050), I think the predictions about education and shopping are wrong because they assume they're primarily about consumption. People have been predicting mega-universities for years, and while books are easily bought online, clothes aren't.
I teach online due to COVID, and the overwhelming majority of students and teachers can't wait to get back to face-to-face learning, because learning is social and the technology can't compete with seeing everyone in a room at once, without fractional delays. Some people can learn without the motivation of a social environment, but many can't, and a lot of the experience of a tertiary education is about being on campus. And shopping in person is fun and social. Some industries will lose physical shops, but many won't. Education and shopping will be more like e-books, prophesised to take over the world but now one of a range of options and still less popular than physical books.
I agree.
This futurist mostly agrees with you. I hope in 1 but I have strong doubts. Love the last paragraph. At 63, I haven’t done yet all I wanted to do, and I am working on it. Same for your future 2050 self I guess.
Are there any trends you think will reverse? Seems like all your predictions are of current trends continuing. But if you approached it that way in 1992, you'd also have guessed that crime would have increased almost to the point of societal collapse, teen pregnancy would have increased from then-recent historical lows (this seems like an example where it's hard to say current trends will continue - is the current trend measured over the last few years or the last few decades? Would change your answer on that one), and perhaps AIDS would be killing a huge number of people. If anything political conservatism would have seemed like the future - just getting off 12 years of Republican presidents, and 20 out of 24 years, with the guy who was going to finally win for the Democrats being a centrist.
I hope you don't seriously believe that you will be depleted of books at 62, since I just started a career as a writer at 65. (That is when my first commercial book came out, not when I started writing it.) We are going to have an awful lot of old people around, a resource we never had until right about now, and we'd better think seriously about how to use that resource productively. We can't afford to just sit on our haunches (an increasingly uncomfortable position anyway at my age) and live off the fruit of the technological tree.
I love to hear you just published a book and switched careers - congrats!
Thanks. My first book is a futuristic book in that it uses economic history to make conjectures about the future, but I don't call myself a futurist for the exact reason you describe. Here's the link: https://www.amazon.com/Fewer-Richer-Greener-Prospects-Abundance/dp/1119526892. Here is the last chapter, reprinted (and made available for free!) by a magazine for financial professionals: https://www.advisorperspectives.com/articles/2020/03/09/save-the-children-from-apocalyptic-thinking. Happy reading, Larry
the single most important thing that will impact and inform all of those areas of society is the environmental jackpot [climate change/biodiversity loss/desertification/mass extinction] but it's mentioned nowhere here :(
See Peter Watts’s (a very good sci-fi writer) comment about precisely this. To be honest I’m of the opinion that the effects of climate change will hit hardest post-2050 but I’m open to the idea it will be a lot sooner.
Since I was born in Manhattan in 1926, I have seen this world move through major changes that makes me very cautious about easy prediction. The rate of technology advances is quite different today than when I grew up in the 1930's and saw my first TV at the 1939 World's Fair. Even Heinlein' and Asimov said nothing about computers and H.G. Wells with his time machine had not speculated on the possibilities of artificial intelligence. This world today has not even taken seriously the climate threats since fossil fuels are set to double in the next decades and the prospect of current civilization under two more decades of vast planetary changes where even the fundamental possibility of growing enough food is quickly disappearing and most recently the whole shipping industry that cannot meet current vital demands makes the future look like a very bad joke.
A Martian colony may have some feasible but still rather primitive transportation possibilities but it has little if any concept of the highly integrated hugely variable and fragile life forms on this planet where life such as fungus and microbial living things provide the massive supports that we larger animals almost entirely neglect to acknowledge as vital to our existence and the existence of all other forms of life on the planet, Mars is totally sterile and, perhaps initially, some form of underground reproduction of Earth environment might be possible but it is a huge enterprise that might have marginal success after a century of dangerous struggle and huge support from planet Earth. But the social instabilities that are clearly evident in current social organizations today in the solvable fight against Covid-19 indicates that even the best we can manage is not enough to save the poorer nations from unspeakable tragedy. A quick setup of a Martian colony that might survive seems unlikely considering the open foolishness today everywhere on our planet.
Heinlein in his novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress did visualize an artificial intellect but it was merely a mechanical human mind with no prospect of the superior possibilities which frighten anyone of an AI vastly more powerful than a human.
Wow, 96 or 97 years old sir. Congrats on the long experience. It seems you were just old enough to make America's entry into WWII. Thanks for your insights...I agree with all our struggles to do well on earth, how can we imagine doing well on Mars. But I feel there may be things we just can't see yet that we will benefit from leaving earth...it seems like an inevitable journey of exploration, just as we needed to discover all of this planet and all those great explorations...I just hope colonialism won't repeat.
'Mostly online' education is a bit like mostly air-breathing education. Yes, of course it will be mostly online, but what does that mean?
This is a very productive article, and I like it a lot. I disagree with a lot of it, which is one of the reasons I like it a lot. One point worth making: the Canadian Forces futures people discovered, about a decade ago, that they had real difficulty communicating their futures work to their customers. They solved this problem by hiring a science fiction writer to produce their written material. The result was very engaging, readable, *good* science fiction, based on their work.
Bad futures communication often comes from weak futures work (and you've given us some really sharp examples). Good science fiction includes good futures work, almost by definition. This means that it's unfair to compare bad futures communication to science fiction 'without the plot'. Instead, compare bad futures communication to *bad* science fiction 'without the plot'.
I will be seventy-nine it will be the winter of my life. it will be the autumn of your life Mr Hoel. don't wish the seasons away...
A fair point
Fascinating piece, but I have to argue with #5 though, about a "mostly storeless" future. You may be right, and I am no retail expert, but you did say you were going to base your forecasts on "current trends." Well, BLS says number of retail establishments in 2001 was about 1 million (1.05 actually), then in post-recession fell to... 1 million (1.025), and then rose by the end of 2020 to... 1 million (back to 1.05 actually). I don't see a "current trend" there. So you must be predicting a change to the trend, yes? I am not saying you are wrong, just don't see a trend here.
I think that's quite fair Glenn, but the trend I'm judging from is actually the speed of deliveries, which are significantly increasing. While I think cute downtowns will still be around in 2050, I think almost everything outside of them will be significantly downscaled and shuttered. The trend I am judging from is the progress in robotics, delivery-speed, and drones, rather than directly extrapolating from store closings. So in this I do expect a significant drop off that wouldn't be apparent from just the trend in number of retail establishments.
Makes sense to me! For a future version (nice turn of phrase I did there!) of this article, it might help to make that more explicit, as in "The trends behind this prediction are X and Y and the reason they have had no impact on store counts yet is Z." (LIke I always wonder why, how after a decade of Uber etc., car ownership (in terms of vehicle/household) has not gone done... and in cities like NY and LA has even gone up!). One would also need to wrestle around with why digital natives like Casper and Warby Parker and Wayfair and maybe even Amazon are opening physical stores. Okay, enough nattering on by me.
The likeliest scenarios per my read of persistent trends have energy becoming more expensive in the future. For a few reasons: 1) Increasingly scarce and uneconomically extractable fossil fuels (today, the Energy Return on Investment of fossil fuels is a small fraction of what it was a century or even a generation ago, as all the new finds are offshore, in oil sands, or otherwise more difficult and less efficient to extract and refine). 2) The externality of fossil fuel consumption has gotten exponentially more intense (i.e. Climate Change), constraining their use. 3) Renewable alternatives to burning oil are (often) cheaper for electricity generation, but not for transport, and certainly not for heavier industrial applications. Unless we can crack and then scale out nuclear fusion, no existing renewable energy technology will have the low cost, stability, and energy density that fossil fuels have. So, energy will get more expensive in a way that we're not used to and that every aspect of our contemporary existence is predicated on. With higher energy prices, you completely flip the logic of the design of everything.
The implications for retail commerce are many, but one of them is that to-you-door-online-delivery-of-everything isn't viable. So, ironically, we're returned again to the hub-and-spoke model of delivering goods to depots and points-of-sale. That is to say, stores. We might even return to the much more enduring pre-industrial model of the temporary market town. When energy and shipping are more expensive, just-in-time delivery makes less sense. Globalized supply chains make less sense. By contrast, warehousing/storage and distributed production make more sense.
16, 17. This is what current trends seem to indicate.
But now that we are talking about China etc., I think you skipped one important thing:
My prediction, based on current trends, is that the US and the West will become *much* less important than today in the global scheme of things on the planet.
Therefore, I think you should qualify many of your prediction with “in the US and the West.” Things can and I think will be different elsewhere.
Fascinating post Erik, agree with most of these (though I'm not quite as pessimistic on culture/totalitarianism).
I think the Mars colonies is the only big miss on your list. Futurists in the 1950's also had absurdly grand hopes for Space that never materialized (cities on the moon etc.), and I suspect we're in the same spot today with our own predictions.
One important note: everything in prediction seems to take WAY longer than we think. Look at Kubrick's 2001 or Blade Runner (set in 2019!). Both were absurdly off in their optimism for space travel by those years.
For my own position: I'm extremely bullish inner space (VR), moderately bearish Outer Space.
VR seems seductive, fun, full of possibility and easy to think of a dozen applications. Space is difficult, expensive, hostile, and ambiguous in its benefits (what does a Mars colony actually do for us on Earth?) apart from some symbolic pride as a feat of scientific achievement. Especially consider the hostile terrain/atmosphere of Mars in general - not an attractive prospect to live in.
Ironically I came here from MR blog*
I read MR regularly and read your article now, both of you are well-educated and worth my time.
I have no intention to spark a intellectual conflict between you too guys. I just want to see different POVs and came up with one of my own.
That said, I am interested in knowing your reply about Cowen claim that you criticize his prediction than you basically made the same one.
Peace.
* https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/friday-assorted-links-333.html
Nice of him to link it. Tyler Cowen’s great, I just think contrawise to some of his predictions in a brief article he once wrote. His full views are likely more complex than what’s there, and hedged and flexible, as all human views ultimately are. My philosophy of writing on the internet is that it’s pretty low-bandwidth. Meaning that, in order to find if we truly disagreed or were just emphasizing different things by phrasing it very differently, we’d have to interact in-depth.
Brilliant piece and some wonderful insights! I hope you are I are both around in 2050 to re-read it. Also, as a "futurist," I appreciated your insights on how and why futurists can go astray on our "predictions" about the future. One trick I try to apply to myself is to go back and revisit my old writings and analyze why I was wrong.