Russia continued focusing all its strength on capturing the far eastern region of Ukraine, known as “Donbass.” Over the course of the month, Russian forces used their superior artillery and troop numbers to grind down Ukraine’s defenders in continuous battles of attrition. Losses were high on both sides.
Russia’s surprisingly weak performance in Ukraine suggests that NATO intelligence overestimated it, and the alliance could defend itself from Russia with fewer troops than it thought. https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2022.2078044
Glimpse the future: A Ukrainian flying drone equipped with a thermal camera and bombs tracked down a group of Russian soldiers hiding in the woods at night and killed several of them with its payload. https://youtu.be/TgdcsIFX8vA
Russian forces had to abandon “Snake Island,” which they captured at the start of the war, due to heavy losses from frequent Ukrainian attacks. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61992491
Francis Fukuyama’s predictions from March 10 that the Russian army would lose the war in Ukraine by now, mostly due to supply shortages, was wrong (though other aspects of his analysis were right) because the Russians realized they were overextended and retreated from everywhere but southern and far eastern Ukraine before their war machine broke down. https://www.americanpurpose.com/blog/fukuyama/preparing-for-defeat/
After over 50 years of using the M-16 series of assault rifles, the U.S. Army has announced it is finally adopting a replacement. To be called the “M-5,” the new rifle is bigger, more powerful, and possesses some more technically advanced features than its predecessor. https://youtu.be/MTZRCEh1Czg
Text-to-image computer algorithms just keep getting better the more models we feed into them. Look at the improvement that happens when the algorithms have 350 million, 750 million, 3 billion and 20 billion models. https://parti.research.google/
A Google chatbot called LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications) claimed in a conversation with one of its developers that it was sentient and had emotions. After reporting the exchange to his superiors, who proved unsympathetic, the developer, Blake Lemoine, leaked the text of the conversation with the machine to the media. I doubt LaMDA is actually sentient or emotional, but it’s remarkable we’ve already reached this milestone, and the machine should be given some benefit of the doubt and tested further. https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917
Because the Earth wobbles on its axis like a spinning top, the star that is directly above the North Pole gradually changes. A dearth of stars above Antarctica means there isn’t a “South Star.” https://explainingscience.org/2020/09/25/the-changing-pole-star/
A “sun gun” is an orbital weapon that reflects and concentrates beams of sunlight onto targets on the Earth’s surface, frying them. It can be done with one, large satellite with an attached, concave mirror, or with many small satellites with small attached mirrors. (Do Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites have mirrored sides?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_gun
The Iñupiaq people of Alaska have a unique, base-20 numeral system called “Kaktovik” that embeds the numerical value of each symbol into its appearance. The number and arrangement of strokes indicates a character’s value. This makes it possible to do some complex equations much more easily than is possible using the modernized Arabic numerals that are the global standard today. https://youtu.be/EyS6FfczH0Q
Pumped hydro is an excellent way to store excess power, but it can only be built in a small number of places with the right geography. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSgd-QhLHRI
The amount of land humans devote to producing food peaked around 2000 and has been declining ever since. This is mostly due to shrinkage of pasture land for grazing animals, and also to more efficient farming practices and technologies being adopted everywhere. https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land
We all know about electric eels, which can generate electric shocks to paralyze their prey, but did you know there are also aquatic animals that can generate and sense weak electric fields for the purposes of merely finding prey and communicating with other members of their species? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroreception_and_electrogenesis
A member of Vladimir Putin’s entourage collects his feces in a special briefcase whenever he travels abroad to prevent foreign spies from getting it and analyzing it to uncover the leader’s genetics and health status. https://www.foxnews.com/world/putin-poop-case-moscow-health-problems
New information has been released about the first pig heart transplant. After receiving the new organ, the recipient lived for two months before it became so weak that it couldn’t keep him conscious, and his family decided to end his life support. Crucially, the organ didn’t fail due to the man’s immune system rejecting it. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/pig-heart-transplant-failed-as-its-heart-muscle-cells-died/
Instead of doing a long essay or analysis, I’m trying something different this month by posting a bunch of short, undeveloped thoughts that are in line with the usual topics I cover on this blog. Frankly, I can’t manage more than this right now since my life has gotten VERY busy, though I have hope things will calm down soon. Here are my musings…
In the not-too-distant future, I think it will be possible to make a “computerized helmet” that could induce altered states of consciousness. The inside of the helmet would have electrodes that monitored your brain’s activity, and headphones would be attached to its sides, and video display to its front. Think of it as the Ganzfeld Experiment on steroids.
When worn, the helmet would play combinations of images and sounds, monitor their effects on your brain activity, and change the images and sounds in real time to ease your mind into an altered state. Each person might need a unique audiovisual experience to attain it, and some might be totally resistant to the machine’s effects.
In the far future, once we have advanced brain implants that are integrated into every region of the brain, it should be possible to use the devices to trigger any desired mental state, including ecstasy or intoxication. Direct electronic stimulation of the brain’s pleasure regions could make chemical-based drugs like heroin obsolete. The ability to experience blinding, pure pleasure on command might also be the doom of the human race as we know it.
If it is possible to make robots that look and act just like humans (androids), then it should be possible to make robot imitations of animals. In fact, I think the latter would be easier since animals have narrower ranges of behaviors, emotional states, and cognition. There would be some demand for animal-robots from people who wanted pets but without the hassles of dealing with their waste, feeding, or other needs. Moreover, since robots have effectively unlimited lifespans, they would be attractive to people who couldn’t bear the pain of seeing their pets age, sicken and die.
Robots are also infinitely more customizable than biological organisms, meaning people could have pets custom-made for their needs. One person might make a robot replica of a beloved natural pet that died, complete with an accurate personality and behavioral profile derived from video footage of the original pet. Another person might want a cat that was as smart as a human child and could speak simple sentences. Someone else might want a robotic cat-dog hybrid.
With moderate levels of genetic engineering, domesticated animals like cats and dogs could be made to understand a wider range of spoken human words and could make more sounds of their own, though they’ll never achieve the ability to truly understand and speak language. Computers will assist by “translating” animal noises, facial expressions, and other behaviors into human speech that nearby people can understand (this was recently done with pig grunts), and perhaps by doing the reverse for the animals’ benefit. In the very long run, linked brain implants will let us sense what animals are thinking and feeling, and to telepathically communicate with them to some degree.
One solution to global warming is to put large sunshades in space, positioned between the Sun and Earth. They would block sunlight from reaching the planet, cooling it down. Instead of there being only one, large sunshade, there would be many small ones, whose shadows would, in aggregate, cover the same area that a single large one would.
The sunshades would be able to maneuver, so they could cast their shadows on specific parts of the Earth, at specific times. We could have scheduled, “artificial eclipses” over cities if people wanted to experience them, and we could cool down hurricanes to weaken them, or cool down their fringes to steer them away from land.
As a bonus, the sunward sides of the sunshades would be covered in solar panels, producing electricity that the sunshades could use to power their maneuvering thrusters or to recharge other space ships that docked with them. They might even beam some of the power down to the Earth’s surface as microwaves.
Note: I have no illusions that we could launch enough sunshades into space to halt global warming anytime soon. We need to use technologies that already exist to deal with the problem, starting now.
Sunshades could also act as planet-killing weapons. Build one and position it so it blocks all light from reaching a planet from the star it is orbiting. This would only work against planets that lacked intelligent life forms capable of space flight.
Once AGI exists, it will be able to accurately emulate the styles of famous, long-dead writers and artists like Shakespeare, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Stanley Kubrick, and to produce new creative works in the same veins. It might even be better.
If we’re willing to throw a lot of resources at the problem, we might be able to use “ancestor simulations” to replicate, say, Shakespeare. Start with an accurate simulation of 1600s England and experiment with different Shakespeare bots, each growing up in environments as closely matching his as possible. See what plays each bot produces, and rewind and replay the simulation as many times as is needed, but with iterative tweaks to the environment and/or to the Shakespeare bot until the plays align with those the real Shakespeare wrote. At that point, you’re done, and you could use the bot to write entirely new, authentic plays.
Once restaurants have robot chefs, not only will the quality of the meals increase but the variety will as well. A team of robots would know how to combine ten, simple ingredients in enough ways to make hundreds of dishes (think of how contestant chefs on the show Chopped have to creatively use random ingredients to make meals in a hurry). A customer could even upload a complex recipe to the robots that they had never seen before and have it prepared expertly. Instead of future dining consisting of insect paste and some kind of bland, artificial food, I see things headed in the opposite direction, towards more complexity and variety.
Whenever wormholes are depicted in science fiction, they’re always used as a means of transportation across vast distances. However, the wormholes would have other, revolutionary applications. A tiny wormhole that had one end in a portable electronic device and another end in a large power plant could serve as an effectively unlimited “battery” for the device. Another tiny wormhole with one end in the device and the other in a massive heat sink could also remove effectively unlimited amounts of waste heat from the former. A Star Wars laser pistol that could fire an infinite number of shots, each powerful enough to kill someone, could be built.
After initial overconfidence and battlefield failures, the Russians have pared down their war objectives to conquering only the Russian-majority areas of eastern and southeastern Ukraine. In spite of serious losses, concentrating their forces in those areas led to significant gains of territory, and Russia now controls a swath of Ukraine stretching from Crimea in the south to just east of Kharkiv in the north. The capture of Mariupol provides Russia with a secure overland route to Crimea. Elsewhere, Ukraine has driven Russian troops back across the entire border of Belarus, and back across the northernmost stretch of its border with Russia itself. In a major victory, Ukraine also halted a Russian attempt to capture the northeastern city of Kharkiv. The war is taking economic tolls on both countries, though neither looks like it’s about to lose the capacity to fight soon.
Surveillance cameras filmed a group of Russian soldiers shooting two Ukrainian men in their backs at a car dealership, then looting the inside of one of the buildings. https://youtu.be/1GUrNPPTSWM
One of Russia’s second-most advanced tanks, the T-90M, was destroyed in Ukraine. The tank had to be abandoned after suffering battle damage or a malfunction in the field, and then another Russian tank in its unit shot it and blew it up before driving away to prevent Ukrainians from capturing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjx_GMLF–Y
‘SHOCKING video captures the moment a Russian tank is reportedly blown up, sending its turret hurtling 250ft into the air following a Ukrainian missile strike.’ https://youtu.be/QiybJ8UuHXA
Russia is sending obsolescent T-62 tanks towards Ukraine. While many crowed that it proved Russian losses were so high that they had run out of modern tanks, it’s likelier that the T-62s will be used to arm pro-Russian militias in occupied parts of Ukraine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNlb8qNykrg
Due to manpower losses, Russia has also removed its upper age limit of 40 for people to enlist in its army. However, recruits over that age will only be allowed to serve in specific, non-combat roles. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61619638
This March 20 Twitter thread, which predicted Russia’s entire military truck fleet would be incapacitated by now, leaving their frontline forces without supplies, was too dire. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505370275273183239.html
During WWII, the Germans captured countless Allied weapons, from small arms to tanks, and even captured foreign weapon factories. They put it all to use, especially as material shortages worsened and undermined their ability to make their own things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAeb1-bI5gA
A typical scenario: A tank is immobilized by damage, but not destroyed. It breaks down near the front lines or in enemy territory. While the tank is technically repairable, fixing it would take time, and the crewmen decide to abandon it and flee because enemy forces are nearby and could burst out of the treeline or come over the hill at any minute and kill them. Intact tanks are commonly lost to the enemy this way, and there were many such incidents early in WWII that let the Axis and Allies capture examples of each others’ best tanks, and to study them in labs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_131
BAE Systems unveiled a “robot tank” in the form of a remote-controlled M113 with an advanced rocket launcher on top. Since the vehicle doesn’t carry humans inside, its roof could be lowered to save weight and make it a smaller target. I predicted robot tanks would be smaller than their manned equivalents. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/army-tests-uncrewed-m113-armed-with-laser-guided-rocket-launcher
A Chinese robotics lab built a swarm of flying drones that could navigate an unfamiliar forest without crashing into any trees or other objects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9ZbipO8vxM
This video of a soldier holding a 60mm mortar tube and firing the weapon from that position gives a sense of how much recoil it has. No wonder they’re supposed to be firmly set in the ground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB-r352j2FI
It’s The Future, so where are our jetpacks? Well, even if the technology were affordable and practical, it would be too dangerous to use. https://youtu.be/KWmTZaGpzTo
The first synthetic dye, mauveine, was invented in 1855. For all of human history until 1855, the only way you could add color to a garment was to soak it in natural dyes. Most natural dyes fade shockingly quickly in the sunlight, and the clothing industry has long considered them obsolete. This means, in the old days, people either wore un-dyed clothes or badly faded clothes. Imagine a lot of shades of brown. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273606710_The_rate_of_fading_of_natural_dyes
A new, diamond-based disc can store as much data as a billion Blu-ray discs. I don’t worry about scenarios where all (or most) human knowledge is lost due to a catastrophe like nuclear war or a solar flare frying all our computer hard drives. Someday, we’ll have small, cheap storage devices that can contain all important information we know of, kind of like a thumbdrive containing full downloads of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. It would just take one of them survive a global catastrophe. https://gizmodo.com/quantum-computing-diamond-disc-could-store-billion-blu-1848853029
Here’s a long interview with professor Chris Mason, a very fascinating man who envisions the future of space exploration and of humankind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C2tPFCGL1U
A small, private space company called “Rocket Lab” used a helicopter to snag one of their rockets in midair as it slowly parachuted back to Earth after putting satellites in orbit. The recovery technique will let them reuse their space rockets, saving large amounts of money. https://www.space.com/rocket-lab-helicopter-booster-catch-satellite-launch
In 1971, a plane taking mapping photos of a remote part of Costa Rica captured one of the clearest images of a UFO to date. The film negatives have been re-scanned, and even higher-res photos derived from it were just released. https://www.uapmedia.uk/articles/costarica-ufo?format=amp
Quantum computers will be so powerful in the future that it will be possible to create accurate simulations of groups of individual atoms and their internal and external forces. This will lead to advances in battery design and materials science more generally as engineers will be able to rapidly experiment with all kinds of simulated alloys and element combinations to discover materials that have the optimal properties for different applications. https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/how-quantum-simulations-are-set-to-revolutionize-lithium-batteries
In Madagascar, people of mainland African descent reproduced more than people of Indian Ocean rim descent because the former are more genetically resistant to malaria. Only in the central highlands, where mosquitoes are rarer, do non-Africans still predominate. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03342-5
More proof that human intelligence has a strong genetic component: Most of the world’s mathematicians fall into just 24 scientific ‘families’, one of which dates back to the fifteenth century. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20491
Imagine this: the world is wracked by a mysterious disease that some claim the government deliberately created and released as part of a secret plan to expand its power. Infected people and even those suspected of being infected are forcibly quarantined and arrested. The police are the faceless enforcers of these rules, and wear high-tech helmets that thermographically scan passersby, and visually highlight people with high body temperatures on the police officer’s computerized visor. China has turned into a Deus Ex video game. https://www.biometricupdate.com/202004/biometric-face-scanning-helmets-reading-the-temperatures-of-people-in-crowds-in-china
Exposure to sarin nerve gas is probably what caused Gulf War Syndrome. It’s amazing how such faint contact with a substance can cause chronic illness and early death to so many people. The human body is frail. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61398886
On May 7, 1922, an article titled “What the world will be like in a hundred years” appeared in the (now defunct) New York Herald. Its author, W.L. George, was a well-known English novelist. Since we’ve reached George’s deadline, it’s worth analyzing his accuracy by comparing the world as we see it to how he predicted it would be.
Therefore it is without anxiety, that I suggest a picture of this world a hundred years hence, and venture as my first guess that the world at that time would be remarkable to one of our ghosts, not so much because it was so different as because it was so similar.
In the main the changes which we may expect must be brought about by science. It is easier to bring about a revolutionary scientific discovery such as that of the X-ray than to alter in the least degree the quality of emotion that arises between a man and a maid. There will probably be many new rays in 2022, but the people whom they illumine will be much the same.
Correct. X-ray imaging technology was invented in 1895, was a revolutionary medical advance, and was still relatively new in 1922. Since then, many other medical imaging technologies that make use of phenomena other than X-rays have been discovered, including ultrasounds, CAT scans, PET scans, MRIs, and fMRIs. On the other hand, human nature and fundamental interpersonal dynamics have not changed. Our technology changes infinitely faster than we as a species can evolve.
I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For Jefferson knew nothing of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, &c.; he did not even know hot and cold bathrooms. The little girl at Grand Central is a blase child; to her these things are commonplace; the year 2022 would have to produce something very startling to interest her ghost.
Debatable. Today there are many innovations that a person from 1922 would struggle to conceptually understand, like the internet, autonomous cars, space rockets, space stations, video calls, access to a million songs and almost all other human-generated content and knowledge from a pocket-sized device, nuclear weapons, machines that can carry on simple conversations about most topics.
The sad thing about discovery is that it works toward its own extinction, and that the more- we discover the less there is left.
This is an observation, not a prediction, but it could stand analysis. Whether there is a finite amount that can be known is a question we still haven’t answered. Even if potential knowledge is finite and science has boundaries, it might take us thousands or millions of years to run out of things to discover. Just this month, data from the Hubble Space Telescope indicated that astronomers’ long-standing estimate of how fast the universe is expanding is wrong, suggesting that there is a basic and important error in our understanding of physics. Moreover, if the recent, high-profile UFO sightings are to be believed, it is possible to build space ships that can violate the known laws of physics and materials science.
I suspect that commercial flying will have become entirely commonplace. The passenger steamer will survive on the coasts, but it will have disappeared on the main routes, and will have been replaced by flying convoys, which should cover the distance between London and New York in about twelve hours. As I am anxious that the reader should not look upon me as a visionary, I would point out that in an airplane collision which happened recently a British passenger plane was traveling at 180 miles an hour, which speed would have brought it across the Atlantic in eighteen hours. It is therefore quite conceivable that America may become separated from Europe by only eight hours.
Correct. It takes about seven hours to directly fly from New York City to London, and about eight hours to do the reverse (times are different due to the Earth’s rotation). Common passenger planes like the Boeing 787 have cruising speeds of 550 – 600 mph. Air travel between Europe and North America is indeed very common.
“Passenger steamers,” which refers to passenger ships of any size that have steam engines for propulsion, are obsolete, and steam engines are little used among all types of ships (they still make sense for some niches). Planes have replaced ships for transoceanic transport, and in rich countries, cars and commuter trains are much more common modes of transport up and down riverine routes than boats. An important exception is short ferry trips, which remain the most sensible ways to travel in some locales.
As a means of everyday human transportation, ships have sharply declined since 1922, but they’ve found new life serving the leisure demands of people. The cruise ship industry is booming, and the boat tour industry is healthy.
The same cause will affect the railroads, which at that time will probably have ceased to carry passengers except for suburban traffic. Railroads may continue to handle freight, but it may be that even this will be taken from them by road traffic, because the automobile does not have to carry the enormous overhead charges of tracks. Certainly food, mails and all light goods will be taken over from the railroads by road trucks.
Half right, half wrong. In developed countries, trains are used much less for long-distance passenger traffic than they were in 1922, but they are still a primary means of daily transportation for people who live in cities or who commute into them for work. Railroads also remain the backbone of freight transportation. It’s still cheaper to move many types of cargoes by rail instead of by truck, and as the above chart shows, trains moved almost as much cargo in the U.S. as trucks did in 2018. Moreover, the total volume of material moved by rail in the U.S. increased from 1980 – 2018, showing that it’s not dying out.
The people of the year 2022 will probably never see a wire outlined against the sky: it Is practically certain that wireless telegraphy and wireless telephones will have crushed the cable system long before the century is done. Possibly, too, power may travel through the air when means are found to prevent enormous voltages being suddenly discharged in the wrong place.
Mostly wrong. Power lines are underground in most parts of American cities, but they are still above ground almost everywhere else due to cost and ease of maintenance. Wireless telephones (cell phones) are indeed common, but the failure to find a safe, economical way to wirelessly transmit electricity means that power lines are still common sights.
Coal will not be exhausted, but our reserves will be seriously depleted, and so will those of oil. One of the world dangers a century hence will be a shortage of fuel, but it is likely that by that time a great deal of power will be obtained from tides, from the sun, probably from radium and other forms of radial energy, while it may also be that atomic energy will be harnessed. If It is true that matter is kept together by forces known as electrons. It is possible that we shall know how to disperse matter so as to release the electron as a force. This force would last as long as matter, therefore as long as the earth itself.
This was half right, half wrong. We have used enormous amounts of fossil fuels over the last 100 years, but they are not near depletion. Coal reserves remain highest of all, and BP estimates the world has over 100 years of it remaining, at present usage rates. Oil is not close to running out, and fracking has substantially boosted the size of the global reserve.
Tidal power never became widespread because the technology proved too finicky in practice to be useful outside of a small number of places with ideal geography.
In 1922, when these predictions were made, science supported the notion that sunlight and radioactive metals could be used to generate electricity, so the author’s prescience about the rise of solar and nuclear energy was not thanks to clairvoyance–he was well-read on physics literature. That said, it took decades for the first commercial designs to be invented.
The movies will be more attractive, as long before 2022 they will have been replaced by the kinephone, which now exists only in the laboratory. That is the figures on the screen will not only move, but they will have their natural colors and speak with ordinary voices. Thus, the stage as we know it to-day may entirely disappear, which does not mean the doom of art, since the movie actress of 2022 will not only not need to know how to smile but also how to talk.
Correct. Movies started looking and sounding lifelike long before 2022. However, “the stage” did not entirely disappear. Live theatre plays are still held, though attending them is a marker of higher status (or pretensions to be such), whereas in 1922 it was a common venue of entertainment. This inversion also happened with horse ownership over the same period.
One might extend indefinitely on the number of inventions which ought to exist and will exist, but the reader can think of them for himself, and it is more interesting to ask ourselves what will be the appearance of our cities a hundred years hence. To my mind they will offer a mixed outlook, because mankind never tears anything down completely to build up something else; it erects the new while retaining the old; thus, many buildings now standing will be preserved. It is conceivable that the Capitol at Washington, many of the universities and churches will be standing a hundred years hence, and that they will, almost unaltered, be preserved by tradition.
Correct. It’s hard to think of a government capitol building in the U.S. that has been torn down since 1922, and it’s common to come across university buildings, churches and monuments that are over 100 years old today. If anything, we are taking historical building preservation too far, preventing valuable real estate from being used for new purposes. This is particularly bad in older cities like New York and San Francisco, where the inability to tear down smaller buildings and houses made in 1922 or earlier, or to even build contemporary structures next to them for fear of damaging the historic authenticity of the neighborhood, has produced affordable housing shortages and high commercial space rents.
Also, many private dwellings will survive and will be inhabited by individual families. I think that they will have passed through the cooperative stage, which may be expected fifty or sixty years hence, when the servant problem has become completely unmanageable and when private dwellings organize themselves to engage staffs to cook, clean, and mend for the groups. That cooperative stage will be the last kick of the private mistress who wants to retain in her household some sort of slave. In 2022 she will have been bent by circumstances, but she will have recovered her private dwelling, being served for seven hours a day by an orderly. The woman who becomes an orderly will be as well paid as if she were a stenographer, will wear her own clothes, be called “Miss,” belong to her trade union and work under union rules.
Wrong. This prediction touches on some peculiarities of life in 1922 that are almost forgotten today. Widespread poverty and sexism created a large number of women who were desperate for work, but could only find it in a handful of career fields that men eschewed. In 1922, it was much more common for women to work as domestic servants, and each day they would go to the houses of richer people to do cleaning, cooking, and other household tasks. Additionally, it was normal for even lower-middle-class households to employ domestic servants.
In 1922, labor-saving machines like dishwashers, clothes washers, and vacuum cleaners were not yet common, and because the average family was larger than today’s, it produced more of a daily mess. Most households simply lacked the time to meet their own cleaning and cooking needs, making domestic servants essential, or close to it.
At the same time, few people were willing to pay maids, cooks, and cleaners decent wages, making domestic servitude an unpopular and low-status line of work. There were never enough of them. The “servant problem” mentioned in the prediction was a common term in 1922 that described the shortfall of domestic servants in America. W.L. George predicted that the shortfall would keep growing until families would be forced to take advantage of economies of scale and get their domestic work done at an affordable cost by sharing servants. However, that “cooperative” arrangement would ultimately fail as the domestic servants unionized and forced households to give them high wages and reasonable workloads.
Things didn’t turn out that way. Labor-saving household innovations like the machines listed earlier, and like microwaveable and pre-packaged meals became widespread shortly after WWII, reducing the need for home servants. Clothing styles also became less formal, reducing the need to launder and iron clothes. Also, as laws and social norms changed, better types of careers opened for women, steadily thinning the ranks of domestic servants. By the 1970s, they had become rarities seldom encountered outside of rich households.
Naturally the work of the household, which is being reduced day by day, will in 2022 be a great deal lighter. I believe that most of the cleaning required to-day in a house will have been done away with. In the first place, through the disappearance of coal in all places where electricity is not made there will be no more smoke, perhaps not even that of tobacco. In the second place I have a vision of walls, furniture and hangings made of more or less compressed papier mache, bound with brass or taping along the edges. Thus, instead of scrubbing its floors, the year 2022 will unscrew the brass edges or unstitch the tapes and peel off the dirty surface of the floor or curtains. Then every year a new floor board will be laid. One may hope that standard chairs, tables, carpets, will be peeled in the same way.
Half right and half wrong. Thanks to environmental laws enacted starting in the 1950s, levels of soot and other industrial toxins in the air are much lower than they were in 1922, and there are few places in the developed world where people have to scrub residue films off their houses and cars. W.L. George was right that this partly owes to changes in coal use: coal-burning stoves and boilers are no longer common in homes, buildings and factories, and the remaining coal consumption overwhelmingly occurs at large power plants. Those plants also have much better technology for filtering particulates out of their waste gas before it is released into the atmosphere.
W.L. George was also right that it would be much less common in 2022 for people to smoke indoors, leading to a further improvement in air quality and decreased need for cleaning since brownish nicotine stains no longer build up on walls and other surfaces.
However, his weird prediction that people would cover their floors and furniture in giant stickers that they could peel off and replace to avoid doing any cleaning didn’t come true. The impracticality of such a thing should have been obvious even in 1922, as getting a sticker that is the exact shape and size of the floor in a particular room of your house, removing all the objects from the room, peeling off the old sticker, applying the new sticker, and then putting the objects back in the room costs a lot of time and trouble. (Additionally, applying the new floor sticker without trapping any visible air bubbles under it or creating creases in it would probably be a frustrating effort) It’s easier to sweep or vacuum the bare floor as needed.
Similar reforms apply to cooking, a great deal of which will survive among old fashioned people, but a great deal more of which will probably be avoided by the use of synthetic foods. It is conceivable, though not certain, that in 2022 a complete meal may be taken in the shape of four pills. This is not entirely visionary; I am convinced that corned beef hash and pumpkin pie will still exist, but the pill lunch will–roll by their side.
Wrong. While culinary competence has declined in most countries, people still eat regular food, and “meal pills” don’t exist. This is because it’s impractical to cram enough calories into a swallowable pill to substitute for a full meal.
You’d have to swallow about this many large pills full of saturated fat to equal what you consume during a typical meal.
Saturated fat is the most calorie-dense substance, and “tallow” is the food product made of it and nothing else. One-hundred grams of tallow contains 902 calories, so obtaining a full day’s worth of 2,000 calories would require the consumption of 222 grams (nearly 8 ounces) of it. Divided equally between three meals, you’d have to swallow a literal cupped handful of tallow pills each time. It wouldn’t be convenient, it might take longer than expected to down them all, and the sudden dumping of fat into your body would cause havoc in your digestive system and damage your health over time if you subsisted on the pills. It wouldn’t be possible to pack 667 calories of tallow into four pills that would still be small enough for you to swallow, as W.L. George predicted.
Anyway, I doubt we missed out on anything. Eating food is one of the great pleasures in life.
But at that time few private dwellings will be built: in their stead will rise the community dwellings, where the majority of mankind will be living. They will probably be located in garden spaces and rise to forty or fifty floors, housing easily four or five thousand families. This is not exaggerated, since in one New York hotel to-day three thousand people sleep every night. It would mean also that each block would have a local authority of its own. I imagine these dwellings as affording one room to each adult of the family and one room for common use. Such cooking as then exists will be conducted by the local authority of the block, which will also undertake laundry, mending, cleaning and will provide a complete nursery for the children of the tenants.
Wrong. Most people in the world do not live in high-rise co-op apartments. Moreover, residential skyscrapers that are over 40 stories high are rare outside of major cities, and they tend to be prestige locations where richer people live.
While the share of humans that live in urban areas has greatly increased since 1922–and in fact, more people now live there than in rural areas–they mostly live in low-rise apartment buildings, rowhomes, detached homes, and slum shacks that would be recognizable in proportions and style to W.L. George. Services like meals, laundry, and childcare are rarely provided by landlords, and most people today either provide them for themselves or obtain them through the private market and pay out-of-pocket.
Perhaps at that time we shall have attained a dream which I often nurse, namely, the city roofed with glass. That city would be a complete unit, with accommodations for houses, offices, factories and open spaces, all this carefully allocated. The roof would completely do away with weather and would maintain an even temperature to be fixed by the taste of the period. Artificial ventilation would suppress wind. As for the open spaces, if the temperature were warm they would exhibit a continual show of flowers, which would be emancipated from winter and summer; In other words, winter would not come however long the descendants of Mr. Hutchinson might wait.
Wrong. This quote explains why:
The construction of the Montreal Biosphère, a 250-foot diameter climate controlled World Expo attraction, proved incredibly difficult. And when people built domed houses and other buildings, they tended to leak, requiring frequent and expensive maintenance. Would a domed city really result in energy savings, given the enormous volume of air conditioned, largely unused, space? Decades later, we may have a solid answer: No…[Buckminster] Fuller long promised that domes would be essential to the occupation of the Arctic, Antarctic, and other planets, but there too, reality has fallen short. From 1975-2003 the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Scientific Station was encased inside a 160-feet-wide dome, but reviews were mixed. The dome could keep snow off the buildings inside, but not off of the dome itself, where it accumulated. Eventually, the entire station found itself buried in snow and, by 1988, the dome’s foundation was cracking spectacularly under the pressure. Today, the gold standard for Antarctic architecture is not domes, but modular units that can be elevated to escape an icy burial.
The family would still exist, even though it is not doing very well to-day. It is inconceivable that some sort of feeling between parents and children should not persist, though I am of course unable to tell what that feeling will be. I imagine that the link will be thinner than it is to-day, because the child is likely to be taken over by the State, not only schooled but fed and clad, and at the end of its training placed in a post suitable to its abilities.
Part right, part wrong. The traditional family has certainly declined over the last 100 years: divorce, single-parent households, and children born out of wedlock are many times more common now, with most deleterious effects on everyone (a good roundup of statistics is here: https://lanekenworthy.net/families/). However, things have fortunately not gotten so bad that the government raises children in orphanages as a matter of course. The only country I know of that tried such a policy was communist Romania, which banned abortion in 1967 in a deliberate attempt to spur population growth and increase the number of workers. The result was a humanitarian tragedy, as hundreds of thousands of unwanted children were born each year, many of whom ended up in the country’s state-run orphanages. Lack of resources, neglect, and abuse left them permanently traumatized and stunted. It was a disaster that showed the government is totally unsuited for the child-rearing role W.L. George envisioned.
This may be affected by birth control, which In 2022 will be legal all over the world. There will be stages: the first results of birth control will be to reduce the birth rate; then the State will step in as it does in France, and make it worth people’s while to have more children; then the State will discover that it has made things too easy and that people are having children recklessly; finally some sort of balance will establish itself between the State demand for children and the national supply.
The map shows abortion rights by country
Unclear! First, what does “legal all over the world” mean? Legal in every country, or in a group of countries encompassing most of the human population, or something else? And what counts as “legal”? Countries that let women get abortions at any stage of pregnancy and for any reason, or would W.L. George be satisfied with countries that still applied significant restrictions on abortion, like a ban on doing it in the third trimester (a common limitation in Europe)?
Globally, abortion access has decreased the fertility rate, but so have other major factors like greater career opportunities for women, higher costs of raising children, and a diminished cultural emphasis on having children. As a result, many rich and even middle-income countries have such low birthrates that their populations are shrinking or will soon start doing so. W.L. George was right to foresee that some governments would recognize the problem and enact policies to incent their citizens to have more children (China’s abandonment of its One Child policy, and the generous welfare programs in Western Europe for mothers are the most notable examples), though at best these have merely slowed the rate of population decline. Encouragement of immigration has become the preferred policy response, though East Asian countries seem resigned to accepting decline.
A “balance” to the population growth rate has not been achieved in any country as of 2022, unless by pure luck and not through focused government policy and the compliant behavior of citizens. Globally, the rate and distribution of human population change is uncoordinated and unbalanced: Most of the population growth is happening in places that are the least able accommodate more people, economically and environmentally.
Largely the condition of the family will be governed by the position of woman, because woman is the family, while man is merely its supporter. It is practically certain that in 2022 nearly all women will have discarded the idea that they are primarily “makers of men.” Most fit women will then be following an individual career. All positions will be open to them and a great many women will have risen high. The year 2022 will probably see a large number of women in Congress, a great many on the judicial bench, many in civil service posts and perhaps some in the President’s Cabinet.
Correct, so long as we exclude large parts of the world where conservative religious values still dominate. Focusing on the U.S., it is true that “most fit women,” which is probably another way of saying “most healthy women of working age,” have jobs. The figure is 76%, much higher than it was 100 years ago. The law prohibits hiring on the basis of sex and other demographic factors, so all jobs are technically open to women.
In Congress, 27% of the House consists of female Representatives, and in the Senate, 24% of its membership is female. It would be fair to call those a “large number” of women, and in fact, female representation in Congress is at a record high in 2022. Three of the nine Supreme Court Justices are women, and their number will grow to four once Stephen Breyer retires and is replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson. Half of the members of President Biden’s cabinet are female, including its most important member, Vice President Harris.
But it is unlikely that women will have achieved equality with men. Cautious feminists such as myself realize that things go slowly and that a brief hundred years will not wipe out the effects on women of 30,000 years of slavery. Women will work, partly because they want to and partly because they will be able to. Thus women will pay their share in the upkeep of home and family. The above suggestion of community buildings, where all the household work will be done by professionals, will liberate the average wife and enable her out of her wages to pay her share of the household work which she dislikes.
This is partly correct. Even in countries with progressive values, women have yet to achieve full equality with men in a number of important areas, mainly related to money and educational achievement. Contrary to the author’s view, motherhood has not been rendered obsolete by communal childrearing, and in fact it remains as probably the biggest impediment to sex equality. Women still do the lion’s share of household labor, even if they also have full-time jobs outside the home, and mothers are much likelier to drop out of the workforce to raise their children or to eschew more demanding jobs for the same reason.
Marriage will still exist much as it is to-day, for mankind has an inveterate taste for the institution, but divorce will probably be as easy everywhere as it is in Nevada. In view, however, of the improved position of woman and her earning power, she will not only cease to be entitled to alimony, but she will be expected, after the divorce, to pay her share of the maintenance of her children.
The author’s predictions are wrong for being both too conservative and too liberal! In 1922, Nevada had the most lax divorce laws in America, and couples could be granted a divorce for almost any reason. However, doing so required at least one of them to first establish legal residency, which required them to live in Nevada for at least six months. This created a strange, churning diaspora of people who were biding their time in the state for half a year to obtain divorce decrees. It disappeared later in the 20th century as other states made their own divorce laws less strict, removing the need for anyone to visit Nevada. In 2022, it’s much easier to get a divorce in America.
On the other hand, alimony laws have not changed nearly as much, and it’s the norm for women to be awarded sizeable alimonies from their ex-husbands upon divorce. Income and net worth determine the size and direction of alimony payments, and since men are likelier to make more money than their wives, most of the divorcees who receive alimony payments are women.
As regards the politics of 2022, I should expect the form of the State to be much the same. A few rearrangements may have taken place on the lines of self-determination; for instance, Austria may have united with Germany, the South American republics may have federated, &c, but I do not believe that there will be a superstate. There will still be republics and monarchies; possibly, in 2022, the Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Norwegian kings may have fallen, but for a variety of reasons, either lack of advancement or practical convenience, we may expect still to find kings in Sweden, Jugo-Slavia, Greece, Rumania and Great Britain.
This prediction was mostly correct. When the author says the basic “form of the State” will not have changed by 2022, it’s unclear whether “form” refers to the shapes and boundaries of countries or to the status of countries as the essential political units of the world. As the 1922 political map below shows, some borders have radically changed (Africa and Asia) while many others have not shifted at all (the Americas).
In spite of a lot of hoopla about transnational corporations becoming stronger than countries, terrorist groups and drug cartels carving out territories for themselves, and globalization erasing borders, the nation-state system still reigns supreme. For better or worse, central governments matter, national identity matters, and borders matter. Indeed, there is no global superstate, we are not poised to create one, and the continent that is closest to transforming into one, Europe, might have already reached the limits of how much integration its people will allow.
The author was right that the nation-states of 2022 would be governed by a mix of republics and monarchies, though his specific guesses of which European monarchies would survive were wrong: the Spanish, Dutch and Norwegian royal families HAVE NOT fallen from power, but the Yugoslavian, Greek, and Romanian royal families HAVE fallen.
Overall, monarchies have weakened over the last 100 years: the number of countries with monarchical governments has declined, the fraction of the human population living under monarchies has declined, and the amount of political power held by the remaining monarchs is generally less than their ancestors had in 1922.
On the inside, these States may have slightly changed, for there prevails a tendency to socialization which has nothing to do with socialism. Most of the European governments are unconsciously nationalizing a number of industries, and this will go on. One may therefore presume that in 2022 most States will have nationalized railways, telegraphs, telephones, canals, docks, water supply, gas (if any) and electricity. Other industries will exist much as they do to-day, but it is likely that the State will be inclined to control them, to limit their profits, and to arbitrate between them and the workers. We find a hint of this in America in the anti-trust acts; a hundred years hence the tendency will be much stronger. It is worth noting as an international factor that by that time purely national industries will almost have disappeared, and that the work of the world will be in the hands of controlled combines governing the supply of a commodity from China to Peru.
Across the Western world, people were still adjusting to the dislocations of the Industrial Age, and laws and social attitudes lagged behind economic realities. Cities were overcrowded with people seeking work in factories, there were few laws pertaining to labor rights or building standards, and a huge wealth gap existed between the capitalists who owned the factories and land, and the people who worked in and lived on them. The Bolshevik Revolution had just happened in Russia, Vladimir Lenin was still alive, and Communist forces worldwide had not yet killed or let starve millions of people. Communist ideology had not yet been discredited, and its leaders and adherents could still have reason to believe it was a superior and even inevitable alternative to capitalism.
All humans are born ignorant and helpless. A child’s parents, community, and society pays an enormous sum of time and money to provide their basic needs and to prepare them for adulthood. Nearly all children in modern societies are incapable of being anything but economic liabilities until age 16, when they might finally have the right intelligence, strength, and personality traits to work full time and contribute more to the economy than they consume.
Of course, in increasingly advanced societies like ours, economic, scientific, and technological growth depend on having high-quality human capital, and that requires schooling and workplace training well into a person’s 20s. This effectively extends the “liability” phase of such a person’s life just as long, as higher education usually costs more money than a young adult student can make at a side job.
Once that is finished, the productive period of an educated person’s life lasts about 40 years, after which they retire and stop contributing to the economy, science, or technology. In terms of a resource balance sheet, the only difference between this period of a person’s life and his childhood is that, as a retiree, he is probably living off his own accumulated savings rather than other peoples’ money.
And then the person dies, at 80 let’s say. He spent the first 25 years of his life learning and preparing for the workforce, 40 years participating in it and making real, measurable contributions to the world, and the final 15 years hanging around his house and pursuing low-key hobbies. That means this person, who we’ll think of as the “average skilled professional,” had a “lifetime efficiency rate” of 50%. Not bad, right?
Actually, it’s much worse once you also consider this person’s daily time usage:
The average, working-age American only spends about 1/3 of his day working. Sleep takes up just as much time, and the remaining 1/3 of the day is devoted to leisure, satisfying basic physiological needs (e.g. – eating, drinking, cleaning one’s body), running errands, doing chores, and caring for offspring or elderly parents. This means the typical person’s “lifetime efficiency rate” decreases by 2/3, from 50% to 16.6%.
But it gets worse. Any adult who has spent time in a workplace knows that eight hours of real work rarely get done during an eight-hour workday. Large amounts of time are wasted doing pointless assignments that shouldn’t exist and don’t actually help the organization, going to meetings that accomplish nothing and/or take longer than necessary, socializing with colleagues, using computers and smartphones for entertainment and socializing, doing non-value-added training, or doing actual value-added refresher training that must be undertaken because the brains of the human workers constantly forget things. In industrial jobs, there’s often downtime thanks to lack of supplies or to a crucial piece of equipment being unavailable.
From personal experience and from years of observation, I estimate that only 25% of the average American professional’s work day is spend doing real, useful work. That means the lifetime efficiency rate drops to 4.2%.
It still gets worse. Realize that many highly productive people who, let’s say, might actually do eight hours of real work per eight hour work day, are actually doing things that damage the world and slow down the pace of progress in every dimension. Examples include:
A journalist who consciously inserts systematic bias into their news reports, which in turn leave thousands of people misinformed, anxious, and bigoted against another group of people.
An advertising executive whose professional life revolves around tricking thousands of people into buying goods or services that they don’t need, or that are actually inferior to those offered by competitors. The result is a massive misallocation of money, and possible social problems as only people with higher incomes can visibly enjoy the useless products, while poorer people can only watch with envy.
A mathematician who uses his gifts in the service of a Wall Street hedge fund, finding exotic and highly technical ways to aggregate stock market money in his company’s hands at the expense of competitors. The hedge fund creates no value and doesn’t expand the size of the “economic pie”–it merely expands the size of its own slice of that pie.
A bureaucrat who manages a program meant to further some ill-defined social mandate. Though he and his team have won internal agency awards for various accomplishments, by every honest metric, the program has consistently and completely failed to help its target demographic.
A drug dealer who “hustles” his part of the city from sunrise to sunset, doing dozens of deals per day and often dodging bullets. The drugs leave his customers too intoxicated to work or to take care of themselves and their families, and have sent many of them to hospitals thanks to overdoses and chemical contaminants.
These kinds of people do what could be called “counterproductive work” or “undermining work,” and it can be very hard to tell them apart from people who do useful work that helps the whole world. Unfortunately, peripheral people who use their own labors to support the counterproductive people, like the cameraman who films the dishonest newscaster’s reports, are also doing counterproductive work, even if they don’t realize it. Once the foul efforts of these people are subtracted from the equation, the lifetime efficiency rate of the median American professional drops to, I’ll say, 3.5%.
Only 3.5% of this educated and well-trained person’s life is spent doing work that benefits society with no catches or caveats. Examples include:
A heart surgeon who saves the lives of younger people.
A medical researcher who runs experiments that help discover a vaccine for a painful, widespread disease.
A chemist who discovers a way to make solar panels more cheaply, without any reduction to the panels’ efficiency, lifespan, or any other attribute.
A civil engineer who designs a bridge that sharply reduces commute times for local people, resulting in aggregate fuel savings that exceed the bridge’s construction cost in ten years.
A carpenter who helps build affordable housing that meets all building codes, in a place where it is in high demand.
In each case, the person’s labor helps other people while hurting no one, and improves the efficiency of some system.
Let me mention two important caveats to this thought experiment. First, humanity’s 3.5% efficiency rate might sound pitiful, but it beats every other species, which all have 0% efficiency. One-hundred percent of every non-human animal’s time is spent satisfying physiological needs (e.g. – hunger, sleep), avoiding danger, caring for offspring, and indulging in pleasure (which might be fairly lumped in with “satisfying physiological needs”). At the end of its life, the animal leaves behind no surpluses, no inventions, and no works that benefit its species or anything else, except maybe by pure accident. Our measly 3.5% efficiency rate allowed our species to slowly edge out all the others and to dominate the planet.
Second, under my definition of “efficiency,” it’s possible for a person to have 0% efficiency even though they work very hard, create tangible fruits of their labor, and never do “counterproductive work.” A perfect example of such a person would be a primitive hunter or sustenance farmer who is always on the brink of starvation and spends all his time acquiring and eating food, with no time left over for other pursuits. He never invents a new type of spear or plow, never builds anything more than a wooden shack that will collapse shortly after he dies, and never makes up any religions or useful pieces of knowledge. For the first 95% of our species’ existence, our aggregate lifetime efficiency rate was infinitesimally greater than 0%.
Am I doing this thought experiment just to be dour and to cast humanity in a cynical light? No. By illustrating how inefficient we are, I’m just making a case that we’ll be surpassed by intelligent machines that will be invariably more efficient. Ha ha!
The first key advantage intelligent machines will have is perfect memories. They will never forget anything, and will be able to instantly recall all their memories. This will dramatically shorten the amount of time it takes to educate one of them to the same level as the average American professional I’ve profiled in this essay. Much of teaching is repetition of the same things again and again. And since intelligent machines wouldn’t forget anything, there would be no need for periodic retraining in the workplace, which takes time away from doing real work. Machines wouldn’t have “skills degradation,” and they wouldn’t need to practice tasks to remind themselves how to do them.
(Note that I’m not even assuming that machines will be faster at learning new things than humans are. Again, I’m being conservative by only assuming that they don’t forget things.)
The second key advantage would be near-freedom from human physiological needs, like the need to sleep, eat, or clean one’s self. Intelligent machines would need to periodically go offline for maintenance, repairs or upgrades, but this wouldn’t gobble up anywhere near as much time as it does in humans. For example, while a human spends 33% of his life sleeping, a typical server at a major tech company like Amazon or Facebook spends less than 1% of its time “down.” Intelligent machines wouldn’t have a good correlate to “eating,” since they would only consume electricity and do it while simultaneously performing work tasks. And since machines wouldn’t sweat, shed skin, or grow more than trivial amounts of bacteria on themselves, they wouldn’t need to clean their bodies or garb (if they wore any) nearly as often as humans. Intelligent machines also wouldn’t have a need for leisure, or if they did, they might need less than we do, saving them even more time.
Instead of being able to devote just eight hours a day to learning and working, an intelligent machine could devote 20 hours a day to them, as a conservative estimate. This, in turn, would further shorten the amount of time needed to educate a machine to the same level as the average American professional. I wrote earlier that the professional needed schooling until age 25 to be able to start a high-level job. Since the intelligent machine can spend more time each day studying, it can attend the same number of classes in only 10 years. And since it has a perfect memory, it lessons don’t need to contain as much repetition, and remedial lessons are unnecessary. Let’s say that cuts the amount of schooling needed by 30%. An intelligent machine only needs seven years to operate at the same level as a highly educated 25-year-old human.
And in the workplace, an intelligent machine wouldn’t be subject to the distractions that its human colleagues were (e.g. – socializing, surfing the internet), though its human bosses might still give it pointless assignments or force it to attend unproductive meetings. Still, during an eight-hour day, it would get at least seven hours of real work done (and this is another conservative guess). But as noted earlier, it would actually have 20 hour work days, meaning it would get 17.5 hours of real work done each day, dwarfing the two hours of real work the typical American professional does per day.
As for the “counterproductive work” / “undermining work,” I predict that human bosses will someday task intelligent machines with doing it, allowing scams, disinformation peddling, and criminal enterprises to reach new heights of efficiency. However, the victims will all be humans. Intelligent machines themselves would not be dumb enough, impulsive enough, or possessed of the necessary psychological weaknesses to take whatever bait the “counterproductive workers” were offering, and the latter will be laid bare before their eyes and avoided. For example, an intelligent machine looking to buy a new vehicle would have a perfect understanding of its own needs, and would only need a few seconds to thoroughly research all the available vehicle models and identify the one that best met its criteria. Car commercials designed to play on human emotions, insecurities, and lifestyle consciousness to dupe people into buying suboptimal vehicles wouldn’t sway the machine at all.
I won’t do another set of calculations for the hypothetical intelligent machine, but it should be clear that its advantages will be many and will compound on top of each other, resulting in them being much more efficient that even highly trained humans at doing work. Moreover, in a machine-dominated world, where they controlled the economy, government, and resource allocation, parasitic “counterproductive work” that we humans mistake for useful work would probably disappear. Just as humans slowly edged out all other species thanks to our tiny work efficiency advantage over them, intelligent machines will edge out humans in the future. It’s just a question of when.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has gone badly. In spite of Russia’s fearsome reputation and its recent military modernization, its battlefield performance has been disappointing and marred by many mistakes. The Ukrainians have fought harder than anyone anticipated, and have inflicted serious losses on their enemy. What was supposed to have been a quick, surgical operation to replace Ukraine’s regime with one friendlier to Moscow is turning into a bloody stalemate. Western sanctions against Russia for the invasion have been very severe, setting the country on course for major economic problems within a few months. It’s clear that Putin badly miscalculated when he decided to launch the war. Here’s a roundup of war articles:
On March 4, Russia scholar Michael Kofman predicted: “I try not to make too many predictions. I think given all the problems in the Russian campaign, delusional assumptions, an unworkable concept of operations, little prepared for a sustained war like this, I give it ~3 more weeks before this is an exhausted force.” https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1499967950975115269
This is a great analysis of Russia’s mistakes, and the likely future of the war. One basic insight is that the Russians were too weak to attack Ukraine on three fronts (northern, eastern, and southern) and achieve major objectives on all of them. They should have used all their forces to attack only one front. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/21/michael-kofman-russia-military-expert-00018906
It’s also prudent to remember that Russia has a much greater warmaking capacity than Ukraine. In the long run, and if it were willing to pay the price, Russia could take over its smaller neighbor. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60881915
Ukraine has captured at least one, seemingly intact example of the Russian Army’s most advanced field radio, the “R-187P1 Azart.” The Russians have far fewer Azarts than they claimed before the invasion, and are mostly relying on older radios and even cellphones, which can all be more easily jammed and eavesdropped on. And, in an example of the corruption that pervades Russia and has damaged its battlefield performance, there’s evidence that the Russian company in charge of making Azart radios secretly imported electronic components from China to make them, and pocketed the difference between what the Russian government paid them, and what they saved by using Chinese parts. https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russian-comms-ukraine-world-hertz
‘The CIA director said Putin premised his war on four false assumptions: He thought Ukraine was weak, he believed Europe was distracted and wouldn’t mount a strong response, he thought Russia’s economy was prepared to withstand sanctions and he believed Russia’s military had been modernized and would fight effectively.’ https://www.npr.org/2022/03/08/1085155440/cia-director-putin-is-angry-and-frustrated-likely-to-double-down
Here’s a video of a Ukrainian infantry platoon going into battle armed with a variety of Western-supplied antitank missiles. These have caused major damage to Russia’s military vehicle fleet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gezu6A9zcLU
The Ukrainian soldiers who ambushed and destroyed a small column of Russian vehicles near Kiev give a detailed description of the battle, at the site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ryCBcq_qxk
Video of Ukrainian troops blowing up an abandoned Russian tank, presumably because of the chance that Russian forces might recapture the area and return the vehicle to service. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFhspNJEHIk
The U.S. government’s official stance is now that Russian forces have committed war crimes against the Ukrainian people, and the matter should be investigated by an international criminal court. https://www.state.gov/war-crimes-by-russias-forces-in-ukraine/
An interesting bit about NATO standards: ‘Finally, some national standards are recognized as not inferior to NATO standards and do not require revision (in Ukraine, for instance, these are those related to potable water quality). The fact that compliance with all NATO standards is not the norm even for leading states members is evidenced by the fact that no country of the Alliance has achieved the mark of 100%, although in some, including Germany (91%), Great Britain (83%), France, Norway (81% each), Canada (76%), the degree of the implementation of standards is very high…Let us assume that if the current pace of implementation is maintained, Ukraine will implement at least 90% of the existing standards of the Alliance in approximately 13–14 years.’ https://rpr.org.ua/en/news/ukraine-and-nato-standards-progress-under-zelenskyy-s-presidency/
Britain is planning on upgrading its tank fleet to indigenously made Challenger 3’s, but it’s not economical for them to keep such a small fleet of one-off tanks that are specific to their country. They should switch to either the U.S. M1 Abrams or German Leopard 2, and maybe sell their Challenger 2’s to smaller NATO countries, like the Balkan states. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44927/british-armys-next-generation-challenger-3-tank-is-now-under-construction
The Soviet VVA-14 was one of the weirdest but potentially most versatile aircraft ever built. Its designer had plans for even more dramatic variants that weren’t built. https://youtu.be/UD7xiWWs-bs
NASA briefly experimented with “passive” communications satellites that were large balloons made out of radar-reflecting materials. One ground station would aim a powerful radio at it and broadcast a signal, which would bounce off the balloon and deflect at such an angle that another ground station thousands of miles distant would receive it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo
Using CRISPR, scientists were able to self-fertilize a female mouse with her own eggs. One of the resulting 12 zygotes lived to adulthood. It was not a clone of her. A clone shares 100% of your DNA, and a natural child shares 50% of your DNA. This new technique could be used to make offspring that shared an unnatural amount of your DNA, like 75 or 85%. https://phys.org/news/2022-03-mammalian-offspring-derived-unfertilized-egg.html
My predictions about humans in 12,022 A.D.: -There might still be some Homo sapiens, though they will be genetically engineered. Imagine today’s all-star athlete who graduated from high school at 17, went to MIT on an academic scholarship, and is also a model on the side being the average human by then. We could breed with them. -There will be “human-looking” people that will have radically different genetics and anatomical/physiological features from us. Imagine a person who looks externally normal, but has bird lungs, octopus eyes, and a different number of chromosomes than you. They will be so different that they will count as different species, and we won’t be able to breed with them. -There will be intelligent but nonhuman-looking life forms that are the products of many iterations of genetic engineering. Imagine something like a horse-sized spider with a big brain occupying most of its torso. It could trace its lineage back to a normal human that is alive today. -Some members of those three groups of intelligent life forms will be meshed with technology that augments their abilities. There might be a Homo sapien with synthetic, self-healing organs that are superior to his old, natural organs, there might be a “human-looking” Homo neosapien that also has brain implants to make him smarter, and there might be intelligent spiders with nanomachines circulating in their bloodstreams to assist with various bodily processes.
‘[By 1,000 years from now] The bulk of technology will remain simple or semi-simple, while a smaller portion will continue to complexify greatly. I expect our cities and homes a thousand years hence to be recognizable, rather than unrecognizable. As long as we inhabit bodies approximately our size – a few meters and 50 kilos — the bulk of the technology that will surround us need not be crazily more complex. And there is good reason to expect we’ll remain the same size, despite intense genetic engineering and downloading to robots. Our body size is weirdly almost exactly in the middle of the size of the universe. The smallest things we know about are approximately 30 orders of magnitude smaller than ourselves, and the largest structures in the universe are about 30 orders of magnitude bigger. We inhabit a middle scale that is sympathetic to sustainable flexibility in the universe’s current physics. Bigger bodies encourage rigidity, smaller ones encourage empheralization. As long as we own bodies – and what sane being does not want to be embodied? – the infrastructure technology we already have will continue (in general) to work. Roads of stone, buildings of modified plant material and earth, not that different from our cities and homes 2,000 years ago. Some visionaries might imagine complex living buildings in the future, for instance, but most average structures are unlikely to be more complex than the formerly living plants we already use. They don’t need to. I think there is a “complex enough” restraint. Technologies need not complexify to be useful in the future. Danny Hillis, computer inventor, once confided to me that he believed that there’s a good chance that 1,000 years from now computers might still be running programming code from today, say a unix kernel and TCP/IP. They almost certainly will be binary digital. Like bacteria, or cockroaches, these simpler technologies remain simple, and remain viable, because they work. They don’t have to get more complex.’ https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-arc-of-comp/
What happens if you load an enormous amount of data on chemical reactions and human biology into an AI, and then task it with finding lethal compounds against us?
‘In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible. These new molecules were predicted to be more toxic, based on the predicted LD50 values, than publicly known chemical warfare agents.’ https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9
This analysis predicts that the U.S. trucking industry will probably switch to a “transfer-hub” model where autonomous trucks transport goods over long, simple highway routes, while human drivers in smaller trucks move the cargoes over shorter distances at both ends. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01103-w
Small doses of radiation might actually benefit human health thanks to a process called “hormesis.” Note that nuclear power is so expensive partly because the power plants aren’t allowed to release any radiation at all to the surrounding environment, and that requirement is predicated on the assumption that any amount of radiation exposure hurts people. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/832949v1
I agree that the fake meat industry has been overhyped. Though meat substitutes are cheaper and more convincing than ever, they will not render meat consumption extinct. Not even close. Lab-grown meats will eventually eliminate the need to kill animals for food, but the technology won’t be good enough until near the end of this century (it’s not as good or advancing as fast as its contemporary cheerleaders claim). https://reason.com/2022/03/05/the-fake-meat-revolution-has-stalled/
Computers have translated pig noises into a basic “vocabulary” of emotional and mental states. A variety of technologies will let us communicate with animals in the future, and possibly to even share thoughts with them. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07174-8
North Korea still operates some Japanese-made trains from the 1930s. Thanks to the country’s socialist economy, labor is practically free, making it financially possible to keep fixing the trains in spite of their age. Once robots have made labor free across the world, will it become common for manufactured objects of all kinds to stay in service much longer than they do now? https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2021/07/blast-from-past-north-koreas-whacky.html
The German gunboat Graf von Goetzen was launched in 1915 and sent to Tanzania (then a German colony) to dominate Lake Tanganyika. Though the Germans left, the ship didn’t, and it remains in service to this day as a ferry, renamed the Liemba. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Liemba
There’s a new scientific paper claiming that ivermectin doesn’t treat COVID-19. Instead, it kills parasitic worms in people, boosting their immune systems just enough to let them survive COVID-19. Parasites are only common in tropical areas. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.3079
The pandemic isn’t over: China just locked down one of its biggest and most important cities due to a surge in COVID-19 cases. It will have global economic consequences. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-60893070
Russia has invaded Ukraine for a variety of reasons.
I’m not defending Putin, but he’s not simply an evil man who wants to conquer his neighbors. Years of Western European and, specifically, American foreign policy decisions have made him feel disrespected and backed into a corner. Our lack of a long-term, realist grand strategy for dealing with Russia has done major damage. https://reason.com/2022/02/25/how-the-past-4-american-presidents-helped-escalate-tensions-in-ukraine/
This may have been right. ‘But kicking off an invasion of Ukraine in the middle of Xi’s Olympic moment could throw a wrench into such warmth, and risk drawing China into the diplomatic fray. It’s possible Xi asked Putin in their recent call not to invade Ukraine during the Games, according to one diplomat in Beijing who asked not to be identified talking about such scenarios.’ https://nationalpost.com/news/world/war-in-ukraine-is-putin-waiting-for-the-beijing-winter-olympics-to-begin
This was wrong. ‘Russia may stage a large-scale military intervention in the Ukrainian region of Donbass at the end of January, and it could involve around 94,300 troops, Ukrainian Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov claimed on Friday.’ https://thepressunited.com/updates/ukraine-says-russia-may-invade-in-january/
Here’s a remarkable video of a CNN reporter stumbling across Russian paratroopers who just took over an airport in Ukraine. He approached them because he mistakenly thought they were Ukrainian. The Russians were friendly to him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1J6LpkG9zo
The “Henry Long Ranger” is probably the most advanced lever-action rifle ever made. However, the big unsolved design flaws were making it easy to clean the barrel and to clean and remove the internal mechanism. https://youtu.be/wsCO0XV5rwA
‘Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is the process of extracting bioenergy from biomass and capturing and storing the carbon, thereby removing it from the atmosphere. The carbon in the biomass comes from the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) which is extracted from the atmosphere by the biomass when it grows. Energy is extracted in useful forms (electricity, heat, biofuels, etc.) as the biomass is utilized through combustion, fermentation, pyrolysis or other conversion methods. Some of the carbon in the biomass is converted to CO2 or biochar which can then be stored by geologic sequestration or land application, respectively, enabling carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and making BECCS a negative emissions technology (NET).’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage
“Nucleosynthesis” is a process in which a light element is put inside a fusion reactor and bombarded with protons and neutrons, some of which it captures, converting it into a heavier element. Once we have built commercial fusion reactors, we could use the technique to make heavier elements like gold and uranium, and to ensure that we never ran out of any type of element. Terrestrial nucleosynthesis would also decrease the need for asteroid mining to satisfy Earth’s mineral needs. https://twitter.com/friedberg/status/1492382218307575809
This very technical article estimates that the first holographic TVs will become commercially available in the 2040s. They will present slightly different images to a viewer’s right and left eyes, fooling their brains into perceiving the displayed images as being 3D. In short, you’ll be able to watch movies in 3D without having to wear the glasses. The first generation of holographic TVs will operate on the principle of “multiview horizontal parallax only” (HPO), meaning 1) several people watching the same TV set from different angles (e.g. – watching from the left, watching straight-on from the center, watching from the right) will perceive its footage as being 3D and 2) the picture will only look 3D if the viewers’ heads are level. If one of them tilted his head 90 degrees, so his ear was flat against his shoulder, the footage would look 2D instead of 3D. Improved holographic displays operating on more advanced principles will emerge in the decades after. https://www.light-am.com/en/article/doi/10.37188/lam.2021.028
‘In North America, gradient is expressed in terms of the number of feet of rise per 100 feet of horizontal distance. Two examples: if a track rises 1 foot over a distance of 100 feet, the gradient is said to be “1 percent;” a rise of 2 and-a-half feet would be a grade of “2.5 percent.”…The effect of grades on train operations is significant. For each percent of ascending grade, there is an additional resistance to constant-speed movement of 20 lbs. per ton of train. This compares with a resistance on level, straight track of about 5 lbs. per ton of train. A given locomotive, then, can haul only half the tonnage up a .25-percent grade that it can on the level. Descending grades carry their own penalties in the form of equipment wear and tear and increased fuel consumption.’ https://www.trains.com/trn/train-basics/abcs-of-railroading/grades-and-curves/
The adoption of widespread tea drinking in England starting around 1700 led to a 12% decline in mortality since more adults were boiling their dirty water before drinking it. https://eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Antman.pdf
An important health benefit of smoking is that it reduces appetite, in turn lowering a smoker’s body weight. From 2002-17, the decline in smoking in the U.S. caused a small increase in the country’s obesity rate. https://www.nber.org/papers/w29701
For the last 20 years, efforts to create a new Lyme disease vaccine have failed because scientists made a wrong assumption about how an important part of the Lyme bacterium was shaped. Several candidate vaccines failed because they were designed to attach themselves to the wrong shape on the outsides of the bacteria. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/lyme-disease-molecule-revealed
At a meeting between French president Macron and Vladimir Putin, the latter refused to take a COVID-19 test out of fear the Russia would use it to secretly sequence his DNA, and use the information against him. Note my relevant prediction, which I said will come true in the 2030s:
“Trivially cheap gene sequencing and vastly improved knowledge of the human genome will give rise to a “human genome black market,” in which people secretly obtain DNA samples from others, sequence them, and use the data for their own ends. For example, a politician could be blackmailed by an enemy who threatened to publish a list of his genetic defects or the identities of his illegitimate children. Stalkers (of celebrities and ordinary people) would also be interested in obtaining the genetic information of the people they were obsessed with. It is practically impossible to prevent the release of one’s DNA since every discarded cup, bottle, or utensil has a sample.” https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-kept-macron-distance-snubbing-covid-demands-sources-2022-02-10/
“Tetrachromats” are people who have four types of photoreceptors in their eyes instead of the usual three, allowing them to see more colors. This article profiles one tetrachromat, and she finds the colors of nature more stimulating than the average person, while color schemes found in many buildings and manmade environments are bracing. I think our descendants will be able to see more colors than we can. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/30/im-really-just-high-on-life-and-beauty-the-woman-who-can-see-100-million-colours
As a reminder of how unexpected the current real estate price boom is, consider this July 2020 article from The Economist: “Many economists still expect house prices to fall over the whole of 2020—but such forecasts are looking increasingly shaky.”
In other words, as late as mid-2020, there was still no consensus over what direction the U.S. housing market was headed, and even the experts were unaware of how much prices were about to jump. Keep this in mind when reading today’s news articles where those same experts predict what the housing market will do over the next few years. I doubt a big crash in prices is coming, but the possibility can’t be written off. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/07/02/americas-housing-market-is-so-far-unfazed-by-recession
Consider the years of (highly expensive) training men go through just to become fighter pilots, the need for nearly continuous re-training to prevent them from forgetting skills, and the many hours of preparation and after-action work that they must do for each single hour of flight of actual combat missions. It’s amazing but also colossally inefficient. Once someone figures out how to build autonomous fighter planes that can be mass produced, programmed in a few hours at the factory, and uploaded with mission instructions in a few seconds, it will be the end of human pilots. They will be overwhelmed by machine fighter planes that can do missions around the clock, even if the human fighter pilots are better in 1:1 combat against them. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44099/why-fighter-pilots-work-for-eight-hours-intensely-to-only-fly-for-30-minutes
One of Google’s most advanced narrow AIs was tasked with finding a better way to losslessly compress internet videos. It did, but its method was only 4% better than what human computer scientists had created. Across a surprising number of technologies, humans have already achieved optimums or come very close to them. https://deepmind.com/blog/article/MuZeros-first-step-from-research-into-the-real-world
James Cameron now thinks that Skynet would destroy humanity by circulating deepfake videos on the internet to turn people against each other. “The news cycles happen so fast, and people respond so quickly, you could have a major incident take place between the interval between when the deepfake drops and when it’s exposed as a fake.” https://www.pcmag.com/news/james-cameron-skynet-would-destroy-humanity-with-deepfakes-not-nukes
For the record, I think a hostile AI would use a variety of weapons and tactics against us in a war, including advanced digital disinformation campaigns. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic shows how effective biological warfare would be against us, so we should expect that, and I also think Skynet would build some robots to kill us “kinetically,” though the vast majority of them wouldn’t look like T-800s.
‘To that end, here is what I expect AI progress will look like if it fits the patterns of past progress.
Major new methods or capabilities for AI will be demonstrated in systems that are generallypretty poor.
Under the right conditions, such as a multi-billion-dollar effort by a state actor, the first version of an important new AI capability or method may be sufficiently advanced to be a major global risk or of very large strategic value.
An early system with poor practical performance is likely to be followed by very rapid progress toward a system that is more valuable or dangerous
Progress leading up to an important new method or capability in AI is more likely to be accelerating than it is to be stagnant. Notable advances preceding a new capability may not be direct ancestors to it.
Plot: At an unspecified point in the future, it has become common for people to implant their children with devices that record everything they see and hear. The implants, called “Zoes” (two syllables), are organic, are implanted at the fetal stage of life somewhere in the central nervous system, and “grow” as the child grows. The implants are unnoticeable, and people are only told they have them once they hit adulthood. For technical reasons, the audiovisual contents of the Zoes can’t be downloaded until after the person dies.
Robin Williams is the main character and protagonist. The film starts with a memory from his own childhood where he is hanging out alone during a day trip to the countryside and encounters another boy his age, who is also alone. The two get on friendly terms and explore an abandoned building together. While walking over a narrow beam, the other boy falls over the edge, lands on his head and immediately dies. Kid Robin Williams could have saved him by grabbing him as he was dangling from the edge, but he hesitated and the boy died. He runs away and never tells anyone else about this traumatic and shameful memory.
Years later, Robin Williams has found work as a “cutter”–a sort of futuristic video editor who downloads Zoe recordings from the recently deceased and then edits them down into two- or three-hour movies that show all the milestones and positive highlights of their lives. These recordings are usually shown at funerals, given to loved ones, and serve as semi-official records of what happened in a person’s life.
Robin Williams editing footage from a zoe
The editing process entails deleting recordings of bad things the person did (like spousal abuse, child molestation, and everyday acts of cruelty), leaving a happy but false representation of the person’s life. Robin Williams’ choice of this profession clearly stems from his own desire to assuage his own guilty memories of the childhood incident. His character’s last name–“Hakman”–brings the symbolism to an even more obvious level.
The movie’s main conflict arises when Robin Williams is asked to cut the Zoe footage for a wealthy businessman who recently died. After reviewing it, not only does Robin Williams realize the man was a secret pedophile, but he also finds clues that the dead boy from his own childhood might have actually survived and crossed paths with the businessman. Added to the mix is the fact that Robin Williams is under a short deadline to do the cut and return the original footage to the family, and a dangerous terrorist group wants to steal the Zoe footage for blackmail purposes.
The year is never revealed in The Final Cut. Also, aside from the Zoes, the film depicts a world identical to our own–there are no flying cars, laser guns, robots, etc. Most people don’t even have stainless steel dishwashers. It’s a cop-out and makes the film more of a fantasy than anything else. By the time Zoes exist, it will be so far in the future that nearly everything about the world will be different from today.
Analysis:
There will be brain implants that record what people see and hear. In principle, this technology is possible and we already have crude versions of it. Implants that can monitor brain activity and turn a person’s thoughts into written text were recently invented to help people with speech disabilities. More advanced implants that monitor the parts of the brain that processed vision and hearing could someday decode the things a person was seeing and hearing. Alternatively, implants could be attached to the optic and cochlear nerves to directly monitor the stimuli being received by the eyes and ears (respectively), before any of it had been processed by the brain.
Safe, affordable central nervous system implants with capabilities like “Zoes” won’t exist until sometime in the 22nd century. However, average people will be able to effectively do the same type of lifelogging by the end of this decade by wearing the new generation of augmented reality (AR) glasses that are coming.
Brain implants will have “organic” characteristics. The Zoes “grew” along with their hosts, and since they were permanent, lasted a lifetime, and didn’t need to be removed for maintenance, they must have had self-healing capabilities and the ability to extract energy from blood or body heat. The devices thus had “organic” characteristics.
Some technologies will eventually gain organic attributes, and it’s clear this would be especially advantageous for devices implanted in “wet” brains and bodies. As one example, storage of digital information can presently only be done using artificial substrates like hard disk drives and flash drives, but scientists are developing ways to do it using DNA, which is an organic molecule. DNA is an incredibly efficient way to store information (a microscopic amount of it in just one of your cells can hold close to 1 GB of data), and existing cellular self-repair mechanisms are excellent at protecting the data contained in DNA from decay. This might be the ideal data storage medium for brain implants considering the enormous amounts of audiovisual data that would need to be saved.
Beyond that, advanced nanomachines and/or micromachines could fully bridge the gap between organic and synthetic since they would be artificial microorganisms and would allow macro-scale machines to grow, heal, and to move their parts in totally organic ways. Some robots will have supple bodies and will be made of what could be thought of as “artificial cells,” and some humans will have synthetic implants and body parts that look biological and have some properties of organic tissue. The line between “natural” and “artificial” might disappear, leading to life forms combining the attributes of both in refined ways.
Of course, that milestone won’t be reached anytime soon. Again, we’ll probably have to wait until the 22nd century to see this level of technology.
People won’t be able to control their own implants. Another two of the film’s conceits are that people can’t turn their own Zoes off or view the footage they have captured. Only after a person dies can the footage be downloaded (presumably, this involves brain surgery) and viewed (by other people).
Things will never turn out this way. Users will always demand control over their devices and their data privacy, and they will find Zoes useless if they can’t view their own recordings. Actual brain implants we create in the future will be able to transmit and receive data to and from external devices, and will also have simple features allowing users to do things like delete and play back recordings, or temporarily deactivate. (Also consider the legal, employment, and social consequences for a person if it were known that he was always recording everything he was experiencing.) If, for some reason, brain implants lacked these features, then people would instead use AR glasses for their lifelogging.
Machines will be able to recognize what is happening in video footage. A scene I really liked in The Final Cut was where Robin Williams used his computer to scan through the wealthy businessman’s Zoe footage. The data file is thousands of hours long, and the computer rapidly shuffled through every second of it, recognized what the dead man was doing each moment, and categorized each clip appropriately. It automatically sorted clips into groups like “Eating,” “Watching TV,” “At work,” “Walking around,” and “Having sex.” With the basic level of sorting completed, Robin Williams could then go through the clips and use his human judgment to select the ones best representing the man’s major achievements, milestones, and positive traits.
Well before Zoes are invented, computers will become smart enough to do this. In just the last five years, major progress has been made teaching machines to understand what’s going on in video footage, to accurately transcribe speech and recognize sounds, and to identify people through biometrics. Within ten years, a person will be able to upload his lifelogging footage from his AR glasses to a computer and have it sorted with the same speed, accuracy and thoroughness as Robin Williams’ computer. They will even be able to identify locations based on visible landmarks and other clues, and to make other intelligent inferences about the contents of clips.
Far from being a parlor trick or something that is only useful to obsessive-compulsives, this technology could help ordinary people. For example, in 10 years you could ask: “Who was that guy in the white jacket that I talked to at that party last week?” and your AR glasses will understand your spoken question, scan through its stored footage, and answer you, perhaps also offering an instant replay of the episode. It will be like having superhuman memory.
Parents will put implants in their newborn children. In the film, Zoes are implanted in their hosts in early childhood, meaning the decision is made by a host’s parent. It may sound unrealistic for parents to have unnecessary brain surgeries done on their children, but once Zoe-like devices are cheap and surgical techniques are more advanced, it could become common. It might be considered a great blessing for parents to enable their kids to re-live episodes from their childhoods later on. Just don’t expect any of this until the 22nd century.
The FDA just approved the “Eversense E3” glucose monitoring implant. It is surgically placed in a person’s upper arm and can remain there for up to 180 days. More advanced and longer-lasting implants are sure to come.
What might become common much sooner is the installation of health monitoring implants in children. The devices would be smaller, simpler and cheaper than Zoes and would be placed in less vital parts of the body than the brain, making surgery far less risky. Such implants could monitor vital functions (e.g. – heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, temperature, cholesterol, hormone levels, diet, gene expression) and alert parents and doctors to health problems in their earliest phases, and to sudden medical emergencies. The implants might even double as location trackers for use if the children became lost or were kidnapped. If the price and risk are low enough, and the benefits are high enough, the natural parental instinct to do everything to protect one’s children could lead to monitoring implants becoming common in a few decades.
Will tech implants ever be worth it?
But in the interim, body-worn devices will satisfy those functions. As discussed in my Cloud Atlas review, external devices can do most of the same things implanted devices could, but at lower cost and without need for surgery. In my analysis of Ray Kurzweil’s 2019 predictions, I explained how smart watches had become affordable and could continuously monitor many of their wearers’ vital signs, warn them of irregular heartbeats, and alert the local paramedics if they detected “hard falls” followed by user nonresponse. More features, like blood pressure monitoring, will be added with time. Smart watches can also be used as tracking devices.
In my analysis of how accurate my predictions for the 2010s were, I also calculated that it was feasible in 2020 for an average person to record every waking hour of his life with a GoPro, and at a respectable 720p video resolution. The cost of storing the footage would be only $1 a day, putting the whole system well within the financial means of most people in rich countries. Of course, that would require the person to strap a small box to his forehead, which would look so silly few would do it. However, the new generation of AR glasses that will be commercially available by the end of this decade will be sleek and stylish, and have unobtrusive cameras. Hard disk prices will also keep declining, meaning it won’t be long until it costs mere pennies a day to store videos of one’s waking life.
With that in mind, AR glasses that give people the same audiovisual recording abilities as the Zoe brain implants will be affordable and available by the end of this decade. Smart watches that can closely monitor their wearers’ health and provide them with significant medical help will be available around the same time. Improved computer algorithms will be able to pool and analyze all of the data gathered by a person’s various devices to detect patterns and make sophisticated inferences. For instance, it could correlate your early-afternoon headaches with your cup of yogurt at breakfast, and inform you that you are probably going lactose intolerant. Your devices could give you real-time summaries of your health status and make hourly activity recommendations based on the day’s data (“Go for a walk”…”Breathe deeply to calm down”…”Take your medication”).
And very importantly, putting on these or other body-worn devices won’t require surgery, and if they ever broke or became obsolete, you could simply take them off and and throw them away. That won’t be true for body implants. So are cyborg implants merely another poorly conceived sci-fi trope, like laser pistols, which will never materialize?
No. Body implants like Zoes will ultimately make sense for humans to get, and will have important advantages over body-worn devices, but it will take a long time for the implants to become common.
AR glasses can only record what you are seeing and hearing, not what you are tasting, smelling, or feeling on your skin. Only a brain implant like a Zoe could capture those senses, as well as your moment-to-moment emotional states. If you wanted to truly re-live happy memories, an implant would be needed.
And while smart watch technology will reach impressive heights, it will be handicapped by its inability to access the wearer’s bloodstream. Devices inside a person’s body could monitor hormone levels, glucose levels, immune system activity, gene expression, toxin levels, and other important metrics, in addition to doing everything smart watches do. Implants could even stimulate your body with things like electric shocks to your heart, hormone dumps into your bloodstream, or neurotransmitter releases into your brain to counteract health problems. Even without any future cures for diseases or breakthroughs in reversing the aging process, such devices by themselves would significantly improve public health and lifespan.
These and other cybernetic devices will migrate into our bodies once we have found ways to make them totally unobtrusive and reliable, and once the cost and invasiveness of surgery dramatically improves (robot surgeons that work for free might help). Some limited ability to self-repair and to internally reconfigure to account for technology updates will also be needed, and the radically advanced nature of such technology is is why I don’t see the cyborg era dawning this century.
Four final points that weren’t covered in the film:
Ubiquitous surveillance will reduce bad behavior. If people know they’re probably being recorded and the recordings will be stored forever and possibly shared with millions of people, they’re less likely to commit crimes or behave uncivilly. The effect is greater if they know that biometric analysis like facial recognition or voice recognition can easily uncover their real identities from video footage. Thanks to everything being recorded and to the world being populated by intelligent machines and posthumans that will lack berserker emotions and extreme stupidity, the 22nd century will probably be a very polite era.
Having implants in your brain and body that monitor your surroundings, your behavior, and your physiological state could lead to a spooky condition where your personal assistant AI that is watching them could anticipate your thoughts, actions, and needs. If gifted with high enough intelligence and tasked with furthering your long-term enlightened self-interests, your AI could find clever ways to nudge or even control you. As a simple example, it might act like an angel on your shoulder and tell you through your ocular nerve “Don’t eat that pie. You’ve already consumed 2,300 calories today. You get a break on your health insurance premiums if I report you’ve been eating well.” More paternalistically, it might be able to release synthetic dopamine into your brain to calm you down from fits, or just plain take over your body if you were doing something highly illegal or self-destructive. Mind-influencing and mind-control could, along with ubiquitous surveillance, give rise to a very peaceful and harmonious world (or a dystopian one).
Ubiquitous surveillance will create interesting tensions between peoples’ memories and what actually happened. The film touches on this when the brother of a recently deceased man remarks to Robin Williams that the video clip of a childhood boat trip was at odds with his own recollection. It’s beyond the scope of this essay to discuss this issue in depth, but the replacement of fuzzy human memories with clear, unchanging recordings will be a two-edged sword. Past traumas and failures would never be forgotten, but people would also be able to see their own actions through unbiased lenses and to see themselves in a more honest light.
There will be “snitch apps” in the future. Once people have AR glasses, they will be able to download apps that automatically compare the faces of every person they encounter with mugshots of all known criminals and terrorists, and then report sightings to law enforcement. Even if just 0.1% of the population used these when in public, it would be highly effective. There might even be crowdsourced “Wikis” of non-criminal rude people (ex – “Karens” who had public outbursts made notorious by YouTube) whom you could also set your devices to look out for and to highlight for your avoidance or mockery. Likewise, your own reputation would be viewable to other people wearing their own AR glasses.
Implants that can do simple functions like monitoring blood cholesterol levels already exist. As they get cheaper, smaller and better, they will get more common. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-21841829
On the second anniversary of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani’s assassination by a U.S. drone strike, two Iranian drones attacked an American military base in Baghdad. Both were shot down by a U.S. antiaircraft system called “C-RAM.” A C-RAM unit has a built-in radar that identifies the locations and flight paths of enemy aircraft and missiles, and it uses the data to aim its heavy machine gun so the bullets intercept them. All the human operator has to do is push a button to allow the C-RAM to fire. At the 0:26 mark in the video, the C-RAM opened fire on one of the Iranian drones. Note the laser-like stream of bullets. The machine’s aim was perfect. https://youtu.be/Ajkg8yfgug0
Contrast that with footage of human-aimed antiaircraft guns trying to shoot down Japanese kamikaze planes in WWII. You’ll see dozens of machine guns spewing out thousands of bullets at one plane, and missing–often being wildly off-target. https://youtu.be/4mTECUWP0Hk?t=171
At the same time, GPT-3 is a much better chatbot than the best of ten years ago. I think each iteration of GPT will make fewer conversational mistakes than the last, until some future version (GPT-6?) is finally “good enough” to pass the Turing Test. http://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
Once “Metaverse” technology is mature and widespread, it will be common for sports fans to “hang out” in the bleachers of sports arenas during games. They could even pay for retired athletes and other popular commentators to sit with them in VR and narrate the games. Other fans will still be willing to buy tickets to sit in the real bleachers and attend the games in-person. https://futuristspeaker.com/business-trends/when-nfl-football-moves-into-the-metaverse/
Machines can now convert a series of still photos of a building or place into a hi-res, 3D mock-up. Eventually, there will be a hyper-realistic, 1:1 virtual version of the real world that people will be able to explore in VR. https://youtu.be/yptwRRpPEBM
“Frequency hopping” is a method of sending encrypted messages with radio signals. A message like a simple sentence is chopped up into bits, each of which is transmitted on a different frequency from the other. To anyone listening to just one radio wavelength, they will only hear a single, brief sound of the message. However, the intended recipient will hear the whole thing thanks to a special radio descrambler that knows how the bits are distributed across the frequency spectrum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum
Dial-up modems from 20+ years ago used sounds to send and receive data. This is why, if you established the connection and then picked up the phone, you’d hear loud static for a moment–the static was the digital data being conveyed as sounds. Telephone lines weren’t built with the future needs of the internet in mind–they were designed around the much less demanding needs of human speech and listening. As a result, they can’t handle more than 56 kilobytes of data transfer. https://www.10stripe.com/articles/why-is-56k-the-fastest-dialup-modem-speed.php
In 1991, George Friedman published a book predicting the U.S. and Japan would fight a war by 2020. This is something to remember when thinking about his other geopolitical predictions, which also look likely to fail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrbUX84LcXg
Six months ago, Peter Zeihan predicted “We are gonna have inflation in the last half of this year that is absolutely going to be higher than what we had in the early 80s [and] probably faster than what we had in the 70s.” He was basically right. The U.S. inflation rate for November was the highest since July 1982. https://youtu.be/x_fpY63fcd8?t=3560
Nuclear-powered civilian ships were introduced before the technology was fully ready, and were doomed by irrational public fears about radiation and by unfair press coverage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYj4F_cyiJI
Theoretically, we could also build antennas that used the planet’s radiation of excess heat into space to generate electricity. https://www.pnas.org/content/111/11/3927
Theoretically, 10 quadrillion people could live on Earth. We’d just have to build 300,000-storey high skyscrapers to fit everyone, plus a bunch of other megaprojects to radiate the planet’s excess heat into space and regulate global sunlight levels. https://hereticalupdate.substack.com/p/is-earth-running-out-of-resources
‘The result is that you see a distinct parabolic shape in the returns on investment for a tall building. The point of maximum return varies depending on the city, the type of construction and the location of building, and real estate professionals go to great effort to determine the economic building height for a given case. For an office building on a piece of valuable urban real estate, this has traditionally been considered to be in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 storeys tall. During planning for the Empire State Building, it was calculated that 75 storeys was the optimal height, and developers suggested that 70 storeys should be the maximum during the planning of One World Trade Center. But the existence of an increasing number of Manhattan supertall residential buildings suggests that this limit might be increasing, at least for luxury residential real estate.
Building height in excess of this “theoretical optimum” is often height for height’s sake, with the idea that an exceptionally tall building will have “prestige value” that more than compensates for the less efficient design. The (real or perceived) benefits of prestige, combined with the rising costs of servicing the upper floors, often results in buildings that achieve their height by adding large volumes of unoccupied space at the top. The Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building, is perhaps the ultimate example of this, with the top 29% of the building being unoccupied space.’ https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-skyscrapers-are-so-short/
Imagine a 1 – 10 rating scale for your full possible range of emotional experiences.
1 = Most miserable and painful you can be 5 = Feel neither good nor bad 10 = Most happy and blissful you can be
People intuitively think that the increments between each number are subjectively constant, so the felt difference between levels 9 and 10 is the same as the difference between levels 5 and 6. However, there’s evidence that the good and bad extremes are way, way, way more extreme, so that going from level 9 to level 10 is much more of a jump in subjective pleasure than going from level 5 to 6 is. https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/log-scales
With training, most people can learn to control single neurons in their brains. In the far future, I think humans will be able to control their own thoughts, emotions, and gene expression, just by thinking about it. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.05.079038v1.full
For the first time, a pig heart has been transplanted into a human without killing the person. The pig had been genetically engineered so its heart cells would be similar enough to human tissue to not be rejected by the human immune system. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59944889
This article was published in June 2020, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, it was unclear what the effect on birthrates would be, and it could have been argued that more children that normal were going to be conceived since couples would have more time at their homes together. The article predicted the 2021 U.S. birthrate would be 300,000 – 500,000 lower than it was in 2020. The data are still coming in, but there was a decline, closer towards the lower end of their estimate. https://www.brookings.edu/research/half-a-million-fewer-children-the-coming-covid-baby-bust/
Plot: Welcome to 2022. Welcome to a grotesquely overpopulated, resource-depleted, polluted, and impoverished world. It’s a place where practically every tree has been cut down and every person herded into cities to make room for farms that nevertheless barely make enough food for everyone, where the air is sticky and thick with toxic smog and the stench of unwashed bodies and corpses, and where the hungry masses are perpetually on the brink of rioting. There’s no joy, hope, jobs, or even real food anymore–just little processed crackers rationed to the population. It’s a place where corrupt politicians and the executives of corporations collude to protect their own power and privileges at any cost, even if it means forcing the ultimate sacrilege on humanity.
Manhattan, 2022
Welcome to New York City. It’s a decaying and crime-ridden cauldron that is so crowded it’s literally standing room only in many of its apartments and streets. Charlton Heston knows this city well, and keeps busy in it. He’s a homicide detective, and of such esteem that he enjoys the privilege of having his own, small apartment, which he shares with only one other person: his elderly assistant named “Sol.” Their dreary routine is interrupted one day when they are assigned to investigate the murder of one of New York’s richest people–a man named “Simonson” who was a Board member at the “Soylent” corporation.
Soylent is an enormous food processing company that controls half the world’s food supply. Their “Red” and “Yellow” products are derived from plants, and are formed into crackers or loaves. Their latest product, “Green,” is said to be derived from plankton harvested from the ocean. Soylent Red, Yellow and Green are staple foods for New Yorkers, and probably billions of people beyond.
Soylent foods for sale at a New York market
As the investigation proceeds, Heston quickly realizes Simonson’s murder was no robbery gone bad, as it appeared at first glance. As he and Sol follow the clues, it leads them to mortal danger, a conspiracy involving some of the world’s most powerful men, and to a profoundly disturbing secret about the food supply.
Soylent Green was a laugh-out-loud inaccurate portrayal of the world in 2022. Yeah, I know we have our problems, but they don’t compare to the film’s dystopia. The fact that it was so far off the mark should be FOOD FOR THOUGHT for anyone who takes the current crop of doomsday global warming movies set in the future (e.g. – Geostorm, Snowpiercer, Interstellar) seriously.
That said, I still liked Soylent Green and think it’s worth watching so long as it isn’t taken seriously. The movie is well-paced and manages to depict a grim future without overdoing it to the point of being depressing. It’s both entertaining and serious, and at times genuinely tense. The acting is great all around, especially on the part of Charlton Heston, who is less cocky and has a slightly broader emotional range in this than in most of his other roles.
Analysis:
The world will be grossly overpopulated. At the beginning of Soylent Green, we’re told that New York City’s population has grown from roughly 8 million the year the film was released (1973) to 40 million in 2022. Population figures for other parts of the U.S. or for other countries are never given, but at one point Heston says other cities are “all like this,” implying the rest of the world is similarly overpopulated.
The U.S. population in 1973 was about 205 million, and the world population that year was 3.7 billion. If they quintupled like New York City, then in the film, the U.S. population in 2022 was 1 billion, and the world population was 18.5 billion.
Mercifully, the real figures are much lower: New York City has 8.8 million residents, the U.S. has 330 million, and the world has 7.9 billion. Soylent Green‘s prediction that Earth would be grossly overpopulated by 2022 was wrong, and the city in which it is set, New York, has only 11% more inhabitants now than it did in 1973. Instead of it being “standing room only,” the city is but marginally denser.
Outside of the tropical countries and Muslim world, population is growing very little and is even shrinking
Ironically, a growing number of thinkers and journalists today are worried about the opposite problem: population decline. The populations of rich countries are mostly shrinking, or are only slowly expanding thanks to immigration and immigrants having kids. Even middle income countries like China, Thailand and Brazil have seen sharp drops in birthrates and have almost stopped growing. While shrinking a shrinking population has benefits (more space per person, cheaper real estate, less traffic, less pollution created), they are probably outweighed by the downsides of economic decline.
That said, it would be a mistake to simply extrapolate current demographic trends into the future indefinitely and to conclude that the human race is doomed to extinction because people will refuse to have kids. A slew of technologies that will come into existence this century will raise birthrates in various ways: Existing assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization (IVF) will get cheaper, putting them within reach of lower income people. New reproduction technologies will be invented, allowing more people with fertility problems to have healthy kids. For example, post-menopausal women with no eggs will be able to have fertility labs synthesize ova for them that contain their DNA, and to insert it into themselves, younger surrogate mothers or, in the far future, artificial wombs. Robot servants will also ease household workloads, giving parents more time for child-rearing and making parenthood more appealing.
Along with raising birthrates, future technologies will let us grow the human population through the opposite mechanism, which is lowering mortality rates. Disease cures, therapeutic cloning of human organs, cybernetic replacements for organs and limbs, stem cell therapies that regenerate ageing tissues and organs inside the patient’s body, and many other medical advances, will slowly raise lifespans, and to such an extent that “medical immortality” will probably be available to well-resourced people by the end of this century. If people don’t die, then even a very low birthrate among them will lead to Soylent Green levels of overpopulation, though it might take centuries.
The environment will be devastated by pollution. The other aspect of Soylent Green‘s dystopian reality is severe pollution and concomitant environmental devastation. The outdoor scenes–which are already bleak-looking since they are full of derelict buildings, trash-strewn streets and crowds of poor people–are shrouded in a sickly greenish haze, which is certainly smog. New York City is devoid of trees, except a few saplings in a small, sealed arboretum (presumably necessary to protect them from air toxins) that only privileged people can enter.
A sealed arboretum containing NYC’s only trees
The oceans are also so poisoned and overfished that plankton are the only remaining edible sea life. The Soylent company processes harvested plankton into green crackers for human consumption, and the film’s big reveal is that it has been secretly transitioning their content to human flesh because even plankton is dying out. In other words, “SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!”
Manhattan in 2021
This depiction of 2022 is almost totally wrong. New York City still has trees growing outdoors–notably in the massive Central Park. Additionally, the U.S. actually had more trees in 2021 than it did in 1921! The amount of global tree cover also increased by 8% from 1982 to 2016.
Instead of disappearing, global seafood harvests have risen since Soylent Green was in theaters, and there are no signs of an impending collapse of wild fisheries, though fish catches have been flat since the 1990s, suggesting we’ve reached the limit of how many wild calories the seas can sustainably provide us. Fortunately, the human race has proven itself more competent at surmounting this barrier than it was in the movie, and a large and growing share of fish are now “farmed” instead of caught wild.
Though the oceans still supply us with plenty of calories, a large and growing share of seafood comes from “fish farms,” labeled “aquaculture” in this graph.
New York City’s air is not full of smog, and its air quality is in fact substantially better than it was when the film was released. As just one example, sulfur dioxide (SO2) concentrations in the City’s air have sharply dropped, from an average of 155 μg/m3 from 1970-72, to a mere 6.8 μg/m3 today (January 24, 2022). (SO2 is the main component of “smog,” and has an opaque appearance. It causes respiratory problems and acid rain.) Every other type of air pollution (i.e. – PM 2.5, ozone, lead, nitrogen dioxide (NO2)) has sharply dropped in New York City, the rest of America, and the rest of the developed world over the same timeframe, meaning they breathe cleaner air today than people did when Soylent Green was in theaters. This is due to a slew of environmental laws being enacted, including the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1963 and the Clean Water Act of 1972. (U.S. air and water pollution levels had actually been trending down for a short time before Soylent Green‘s 1973 release.)
Delhi, India during its November 2021 smog emergency
Unfortunately, those things aren’t true for the poorer half of the global population, and hundreds of millions of people in India and China endure toxic air, mostly due to weak air pollution laws or to lax enforcement of relevant laws. In fact, in November 2021, Delhi had a smog emergency lasting several days, during which the air became so poisonous that the government shut down the city’s schools. The news images of opaque air, crowded streets, poverty, and decay bear striking similarities to the dystopian New York of Soylent Green. The suffering of people in polluted places like northern India is why I judged “This depiction of 2022 is almost totally wrong.”
Winters in temperate areas will be warm thanks to global warming. Though the movie indicates it is set in the year 2022, no clues are given about the exact dates of its events. Based on the facts that most of the characters wear light clothing, and there are several scenes where they are visibly sweating, it would seem it is set in the summer. However, that assumption is upended by a remark Heston makes when contemplating whether to turn on an air conditioner (a rare luxury): “All the way up. We’ll make it cold. Like winter used to be.”
Evidently, global warming has gotten so severe that even in places with slightly cold climates like New York City are hot in the winter!
Fortunately, this prediction about 2022 also fell flat. Global warming has only had a tiny effect on the city’s temperature. According to NOAA data taken from a weather station that has been operating in Central Park since 1869, NYC’s average temperature for all of 1973 (the year Soylent Green was released) was 56.1°F, and the average for that December was 39.0°F. The average temperature for 2020 (the last year for which full data have been published) was 57.3°F, and that December’s average temperature was 39.2°F.
And on the day I analyzed this prediction (January 26, 2022), New York City’s high temperature was 29°F, and it was bracing for a major snowstorm.
There will be tablet computers. Though we never get a good look at them or see how they work, there appear to be simple tablet computers and PDAs in the film. Heston keeps one of them in his apartment, and in the film’s first scene, Sol reads notes about criminal cases off of it. The device is a piece of transparent plastic, about the size and shape of a magazine, with an opaque layer embedded within it bearing written characters.
It is strongly reminiscent of an actual tablet computer that lets users handwrite digital notes on its screen by using metal styluses. This prediction about 2022 was right.
The “ReMarkable 2” tablet, displaying something more cheerful than a suicide note. It is new for 2022.
People will have computer game machines in their homes. Early in the film, there’s a scene set in Simonson’s luxury condo suite. There we see an arcade-style video game. To be exact, it is “Computer Space,” which was the first commercially successful video game in history, and only made its debut two years before Soylent Green was released.
A privately-owned computer arcade game
In 2022, it is very common for people to have video game consoles in their homes and to play games on their computing devices. If anything, the film’s prediction is too conservative since it depicts video games as being only available to rich people, whereas in reality, even a teenager working a part-time job today could afford a quality console and several games.
The government will ration essential goods. Due to dwindling natural resources, an excessive population, and widespread poverty that leaves most people unable to afford anything, the government rations essential goods, notably food and water. Citizens visit government offices where clerks give them their allotments of money or ration cards, which they exchange with other people in New York to get essential goods. In other scenes, we see private merchants selling Soylent food products in an open-air market, and men in official uniforms using an outdoor water tap to fill the jugs belonging to people who need their daily water rations. The film also implies that other basics, like soap, writing paper, and pencils, are also very hard to get.
A rationing office run by the government
For the U.S. and the developed world more broadly, this is inaccurate. Staple foods, potable water, and everyday items like soap are very cheap. For example, by cooking their own meals at home, an adult could easily get their food budget under $10 per day, and by drinking only tap water or some type of beverage mix like “Tang,” get their daily drink budget below $1. A bar of personal soap cost $1.50, and will last a person for weeks.
A visit to a typical American grocery store in 2022, even in poorer parts of the country, will reveal a cornucopia of food and merchandise at low prices. Additionally, thrift stores are practically everywhere, and are bursting with wide varieties of decent-quality secondhand goods at very low prices. Electronic resources like Craigslist.org, Facebook Marketplace, and Freecycle are also major sources of cheap or even free items available locally. If anything, most of the world is now contending with a surfeit of essential goods, which too often are wasted, thrown out, or allowed to accumulate as unused clutter. Growth of the self-storage industry bears further testimony to this reality. People, Americans in particular, have too much stuff, not too little.
Prostitution will be legal. One of Soylent Green’s main characters is “Shirl” (pronounced almost the same as “Cheryl”), a young woman prostitute who is compensated with free housing and amenities in Mr. Simonson’s luxury condo. The arrangement is legal and accepted as normal, and it is later revealed that the condo building has several other prostitutes, euphemistically termed “furniture,” living in other units. Having a live-in prostitute is an expensive marker of high status, and Heston’s suspicions are raised when, while investigating Simonson’s death, he discovers the latter’s bodyguard has “furniture” in his own apartment in spite of a salary that should be insufficient.
Prostitutes having a party
In real life, prostitution is illegal in New York City, and in the rest of the U.S. except Nevada. There, it is confined to a small number of heavily regulated brothel houses. With varying restrictions, prostitution is legal in about 15 countries, mostly in Europe. Nevertheless, as the revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s high-end prostitution ring–which included sex parties at his luxury Manhattan townhouse–show, it’s still easy for rich men to buy sex in New York.
A small number of industrial food companies will control the global food supply. “Soylent” is clearly the dominant food producer in the U.S., and perhaps the world. As Sol says after researching it: “Soylent controls the food supply for half the world.” It’s unclear who produces the other half, but other big companies and government agricultural agencies probably dominate it.
A small number of food processing companies own many common food and beverage brands. But does that mean they “control the global food supply”?
The world is certainly full of large, highly profitable food processing companies, but none is so big that it controls anywhere near half of the global food supply. Consider the top ten food and drink companies of 2020, along with their food sales for that year:
PepsiCo, Inc. – $70.3 billion
Nestle – $67.7 billion
JBS – $50.7 billion
Anheuser-Busch – $46.9 billion
Tyson Foods – $43.2 billion
Mars – $37.0
Archer Daniels Midland – 35.4 billion
The Coca-Cola Company – $34.3 billion
Cargill – $32.4 billion
Danone – $26.9 billion
If we assume that these ten companies produced all the calories consumed by all humans in 2020, and use revenues as a proxy for calories each produced, then the largest, PepsiCo, only controls 15.8% of the food supply.
Of course, the top 10 food processing companies aren’t really the only ones in existence. The source from which I got the above data actually lists revenue figures for the top 100 companies in the sector. If we include them in the calculation (BTW, rank #100 goes to the “Kewpie Corporation,” which made $3.6 billion in 2020 selling mostly mayonnaise, salad dressing, and baby food in Japan), then big companies sold $1,316 billion of food and beverages in 2020, and the biggest one, PepsiCo, only controls 5.3% of the global market. The top ten combined only control 33.8%.
The darkness of the country indicates what share of its population is engaged in sustenance farming.
Additionally, sustenance farming and the consumption of food made by small, local farms still provides most of the calories for large fractions of the population in Africa and southern Asia. These people eat little or nothing made by the big food processing companies, meaning PepsiCo’s control over global calories should be even lower than the paltry 5.3%.
In rich countries with declining culinary traditions, like the U.S., it is probably common for people to get most of their daily calories from processed foods. However, the foods are still made by several different, competing food processing companies, so there is no monopoly and hence no real-world equivalent to “Soylent.” Even if the biggest one of those companies decided to start secretly blending calories derived from corpses into its food products, only a minority of the U.S. population would end up eating it.
New York City’s population will be 90% white. All of Soylent Green‘s main characters and seemingly 90% of its extras are white. This includes rich, working-class, and poor people.
The reality is very different. The U.S. Census estimated that, in 2021, only 32.1% of New Yorkers were both white and non-Hispanic. Blacks were 24.3%, Asians were 14.1%, and multiracial people were 3.6%. It is surely one of the most racially diverse cities on Earth.
There will be mass unemployment. In the first scene, Heston remarks “There are 20 million guys out of work in Manhattan alone.” Even if this is exaggerated and the real number is only half that figure, and even if “guys” refers to both sexes, it would indicate a staggeringly high unemployment rate.
To be generous, let’s assume that Soylent Green‘s New York had an excellent dependency ratio of 80, meaning 80% of its population was in good health and able to work (children, old people, and disabled people comprise the other 20%). For comparison, NYC’s actual dependency ratio in 2021 was 54.7, and dependency ratios in the 80s have only happened after periods of extraordinary population growth, such as when the post-WWII baby boom generations in India and South Korea hit adulthood.
Eighty percent of 40 million is 32 million, meaning there were 32 million potential adult workers in the city. If 10 million of them (half of Heston’s figure) couldn’t find jobs, that equates to a 31.25% unemployment rate. To put that into perspective, during the Great Depression, the U.S. national unemployment rate peaked at 24.9%. Remarkably, even with optimistic assumptions, the job picture was worse than it had ever been in real life!
What happens if we adjust the calculations to be more bleak? For example what if we lower the dependency ratio to 65 (many of the New Yorkers looked unhealthy and seemed to have motivation problems, both of which would leave them unable to work) and accept Heston’s “20 million guys out of work” figure?
We get a 76.9% unemployment rate, which is unheard of. I can’t imagine a situation where that many willing people wouldn’t be able to find jobs, except maybe the first few weeks following a massive nuclear war. That said, I foresee a day when 76.9% of healthy adults won’t have gainful jobs due to machines doing the work for them, but most of those people won’t be “unemployed” since they’ll embrace (or at least, deal with) the new reality by devoting their time to things other than work, like socializing, video gaming, doing drugs, traveling, or indulging in personal hobbies and niche interests. You don’t count as “unemployed” if you’re not interested in working.
Oh, and what’s New York City’s actual unemployment rate? In December 2021, it was 8.8%, which is high by real-world U.S. standards, but absolutely stellar by Soylent Green‘s.
There will be mass homelessness. Along with lacking jobs, most of the people in the film seem to lack homes. Every morning, Heston has to literally jump over poor people who sleep on the staircase of his apartment. Many of New York’s streets are clogged with broken-down cars that people live in, and sleeping people literally cover the whole floor of his local church at night. Most of the city’s population might be chronically homeless.
Heston jumping over poor people
In reality, no more than 1% of New York City’s population is truly homeless, meaning they either sleep in public spaces or in homeless shelters. And unlike in Soylent Green, most of them only go without proper housing for brief lengths of time, and aren’t “chronically” homeless.
New York City will have epidemic levels of violent crime.Soylent Green begins with a murder, later in the film there’s a street riot where several police officers are attacked and people are shot, and in one scene, the police chief says there were 137 murders in the city over the previous 24 hours. In short, New York City is extremely violent. How accurate was this depiction?
If we assume 137 murders a day is typical, that’s equivalent to 50,005 per year, and a homicide rate of 125 per 100,000 residents. In reality, New York City had 485 murders for all of 2021, meaning its homicide rate is a mere 5.5 per 100,000 residents.
Among big American cities, the most murderous is Louisville, Kentucky, which had 188 murders in 2021, equating to a homicide rate of 30 per 100,000. That means no major urban area in the U.S. comes close to being as violent as Soylent Green‘s New York was.
That said, there are cities outside the U.S. that approach its heights of murder. In 2020, three Mexican cities–Celaya, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez–had the highest murder rates in the world, at 109, 105, and 103 murders per 100,000 residents, respectively. So if the movie had been Soylent Verde and set just one country away, it would have been grimly accurate in this regard.
People will have battery banks in their homes. The small apartment that Heston and Sol share has a bank of what look like car batteries for storing electricity. A stationary bicycle connected to the batteries can be pedaled to recharge them. It’s unclear whether the battery bank is their sole source of electricity, or if it’s merely a backup power source in case of grid failures, and it’s also unclear how common the batteries are in other homes.
The battery bank
Batteries are much cheaper and more energy-dense today than they were when Soylent Green was in theaters. However, home battery banks remain uncommon due to the reliability of the electric grid and because the batteries are still too expensive to be worth it.
For example, a typical American home consumes 30 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per day. A person who valued efficiency could reasonably reduce that to 24 kWh / day by buying high-efficiency appliances and by doing things like wearing sweaters instead of turning the heat up so high in the winter. A typical home storage battery such as the “Growatt 6 KW,” costs $4,490 and can only store 6 kWh of electricity, so four of the batteries would be needed to store just one day’s worth of power, for a total cost of $17,960, plus installation costs. The batteries’ storage capacities also degrade with time, meaning they usually need to be replaced after 10-15 years.
The “Growatt 6KW” residential battery
A better option for backup power is a gas-powered generator. While portable generators with wheels are the most familiar versions of the machines, the types generally used for residential backup power are stationary and look like large boxes right outside the houses they provide power to. One high-quality standby generator capable of meeting the 24 kWh / day requirement is the “Generac 72101,” and it costs $5,997 plus more for installation. It is connected to the house’s natural gas plumbing and automatically turns on whenever it detects an electrical grid outage. Best of all, if properly maintained and not overused, such a generator can last 20 years or more before needing replacement.
A Generac 24 kW backup generator installed outside a home
This means a home battery backup system costs three times more than an equivalent backup gas generator. Battery prices will need to drop by 66% to achieve parity. Such an improvement might be possible: Between 2010 and 2019, lithium-ion battery pack prices dropped 87%. However, the rate of yearly cost-improvement declined over that period and continues to do so, suggesting we’ve picked the low-hanging fruits for improving battery cost-performance, so don’t expect another 87% decline over the next 10 years. To get our 66% improvement, which might cause battery banks to become common in houses and apartments, I think 20 years or more of research and industrial efficiencies will be needed.
Assisted suicide will be legal. Discovering the awful truth about Soylent Green pushes Sol–already an old and world-weary man–over the edge, so he signs up for assisted suicide, which is euphemistically called “Going home.” Not only is it legal, it is barely regulated, and Sol merely has to walk into the nearest euthanasia clinic and sign a form to have it done. There’s no wait time, no “cool down period,” and no requirement for suicide requests to be vetted by a court, doctors, mental health specialists, or the applicant’s family.
Sol committing assisted suicide
This depiction of 2022 was partly accurate. Physician-assisted suicide is legal in 10 American states and Washington, DC. While the laws only allow their residents the right of suicide, it is easy for people from other parts of America to satisfy the requirement by moving in and living there for a short period of time.
Additionally, in those 10 states and DC, the applicant must provide medical evidence that he probably has six months or less to live thanks to poor health, and there are processes for adjudicating that evidence. (In effect, legal doctor-assisted suicide is available to anyone in the U.S. who can prove he has six months or less to live.) Professing that one is sick of living–even if the person can prove they are sincere–is insufficient. This means Sol, were he alive in the real world of 2022, would not be able to commit assisted suicide.
The procedure is also not legal in New York, though it is in neighboring New Jersey, and it’s possible the euthanasia clinic in the film was in the latter state. Less than a mile of water separates Manhattan from Jersey City, and Sol could have easily made the journey.
Cannibalism will be widespread. Like “Luke, I am your father,” the line “Soylent Green is people” has long been in our cultural consciousness, and is known even to those who haven’t seen the latter film. With that in mind, I feel no guilt exposing the movie’s climactic reveal: the Soylent company has been secretly turning corpses into crackers that millions (possibly billions) of unsuspecting people have been eating.
Soylent Green crackers been scooped into a bag at a food market
Again, and very fortunately, this prediction was wrong. Cannibalism is not widespread in 2022, or even practiced by anything but a miniscule number of disturbed people. It is probably as culturally taboo as it was in 1973, and even in rare cases where a person voluntarily allows themselves to be killed and eaten by a cannibal, the latter is arrested and charged with a crime.
However, as I’ve predicted, in vitro meat technology should be advanced enough by 2100 to let us grow human flesh and organs in labs, which would provide people a legal way to indulge in “cannibalism” without breaking laws related to murder or desecration of a corpse. As a result, a small number of people will eat human flesh, mostly for novelty, like how people try weird meats like alligator today, but some will eat it routinely because they like the taste or have a cannibal fetish.
“The Relation of Air Pollution to Mortality” (1976) determined that New York City’s average SO2 concentration from 1970-72 was 155 μg/m3. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45002384
NOAA webpage featuring data from the weather station in Central Park, which has been operating since 1869. It shows how little average temperatures have risen in NYC since 1972. https://www.weather.gov/okx/CentralParkHistorical
On any given day, about 1% of New Yorkers are homeless, meaning they spent the night sleeping in public or in a homeless shelter. https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/
