I came across an interesting podcast interview by Aviation Weekly, in which two aerospace industry analysts discuss progress in building electric planes, and make predictions about the future of the niche. Here’s a list of their key points:
There is a strong, long-term trend for aircraft to have more electronics, and fewer mechanical components like hydraulics. The Boeing 787 is the pinnacle of this.
Even though gas-powered planes get more fuel-efficient each year, the total number of plane flights is growing so fast that, by 2050, 10% of global CO2 emissions will come from planes. As time passes, public pressure will grow to reduce aircraft emissions. Logically, this will help the electric plane industry since they are less polluting than gas-powered planes.
A stumbling block will be the disparity between the stated and revealed preferences of customers: While most people claim to care about global warming and claim they’d be willing to pay extra money to avert it, they might not actually be willing to pay more to fly on a low-emission electric jet. [Consider how people today harshly complain about the small seats, bad food, and nickle-and-diming common on regional airlines, yet they aggressively demand low ticket prices and don’t want to pay more money for better service.] Electric planes will be more expensive than gas-powered planes for decades to come.
As with cars, there are two basic types of electric aircraft: all-electric and hybrid-electric. Many new technologies from the auto sector are crossing over into the aircraft sector, so the electrification of cars today yields insight into the future of planes.
A big difference is that plane engines require ~100x as much power output as car engines. Low battery weight is also much more crucial for planes, and is the primary impediment to their development. Electric planes will only become feasible once a battery with 500 watt-hours per kg is created [for comparison, a Tesla Model 3’s batteries are 207 Wh/kg]. Even that would be an order of magnitude less energy dense than jet fuel.
While advances in battery technology are unpredictable and happen in fits and starts, long-term trends suggest that a 500 Wh/kg battery will be invented around 2030.
Small planes that traverse short-distance routes will be electrified first. Large planes designed for long-distance routes won’t be electrified until the energy density of batteries equals that of jet fuel. The lag time will be decades long.
The number of experimental electric aircraft is rapidly growing. Most of the prototypes and their corresponding startup companies will fail.
$15-20 billion would be needed to develop a large, all-electric passenger plane. Due to the high cost, today’s electric plane startups are focusing on making small planes.
Electric aircraft could demand very different architectures from gas-powered aircraft. For example, large electric aircraft wouldn’t have fuselage-wing layouts. [The pundit doesn’t elaborate, but the default alternative is the flying wing layout.]
In 20-30 years, the aerospace industry could look very different.
To meet the energy demands of electric planes recharging their batteries on the ground, airports would have to be massively upgraded with power infrastructure. [In addition, if the planes had different layouts like flying wings, the airport terminals themselves would need to be rebuilt to accommodate the planes.]
China could seize the global lead in electric aircraft. The country has the technological expertise to make advanced electrical components and batteries, it lacks an established aerospace industry that would politically resist plane electrification in order to protect investments in legacy fleets of gas-powered aircraft, and its government supports any high-tech innovation that could lead to leadership in some industry.
“Subregional,” inter-city plane flights might get much cheaper. Electric, short-takeoff-and-landing (STOL) aircraft could use airstrips close to city centers in the future. This would pose a big challenge to inter-city rail networks.
Finally, let me cite one of my personal predictions, from my big post:
[By the end of the 2070s] It will be technologically and financially feasible for commercial aircraft to produce zero net carbon emissions. The aircraft might use conventional engines powered by synthetic fossil fuels, or they might have electric engines and very energy-dense batteries or fuel cells.
This chart of how prices of various goods and services have changed over the last 20 years in the U.S. shows the impact of Moore’s Law, trade, private sector competition (or lack thereof), and government regulation. https://www.aei.org/publication/chart-of-the-day-or-century/
The U.S. cancer death rate has been declining for 25 consecutive years. It mostly owes to people quitting smoking, and would be even lower if it weren’t for a rise in obesity-induced cancers. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-46822429
A new deep learning AI called “DeepGestalt” can scan images of human faces for the telltale signs of over 200 genetic disorders like Down Syndrome. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0279-0
There’s evidence that primitive human societies become less violent by killing off violent males and/or refusing to let them breed. Impulsive behavior–which can lead to violence–has a heritable, genetic component, and measurable changes to a human genepool can happen after just three generations of consistent natural selection. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/how-humans-tamed-themselves/580447/
Scientists genetically engineered mice so they only gave birth to females. If successfully applied to farm animals, the technique could lower the cost of meat and avert the extermination of billions of male animals per year. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/515064v2
Bird lungs are more efficient at respiration than mammal lungs. With radically advanced genetic engineering, could we make humans that looked no different on the outside, but had bird lungs on the inside? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662944/
Yemeni rebels flew small UAV into a group of government soldiers and detonated it, killing six. It’s useful to think of these sorts of weapons as small guided missiles, which illuminates the fact that their use is just part of the decades-long trend for the technology to get smaller and cheaper. Small groups of people can now afford them. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-46822429
The nearly-forgotten Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was the first instance when two, modern armies equipped with machine guns clashed, and old infantry tactics were shown to be terribly vulnerable to the weapons. Unfortunately, few generals heeded the war’s lessons, and the same mistakes were made ten years later in WWI. http://weaponsman.com/?p=23151
After the U.S. started building a Space Shuttle, Soviet scientists and economists correctly determined that NASA’s claims the Shuttle would launch cargo into orbit cheaper than rockets were false, and in fact, it would cost more. This led the Soviets to conclude that the Shuttle in fact had a clandestine military purpose, and they found it could serve as a very high-speed nuclear bomber and that it could snatch Soviet spy satellites in orbit. The Soviets didn’t consider that Shuttle in fact had no military function, but that the U.S. government would waste billions of dollars chasing an unattainable goal (but we did). https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/181657051514/my-favorite-part-about-the-economically-dubious
China landed a rover on the dark side of the Moon and did an experiment where it sprouted seeds in a sealed container full of soil, demonstrating that crop plants can be grown on the Moon. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-46873526
A brain-computer interface (e.g. – a skullcap embedded with electrodes that monitor the wearer’s brain activity) was used to decipher spoken words a person was hearing based on their brain waves. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/350124v2
If it’s January, it means it’s time for me to update my big list of future predictions! I used the 2018 version of this document as a template, and made edits to it as needed. For the sake of transparency, I’ve indicated recently added content by bolding it, and have indicated deleted or moved content with strikethrough.
Like any futurist worth his salt, I’m going to put my credibility on the line by publishing a list of my future predictions. I won’t modify or delete this particular blog entry once it is published, and if my thinking about anything on the list changes, I’ll instead create a new, revised blog entry. Furthermore, as the deadlines for my predictions pass, I’ll reexamine them.
I’ve broken down my predictions by the decade. Any prediction listed under a specific decade will happen by the end of that decade, unless I specify some other date (e.g. – “X will happen early in this decade.”).
2020s
Better, cheaper solar panels and batteries (for grid power storage and cars) will make clean energy as cheap and as reliable as fossil fuel power for entire regions of the world, including some temperate zones. As cost “tipping points” are reached, it will make financial sense for tens of millions of private homeowners and electricity utility companies to install solar panels on their rooftops and on ground installations, respectively. This will be the case even after government clean energy subsidies are inevitably retracted. However, a 100% transition to clean energy won’t finish in rich countries until the middle of the century, and poor countries will use dirty energy well into the second half of the century.
Fracking and the exploitation of tar sands in the U.S. and Canada will together ensure growth in global oil production until around 2030, at which time the installed base of clean energy and batteries will be big enough to take up the slack. There will be no global energy crisis.
Foldable smartphones will enter mass production, though it’s uncertain how much the market will embrace them. These phones will have one, rigid screen on their “front cover,” and one, flexible screen that is twice as big spanning their inner space.
Improvements to smartphone cameras, mirrorless cameras, and perhaps light-field cameras will make D-SLRs obsolete.
Vastly improved VR goggles with better graphics and no need to be plugged into desktop PCs will hit the market. They won’t display perfectly lifelike footage, but they will be much better than what we have today, and portable. Augmented reality (AR) glasses that are much cheaper and better than the original Google Glass will also make their market debuts.
“Full-immersion” audiovisual VR will be commercially available by the end of the decade. They will be capable of displaying video that is visually indistinguishable from real reality: They will have display resolutions, refresh rates, head tracking sensitivities, and wide fields of view that together deliver a visual experience that matches or exceeds the limits of human vision. The goggles won’t be truly “portable” devices because their high processing and energy requirements will probably make them bulky, give them only a few hours of battery life, or even require them to be plugged into another computer. Moreover, the tactile, olfactory, and physical movement/interaction aspects of the experience will remain underdeveloped.
LED light bulbs will become as cheap as CFL and even incandescent bulbs. It won’t make economic sense NOT to buy LEDs, and they will establish market dominance.
“Smart home”/”Wired home” technology will become mature and widespread in developed countries.
Video gaming will dispense with physical media, and games will be completely streamed from the internet or digitally downloaded. Business that exist just to sell game discs (Gamestop) will shut down.
Instead of a typical home entertainment system having a whole bunch of media discs, different media players and cable boxes, there will be one small, multipurpose box that, among other things, boosts WiFi to ensure the TV and all nearby devices can get signals at multi-Gb/s speeds.
Self-driving vehicles will start hitting the roads in large numbers in rich countries. The vehicles won’t drive as efficiently as humans (a lot of hesitation and slowing down for little or no reason), but they’ll be as safe as human drivers. Long-haul trucks that ply simple highway routes will be the first category of vehicles to be fully automated. The transition will be heralded by a big company like Wal-Mart buying 5,000 self-driving tractor trailers to move goods between its distribution centers and stores. Last-mile delivery–involving weaving through side streets, cities and neighborhoods, and physically carrying packages to peoples’ doors–won’t be automated until after this decade. Self-driving, privately owned passenger cars will stay few in number and will be owned by technophiles, rich people, and taxi cab companies.
Thanks to improvements in battery energy density and cost, and in fast-charging technology, electric cars become cost-competitive with gas-powered cars this decade without government subsidies, leading to their rapid adoption. Electric cars are mechanically simpler and more reliable than gas-powered ones, which will hurt the car repair industry. Many gas stations will also go bankrupt or convert to fast charging stations. [Moved from the 2030s because I discovered the technologies are improving faster than I thought.]
Quality of life for people living and working in cities and near highways will improve as more drivers switch to quieter, emissionless electric vehicles.
A machine will pass the Turing Test by the end of this decade. The milestone will attract enormous amounts of attention and will lead to several retests, some of which the machine will fail, proving that it lacks the full range of human intelligence. It will lead to debate over the Turing Test’s validity as a measure of true intelligence (Ray Kurzweil actually talked about this phenomenon of “moving the goalposts” whenever we think about how smart computers are), and many AI experts will point out the existence of decades-long skepticism in the Turing Test in their community.
The best AIs circa 2029 won’t be able to understand and upgrade their own source codes. They will still be narrow AIs, albeit an order of magnitude better than the ones we have today.
Machines will become better than humans at the vast majority of computer, card, and board games. The only exceptions will be very obscure games or recently created games that no one has bothered to program an AI to play yet. But even for those games, there will be AIs with general intelligence and learning abilities that will be “good enough” to play as well as average humans by reading the instruction manuals and teaching themselves through simulated self-play.
The cost of getting your genome sequenced and expertly interpreted will drop below $1,000, and enough about the human genome will have been deciphered to make the cost worth the benefit for everyone. By the end of the decade, it will be common for newborns in rich countries to have their genomes sequenced.
Cheap DNA tests that can measure a person’s innate IQ and core personality traits with high accuracy will become widely available. There is the potential for this to cause social problems.
At-home medical testing kits and diagnostic devices like swallowable camera-pills will become vastly better and more common.
China’s GDP will surpass America’s, India’s population will surpass China’s, and China will never claim the glorious title of being both the richest and most populous country.
Space tourism will become routine thanks to privately owned spacecraft.
Marijuana will be effectively decriminalized in the U.S. Either the federal government will overturn its marijuana prohibitions, or some patchwork of state and federal bans will remain but be so weakened and lightly enforced that there will be no real government barriers to obtaining and using marijuana.
By the end of this decade, photos of almost every living person will be available online (mostly on social media). Apps will exist that can scan through trillions of photos to find your doppelgangers.
Drones will be used in an attempted or successful assassination of at least one major world leader (Note: Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro wasn’t high profile enough).
2030s
VR and AR goggles will become refined technologies and probably merge into a single type of lightweight device. Like smartphones today, anyone who wants the glasses in 2030 will have them. Even poor people in Africa will be able to buy them. A set of the glasses will last a day on a single charge under normal use.
Augmented reality contact lenses will be invented, though they won’t be as good as AR glasses and they might need remotely linked, body-worn hardware to provide them with power and data.
The bulky V.R. goggles of the 2020s will transform into lightweight, portable V.R. glasses thanks to improved technology. The glasses will display lifelike footage.
Wall-sized, thin, 8K or even 16K TVs will become common in homes in rich countries, and the TVs will be able to display 3D picture without the use of glasses. A sort of virtual reality chamber could be created at moderate cost by installing those TVs on all the walls of a room to create a single, wraparound screen.
The video game industry will be bigger than ever and considered high art.
Books and computer tablets will merge into a single type of device that could be thought of as a “digital book.” It will be a book with several hundred pages made of thin, flexible digital displays (perhaps using ultra-energy efficient e-ink) instead of paper. At the tap of a button, the text on all of the pages will instantly change to display whichever book the user wanted to read at that moment. They could also be used as notebooks in which the user could hand write or draw things with a stylus, which would be saved as image or text files. The devices will fuse the tactile appeal of old-fashioned books with the content flexibility of tablet computers.
Loneliness, social isolation, and other problems caused by overuse of technology and the atomized structure of modern life will be, ironically, cured to a large extent by technology. Chatbots that can hold friendly (and even funny and amusing) conversations with humans for extended periods, diagnose and treat mental illnesses as well as human therapists, and customize themselves to meet the needs of humans will become ubiquitous. The AIs will become adept at analyzing human personalities and matching lonely people with friends and lovers, and at recommending daily activities that will satisfy them, hour-by-hour. Machines will come to understand that constant technology use is antithetical to human nature, so in order to promote human wellness, they find ways to impel humans to get out of their houses, interact with other humans, and be in nature.
House robots will start becoming common in rich countries. They will be slower at doing household tasks than humans, but will still save people hours of labor per week. They may or may not be humanoid. For the sake of safety and minimizing annoyance, most robots will do their work when humans aren’t around. As in, you would come home from work every day and find the floors vacuumed, the lawn mowed, and your laundered clothes in your dresser, with nary a robot in sight since it will have gone back into its closet to recharge. You would never hear the commotion of a clothes washing machine, a vacuum cleaner or a lawnmower. All the work would get done when you were away, as if by magic.
Chatbots will steadily improve their “humanness” over the decade. The instances when AIs say or do something nonsensical will get less and less frequent. Dumber people, children, and people with some types of mental illness will be the first ones to start insisting their AIs are intelligent like humans. Later, average people will start claiming the same. By the end of the decade, a personal assistant AI like “Samantha” from the movie Her will be commercially available.
People will start having genuine personal relationships with AIs and robots. For example, people will resist upgrading to new personal assistant AIs because they will have emotional attachments to their old ones. The destruction of a helper robot or AI might be as emotionally traumatic to some people as the death of a human relative.
Thanks to improvements in battery energy density and cost, and in fast-charging technology, electric cars become cost-competitive with gas-powered cars this decade without government subsidies, leading to their rapid adoption. Electric cars are mechanically simpler and more reliable than gas-powered ones, which will hurt the car repair industry. Many gas stations will also go bankrupt or convert to fast charging stations. [Moved to the 2020s because I discovered the technologies are improving faster than I thought.]
Self-driving cars will become cheap enough and practical enough for average income people to buy, and their driving behavior will become as efficient as an average human. Over the course of this decade, there will be rapid adoption of self-driving cars in rich countries. Freed from driving, people will switch to doing things like watching movies/TV and eating. Car interiors will change accordingly. Road fatalities, and the concomitant demands for traffic police, paramedics, E.R. doctors, car mechanics, and lawyers will sharply decrease. The car insurance industry will shrivel, forcing consolidation. (Humans in those occupations will also face increasing levels of direct job competition from machines over the course of the decade.)
The “big box” business model will start taking over the transportation and car repair industry thanks to the rise of electric, self-driving vehicles and autonomous taxis in place of personal car ownership. The multitudes of small, scattered car repair shops will be replaced by large, centralized car repair facilities that themselves resemble factory assembly lines. Self-driving vehicles will drive to them to have their problems diagnosed and fixed, sparing their human owners from having to waste their time sitting in waiting rooms.
Car ownership won’t die out because it will still be a status symbol, and having a car ready in your driveway will always be more convenient than having to wait even just two minutes for an Uber cab to arrive at the curb. People are lazy.
The ad hoc car rental model exemplified by autonomous Uber cabs and private people renting out their autonomous cars when not in use faces a challenge since daily demand for cars peaks during morning rush hour and afternoon rush hour. In other words, everyone needs a car at the same time each day, so the ratio of cars : people can’t deviate much from, say, 1:2. Of course, if more people telecommuted (almost certain in the future thanks to better VR, faster broadband, and tech-savvy Millennials reaching middle age and taking over the workplace), and if flexible schedules became more widespread (also likely, but within certain limits since most offices can’t function efficiently unless they have “all hands on deck” for at least a few hours each day), the ratio could go even lower. However, there’s still a bottom limit to how few cars a country will need to provide adequate daily transportation for its people.
Automation will start having a major impact on the global economy. Machines will compensate for the shrinkage of the working-age human population in the developed world. Countries with “graying” populations like Japan and Germany will experience a new wave of economic growth. Demand for immigrant laborers will decrease across the world because of machines.
There will be a worldwide increase in the structural unemployment rate thanks to better and cheaper narrow AIs and robots. A plausible scenario would be for the U.S. unemployment rate to be 10%–which was last the case at the nadir of the Great Recession–but for every other economic indicator to be strong. The clear message would be that human labor is becoming decoupled from the economy.
Combining all the best AI and robotics technologies, it will be possible to create general-purpose androids that could function better in the real world (e.g. – perform in the workplace, learn new things, interact with humans, navigate public spaces, manage personal affairs) than the bottom 10% of humans (e.g. – elderly people, the disabled, criminals, the mentally ill, people with poor language abilities or low IQs), and in some narrow domains, the androids will be superhuman (e.g. – physical strength, memory, math abilities). Note that businesses will still find it better to employ task-specific, non-human-looking robots instead of general purpose androids.
By the end of this decade, only poor people, lazy people, and conspiracy theorists (like anti-vaxxers) won’t have their genomes sequenced. It will be trivially cheap, and in fact free for many people (some socialized health care systems will fully subsidize it), and enough will be known about the human genome to make it worthwhile to have the information.
Markets will become brutally competitive and efficient thanks to AIs. Companies will sharply grasp consumer demand through real-time surveillance, and consumers will be alerted to bargains by their personal AIs and devices (e.g. – your AR glasses will visually highlight good deals as you walk through the aisles of a store). Your personal assistant AIs and robots will look out for your self-interest by countering the efforts of other AIs to sway your spending habits in ways that benefit companies and not you.
“Digital immortality” will become possible for average people. Personal assistant AIs, robot servants, and other monitoring devices will be able, through observation alone, to create highly accurate personality profiles of individual humans, and to anticipate their behavior with high fidelity. Voices and mannerisms will be digitally reproducible without any hint of error. Digital simulacra of individual humans will be further refined by having them take voluntary personality tests, and by uploading their genomes, brain scans and other body scans. Even if all of the genetic and biological data couldn’t be made sense of at the moment it was uploaded to an individual’s digital profile, there will be value in saving it since it might be decipherable in the future.
Life expectancy will have increased by a few years thanks to pills and therapies that slightly extend human lifespan. Like, you take a $20 pill each day starting at age 20 and you end up dying at age 87 instead of age 84.
Global oil consumption will peak as people continue switching to other power sources.
Earliest possible date for the first manned Mars mission.
Movie subtitles and the very notion of there being “foreign language films” will become obsolete. Computers will be able to perfectly translate any human language into another, to create perfect digital imitations of any human voice, and to automatically apply CGI so that the mouth movements of people in video footage matches the translated words they’re speaking.
Computer will also be able to automatically enhance old films by accurately colorizing them, removing defects like scratches, and sharpening or focusing footage (one technique will involve interpolating high-res still photos of long-dead actors onto the faces of those same actors in low-res moving footage). Computer enhancement will be so good that we’ll be able to watch films from the early 20th century with near-perfect image and audio clarity.
CGI will get so refined than moviegoers with 20/20 vision won’t be able to see the difference between footage of unaltered human actors and footage of 100% CGI actors.
Lifelike CGI and “performance capture” will enable “digital resurrections” of dead actors. Computers will be able to scan through every scrap of footage with, say, John Wayne in it, and to produce a perfect CGI simulacrum of him that even speaks with his natural voice, and it will be seamlessly inserted into future movies. Elderly actors might also license movie studios to create and use digital simulacra of their younger selves in new movies. The results will be very fascinating, but might also worsen Hollywood’s problem with making formulaic content.
2040s
The world and peoples’ outlooks and priorities will be very different than they were in 2019. Cheap renewable energy will have become widespread and totally negated any worries about an “energy crisis” ever happening, except in exotic, hypothetical scenarios about the distant future. There will be little need for immigration thanks to machine labor and cross-border telecommuting. Moreover, there will be a strong sense in most Western countries that they’re already “diverse enough,” and that there are no further cultural benefits to letting in more foreigners since large communities of most foreign ethnic groups will already exist within their borders. There will be more need than ever for strong social safety nets and entitlement programs thanks to technological unemployment. AI will be a central political and social issue. It won’t be the borderline sci-fi, fringe issue it was in 2019.
Automation, mass unemployment, wealth inequalities between the owners of capital and everyone else, and differential access to expensive human augmentation technologies (such as genetic engineering) will produce overwhelming political pressure for some kind of wealth redistribution and social safety net expansion. Countries that have diligently made small, additive reforms as necessary over the preceding decades will be untroubled. However, countries that failed to adapt their political and economic systems will face upheaval.
2045 will pass without the Technological Singularity happening. Ray Kurzweil will either celebrate his 97th birthday in a wheelchair, or as a popsicle frozen at the Alcor Foundation.
Supercomputers that match or surpass upper-level estimates of the human brain’s computational capabilities will cost a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars apiece, meaning tech companies and universities will be able to afford large numbers of them for AI R&D projects, accelerating progress in the field. Hardware will no longer be the limiting factor to building AGI. If it hasn’t been built yet, it will be due to failure to figure out how to arrange the hardware in the right way to support intelligent thought, and/or to a failure to develop the necessary software.
With robots running the economy, it will be common for businesses to operate 24/7: restaurants will never close, online orders made at 3:00 am will be packed in boxes by 3:10 am, and autonomous delivery trucks will only stop to refuel or exchange cargo.
Advanced energy technology, robot servants, 3D printers, telepresence, and other technologies will allow people to live largely “off-grid” if they choose, while still enjoying a level of comfort that 2019 people would envy.
It will be common for cities, towns and states to heavily restrict or ban human-driven vehicles within their boundaries. A sea change in thinking happens as autonomous cars become accepted as “the norm,” and human-driven cars are thought of as unusual and dangerous.
Over 90% of new car sales in developed countries will be for electric vehicles. Just as the invention of the automobile transformed horses into status goods used for leisure, the rise of electric vehicles will transform internal combustion vehicles into a niche market for richer people.
A global “family tree” showing how all humans are related will be built using written genealogical records and genomic data from the billions of people who have had their DNA sequenced. It will become impossible to hide illegitimate children, and it will also become possible for people to find “genetic doppelgangers”–other people they have no familial relationship to, but with whom, by some coincidence, they share a very large number of genes.
Improved knowledge of human genetics and its relevance to personality traits and interests will strengthen AI’s ability to match humans with friends, lovers, and careers.
Realistic robot sex bots that can move and talk will exist.
2050s
This is the earliest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. It will not be able to instantly change everything in the world or to initiate a Singularity, but it will rapidly grow in intelligence, wealth, and power. It will probably be preceded by successful computer simulations of the brains of progressively more complex model organisms, such as flatworms, fruit flies, and lab rats.
Humans will be heavily dependent upon their machines for almost everything (e.g. – friendship, planning the day, random questions to be answered, career advice, legal counseling, medical checkups, driving cars), and the dependency will be so ingrained that humans will reflexively assume that “The Machines are always right.” Consciously and unconsciously, people will yield more and more of their decision-making and opinion-forming to machines, and find that they and the world writ large are better off for it.
In the developed world, less than 50% of people between age 22 and 65 will have gainful full-time jobs. However, unprofitable full-time jobs that only persist thanks to government subsidies (such as someone running a small coffee shop and paying the bills with their monthly UBI check) and full-time volunteer “jobs” (such as picking up trash in the neighborhood) are counted, most people in that age cohort will be “doing stuff” on a full-time basis.
The doomsaying about Global Warming will start to quiet down as the world’s transition to clean energy hits full stride and predictions about catastrophes from people like Al Gore fail to pan out by their deadlines. Sadly, people will just switch to worrying about and arguing about some new set of doomsday prophecies about something else.
By almost all measures, standards of living will be better in 2050 than today. People will commonly have all types of wonderful consumer devices and appliances that we can’t even fathom. However, some narrow aspects of daily life are likely to worsen, such as overcrowding and further erosion of the human character. Just as people today have short memories and take too many things for granted, so shall people in the 2050s fail to appreciate how much the standard of living has risen since today, and they will ignore all the steady triumphs humanity has made over its problems, and by default, people will still believe the world is constantly on the verge of collapsing and that things are always getting worse.
Cheap desalination will provide humanity with unlimited amounts of drinking water and end the prospect of “water wars.”
Mass surveillance and ubiquitous technology will have minimized violent crime and property crime in developed countries: It will be almost impossible to commit such crimes without a surveillance camera or some other type of sensor detecting the act, or without some device recording the criminal’s presence in the area at the time of the act. House robots will contribute by effectively standing guard over your property at night while you sleep.
It will be common for people to have health monitoring devices on and inside of their bodies that continuously track things like their heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and gene expression. If a person has a health emergency or appears likely to have one, his or her devices will send out a distress signal alerting EMS and nearby random citizens. If you walked up to such a person while wearing AR glasses, you would see their vital statistics and would receive instructions on how to assist them (i.e. – How to do CPR). Robots will also be able to render medical aid.
Cities and their suburbs across the world will have experienced massive growth since 2019. Telepresence, relatively easy off-grid living, and technological unemployment will not, on balance, have driven more people out of metro areas than have migrated into them. Farming areas full of flat, boring land will have been depopulated, and many farms will be 100% automated. The people who choose to leave the metro areas for the “wilderness” will concentrate in rural areas (including national parks) where the climate is good, the natural scenery is nice, and there are opportunities for outdoor recreation.
Therapeutic cloning and stem cell therapies will become useful and will effectively extend human lifespan. For example, a 70-year-old with a failing heart will be able to have a new one grown in a lab using his own DNA, and then implanted into his chest to replace the failing original organ. The new heart will be equivalent to what he had when at age 18 years, so it will last another 52 years before it too fails. In a sense, this will represent age reversal to one part of his body.
The first healthy clone of an adult human is born.
Many factories, farms, and supply chains will be 100% automated, and it will be common for goods to not be touched by a human being’s hands until they reach their buyers. Robots will deliver Amazon packages to your doorstep and even carry them into your house. Items ordered off the internet will appear inside your house a few hours later, as if by magic.
The last of America’s Cold War-era weapon platforms (e.g. – the B-52 bomber, F-15 fighter, M1 Abrams tank, Nimitz aircraft carrier) will finally be retired from service. There will be instances where four generations of people from the same military family served on the same type of plane or ship.
Cheap guided bullets, which can make midair course changes and be fired out of conventional man-portable rifles, will become common in advanced armies.
The richest person alive achieves a $1 trillion net worth.
2060s
China will effectively close the technological, military, and standard of living gaps with other developed countries. Aside from the unpleasantness of being a more crowded place, life in China won’t be worse overall than life in Japan or the average European country.
House robots and human-sized worker robots will be as strong, agile, and dexterous as most humans, and their batteries will be energy-dense enough to power them for most of the day. A typical American family might have multiple robot servants that physically follow around the humans each day to help with tasks. The family members will also be continuously monitored and “followed” by A.I.s embedded in their portable personal computing devices and possibly in their bodies.
Cheap home delivery of groceries, robot chefs, and a vast trove of free online recipes will enable people in average households to eat restaurant-quality meals at home every day, at low cost. Predictive algorithms that can appropriately choose new meals for humans based on their known taste preferences and other factors will determine the menu, and many people will face a culinary “satisfaction paradox.”
Machines will understand humans individually and at the species level better than humans understand themselves. They will have highly accurate personality models of most humans along with a comprehensive grasp of human sociology, human decision-making, human psychology, human cognitive biases, and human nature, and will pool the information to accurately predict human behavior. A nascent version of a 1:1 computer simulation of the Earth–with the human population modeled in great detail–will be created.
There will be a small, permanent human presence on the Moon.
If a manned Mars mission hasn’t happened yet, then there’s intense pressure to do so by the centennial of the first Moon landing (1969).
The worldwide number of supercentenarians–people who are at least 110 years old–is sharply higher than it was in 2019: Their population size could be 10 times bigger or more.
Advances in a variety of technologies will make it possible to cryonically freeze humans in a manner that doesn’t pulverize their tissue. However, the technology needed to safely thaw them out won’t be invented for decades.
2070s
100 years after the U.S. “declared war” on cancer, there still will not be a “cure” for most types of cancer, but vaccination, early detection, treatment, and management of cancer will be vastly better, and in countries with modern healthcare systems, most cancer diagnoses will not reduce a person’s life expectancy. Consider that, diabetes and AIDS were once considered “death sentences” that would invariably kill people within a few years of diagnosis, until medicines were developed that transformed them into treatable, chronic health conditions.
It will be technologically and financially feasible for commercial aircraft to produce zero net carbon emissions. The aircraft might use conventional engines powered by synthetic fossil fuels, or they might have electric engines and very energy-dense batteries or fuel cells.
2100
Humans probably won’t be the dominant intelligent life forms on Earth.
Latest possible time that AGI/SAI will be invented. By this point, computer hardware will so powerful that we could do 1:1 digital simulations of human brains. If our AI still falls far short of human-like general intelligence and creativity, then it might be that only organic substrates have the necessary properties to support them.
Worst case scenario is that AGI/Strong AI hasn’t been invented yet, but thousands of different types of highly efficient, task-specific Narrow AIs have (often coupled to robot bodies), and they fill almost every labor niche better than human workers ever could (“Death by a Thousand Cuts” job automation scenario). Humans grow up in a world where no one has to work, and the notion of drudge work, suffering through a daily commute, and involuntarily waking up at 6:00 am five days a week is unfathomable. Every human will have machines that constantly monitor them or follow them around, and meet practically all their needs.
The world could in many ways resemble Ray Kurzweil’s predicted Post-Singularity world. However, the improvements and changes will have accrued thanks to decades of AGI/Strong AI steady effort. Everything will not instantly change on DD/MM/2045 as Kurzweil suggests it will.
Hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of “digitally immortal avatars” of dead humans will exist, and you will be able to interact with them through a variety of means (in FIVR, through devices like earpieces and TV screens, in the real world if the avatar takes over an android body resembling the human it was based on).
A weak sort of immortality will be available thanks to self-cloning, immortal digital avatars, and perhaps mind uploading. You could clone yourself and instruct your digital avatar–which would be a machine programmed with your personality and memories–to raise the clone and ensure it developed to resemble you. Your digital avatar might have an android body or could exist in a disembodied state.
Life expectancy escape velocity and perhaps medical immortality will be achieved. It will come not from magical, all-purpose nanomachines that fix all your body’s cells and DNA, but from a combination of technologies, including therapeutic cloning of human organs, cybernetic replacements for organs and limbs, and stem cell therapies that regenerate ageing tissues and organs inside the patient’s body. The treatments will be affordable in large part thanks to robot doctors and surgeons who work almost for free, and to medical patents expiring.
All other aspects of medicine and healthcare will have radically advanced. There will be vaccines and cures for almost all contagious diseases. We will be masters of human genetic engineering and know exactly how to produce people that today represent the top 1% of the human race (holistically combining IQ, genetic health, physical attractiveness, and likable/prosocial personality traits). However, the value of even a genius-IQ human will be questionable since intelligent machines will be so much smarter.
Augmentative cybernetics (including direct brain-to-computer links) will exist and be in common use.
FIVR exists wherein AI game masters constantly tailor environments, NPCs and events to suit each player’s needs and to keep them entertained. Every human has his own virtual game universe where he’s #1. With no jobs in the real world to occupy them, it’s quite possible that a large fraction of the human race will willingly choose to live in FIVR. (Related to the satisfaction paradox)
The vast majority of unaugmented human beings will no longer be assets that can invent things and do useful work: they will be liabilities that do (almost) everything worse than intelligent machines and augmented humans. Ergo, the size of a nation’s human population will subtract from its economic and military power, and radical shifts in geopolitics are possible. Geographically large but sparsely populated countries like Russia, Australia and Canada might become very strong. [Changed to reflect the fact that some extraordinarily talented, unaugmented humans like Einstein could still compete with the future “average.”]
The transition to green energy sources will be complete, and humans will no longer be net emitters of greenhouse gases. The means will exist to start reducing global temperatures to restore the Earth to its pre-industrial state, but people will resist because they will have gotten used to the warmer climate. People living in Canada and Russia won’t want their countries to get cold again.
Synthetic meat will taste no different from animal meat, and will be at least as cheap to make. The raising and/or killing of animals for food will be be illegal in many countries, and trends will clearly show the practice heading for worldwide ban.
The means to radical alter human bodies, alter memories, and alter brain structures will be available.
Brain implants will make “telepathy” possible between humans, machines and animals.
Flying cars designed to carry humans could be common, but they will be flown by machines, not humans. Ground vehicles will retain many important advantages (fuel efficiency, cargo capacity, safety, noise level, and more) and won’t become obsolete. Instead of flying cars, it’s more likely that there will be millions of small, autonomous helicopters and VTOL aircraft that will cheaply ferry people through dense, national networks of helipads and airstrips. Autonomous land vehicles would take take passengers to and from the landing sites.
The notion of vehicles (e.g. – cars, planes, and boats) polluting the air will be an alien concept.
Advanced nanomachines could exist.
Vastly improved materials and routine use of very advanced computer design simulations will mean that manufactured objects of all types will be optimally engineered in every respect, and might seem to have “magical” properties. For example, a car will be made of hundreds of different types of alloys, plastics, and glass, each optimized for a different part of the vehicle, and car recalls will never happen since the vehicles will undergo vast amounts of simulated testing in every conceivable driving condition in 1:1 virtual simulations of the real world.
Relatively cheap interplanetary travel (probably just to Mars and to space stations and moons that are about as far as Mars) will exist.
Androids that are outwardly indistinguishable from humans will exist, and humans will hold no advantages over them (e.g. – physical dexterity, fine motor control, appropriateness of facial expressions, capacity for creative thought).
Drones, miniaturized smart weapons, and AIs will dominate warfare, from the top level of national strategy down to the simplest act of combat. The world’s strongest military could, with conventional weapons alone, destroy most of the world’s human population in a short period of time.
The construction and daily operation of prisons will have been fully automated, lowering the monetary costs of incarceration. As such, state prosecutors and judges will no longer feel pressure to let accused criminals have plea deals or to give them shorter prison sentences to ease the burdens of prison overcrowding and high overhead costs.
The term “millionaire” will fall out of use in the U.S. and other Western countries since inflation will have rendered $1 million USD only as valuable as $90,000 USD was in 2019 (assuming a constant inflation rate of 3.0%).
2101 – 2200 AD
Humans will definitely stop being the dominant intelligent life forms on Earth.
Many “humans” will be heavily augmented through genetic engineering, other forms of bioengineering, and cybernetics. People who outwardly look like the normal humans of today might actually have extensive internal modifications that give them superhuman abilities. Non-augmented, entirely “natural” humans like people in 2019 will be looked down upon in the same way you might today look at a very low IQ person with sensory impairments.
Physical disabilities and defects of appearance that cause untold anguish to people in 2019 will be easily and cheaply fixable. For example, male-pattern baldness and obesity will be completely ameliorated with minor medical interventions like pills or outpatient surgery. Missing or deformed limbs will be easily replaced, all types of plastic surgery (including sex reassignment) will be vastly better and cheaper than today, and spinal cord damage will be totally repairable. The global “obesity epidemic” will disappear.
The means to halt and reverse human aging will be created. The human population will come to be dominated by people who are eternally young and beautiful.
Humans and machines will be immortal. Intelligent beings will find it terrifying and tragic to contemplate what it was like for humans in the past, who lived their lives knowing they were doomed to deteriorate and die.
Extreme longevity, better reproductive technologies that eliminate the need for a human partner to have children, and robots that do domestic work and provide companionship (including sex) will weaken the institution of marriage more than any time in human history. An indefinite lifetime of monogamy will be impossible for most people to commit to.
Immortality, the automation of work, and widespread material abundance will completely transform lifestyles. With eternity to look forward to, people won’t feel pressured to get as rich as possible as quickly as possible. As stated, marriage will no longer be viewed as a lifetime commitment, and serial monogamy will probably become the norm. Relationships between parents and offspring will change as longevity erases the disparities in generational outlook and maturity that traditionally characterize parent-child interpersonal dynamics (e.g. – 300-year-old dad doesn’t know any better than his 270-year-old son). The “factory model” of public education–defined by conformity, rote memorization, frequent intelligence testing, and curricula structured to serve the needs of the job market–will disappear. The process of education will be custom-tailored to each person in terms of content, pacing, and style of instruction. Students will be much freer to explore subjects that interest them and to pursue those that best match their talents and interests.
Extinct species for which we have DNA samples (ex – from passenger pigeons on display in a museum) will “resurrected” using genetic technology.
The technology for safely thawing humans out of cryostasis and returning them to good health will be created.
It will be possible to upload human minds to computers. The uploads will not share the same consciousness as their human progenitors, and will be thought of as “copies.”
Gold, silver, and many other “precious metals” will be worth far less than today, adjusting for inflation, because better ways of extracting (including from seawater) them will have been developed. Space mining might also massively boost supplies of the metals, depressing prices. Diamonds will be nearly worthless thanks to better techniques for making them artificially.
The first non-token quantities of minerals derived from asteroid mining will be delivered to the Earth’s surface. (Finding an asteroid that contains valuable minerals, altering its orbit to bring it closer to Earth, and then waiting for it to get here will take decades. No one will become a trillionaire from asteroid mining until well into the 22nd century.)
Intelligent life from Earth will colonize the entire Solar System, all dangerous space objects in our System will be found, the means to deflect or destroy them will be created, and intelligent machines will redesign themselves to be immune to the effects of radiation, solar flares, gamma rays, and EMP. As such, natural phenomena (including global warming) will no longer threaten the existence of civilization. Intelligent beings will find it terrifying and tragic to contemplate what it was like for humans in the past, who were confined to Earth and at the mercy of planet-killing disasters.
“End of the World” prophecies will become far less relevant since civilization will have spread beyond Earth and could be indefinitely self-sustaining even if Earth were destroyed. Some conspiracy theorists and religious people would deal with this by moving on to belief in “End of the Solar System” prophecies, but these will be based on extremely tenuous reasoning.
The locus of civilization and power in our Solar System will shift away from Earth. The vast majority of intelligent life forms outside of Earth will be nonhuman.
A self-sustaining, off-world industrial base will be created.
Spy satellites with lenses big enough to read license plates and discern facial features will be in Earth orbit.
Space probes made in our Solar System and traveling at sub-light speeds will reach nearby stars.
All of the useful knowledge and great works of art that our civilization has produced or discovered could fit into an advanced memory storage device the size of a thumb drive. It will be possible to pair this with something like a self-replicating Von Neumann Probe, creating small, long-lived machines that would know how to rebuild something exactly like our civilization from scratch. Among other data, they would have files on how to build intelligent machines and cloning labs, and files containing the genomes of billions of unique humans and non-human organisms. Such machines could be distributed throughout our Solar System as an “insurance policy” against our extinction, or sent to other star systems to seed them with life.
We will find out whether alien life exists on Mars and the other celestial bodies in our Solar System.
We will reach “Kardashev Type 1 Civilization” status or something equivalent to it.
Intelligent machines will get strong enough to destroy the human race, though it’s impossible to assign odds to whether they’ll choose to do so.
If the “Zoo Hypothesis” is right, and if intelligent aliens have decided not to talk to humans until we’ve reached a high level of intellect, ethics, and culture, then the machine-dominated civilization that will exist on Earth this century might be advanced enough to meet their standards. Uncontrollable emotions and impulses, illogical thinking, tribalism, self-destructive behavior, and fear of the unknown will no longer govern individual and group behavior. Aliens could reveal their existence knowing it wouldn’t cause pandemonium.
Technology will be seamlessly fused with humans, other biological organisms, and the environment itself.
A global network of sensors and drones will identify and track every non-microscopic species on the planet. Cryptids like “bigfoot” and the “Loch Ness Monster” will be definitively proven to not exist. The monitoring network will also make it possible to get highly accurate, real-time counts of entire species populations. Mass gathering of DNA samples–either taken directly from organisms or from biological residue they leave behind–will also allow the full genetic diversity of all non-microscopic species to be known.
Robots will clean up all of the garbage created in human history.
Every significant archaeological site will be excavated and every shipwreck found. There will be no work left for people in the antiquities.
Animals will no longer be raised for food. Additionally, the means will exist to cheaply and artificially produce organic products, like wool and wood.
Tying together two subjects I’ve repeatedly touched on, Russia has sold China advanced turbine engine components for its Type 055 destroyers in exchange for China agreeing to fix up Russia’s sole aircraft carrier. Recall that the Type 055 is one of China’s best ships and is only slightly inferior to U.S. ships of the same type, and Russia’s military floating dock accidentally sank in October. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/2179553/china-makes-turbine-blade-breakthrough-could-give-type-055
Slovakia has decided to replace its Soviet-era MiG-29s with U.S.-built F-16s, which moves NATO that much closer to logistical interoperability and reduces some of their members’ highly embarrassing dependence on Russia for military assistance. https://www.janes.com/article/85204/slovakia-signs-for-f-16v-fighters
When will we have electric planes? Whenever we have at least tripled the energy density of today’s best batteries. Since energy density doubles roughly every 25 years, a tripling should happen in 38 years. At that point, medium-sized electric passenger planes with up to 125 passengers could profitably ply short- and medium-distance routes. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/when-will-electric-airliners-make-sense/
Porsche has made a 450 kW fast-charging station for electric cars. There’s no technical reason why a car’s batteries couldn’t be recharged in under 10 minutes, which would eliminate one of the few advantages of gas-powered cars. https://newatlas.com/porsche-450-kw-fastcharge-prototype/57659/
Electric cars are more expensive than gas-powered cars because the former’s batteries are expensive. However, the costs are rapidly declining, and at the current rate, Bloomberg predicts electric cars should actually get CHEAPER than gas-powered equivalents by 2026. Crucially, this can be done without the discovery of some new type of battery with new chemistry–we’ll find ways to make existing lithium-ion batteries cheaper. https://data.bloomberglp.com/bnef/sites/14/2017/07/BNEF-Lithium-ion-battery-costs-and-market.pdf
Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders thinks a Mars mission is a terrible idea, and that NASA has done nothing but make mistakes and grow more bureaucratic over the last 50 years. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46364179
Once AIs grasp your skills, intelligence, and personality traits, they’ll be able to match you with jobs more optimally than you or a company’s human resources department could. As technological unemployment accelerates, it will be interesting to see what uses machines find for humans (e.g. doctors picking up roadside trash). https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/business/economy/artificial-intelligence-hiring.html
Some ancient Greek myths describe what we would today think of as robots. “If you think about what any reproducing organism that is under natural selection will do,” Martinho-Turswell told me, “it is going to try to maximize the effect it can get from the minimum investment. That is how you win the evolutionary game.” https://gizmodo.com/the-ancient-origins-of-automation-1830880224
Tokyo Disneyland is building a Beauty and the Beast attraction full of robots that look and move exactly like the animated characters. It’s surreal watching footage of these things. https://youtu.be/bJtNxaTwgz0
Kroger has unveiled an autonomous vehicle meant to delivery groceries to people living near one of their stores. Since it isn’t meant to carry humans, the vehicle is very small, light, and lacks safety features. As autonomous vehicles get more common, the diversity of vehicle shapes and sizes will grow, as they will be purpose-built for specific tasks. In a distant future where AIs run the planet and humans aren’t around, I think smaller volumes of physical “stuff” will move around the planet, and vehicles designed to transport human-sized beings will be a very small fraction of the global vehicle fleet. https://techxplore.com/news/2018-12-grocery-delivery-humans-drivers-underway.html
The concept of a “space of possible minds” has recently come to fascinate me. The human mind is only one possible type of mind, and it thinks and perceives things in unique, but not objective ways. Other species, like bats, ants, and chimps, have very different internal states that could be appropriately called “alien.” Maybe in the future, we’ll have an enormous number of minds–human, animal, hybrid, artificial, blended organic/synthetic–all linked to the same Matrix (for lack of a better term), with each mind specialized for a different type of processing. As data entered the Matrix, it would be shunted to the type of mind best suited to process it. Some of the nodes might be human brains floating in jars, genetically tweaked to be enormous in size and hyperspecialized for specific types of thinking. https://www.edge.org/conversation/murray_shanahan-the-space-of-possible-minds
An update to a link I posted some months ago: The NHS has decided to get rid of its ridiculous fax machines. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-46497526
Scientists successfully grew hair follicles in vitro, surgically implanted them into mice, and the hair grew. A true cure for human baldness will exist by the end of this century. Eventually, we’ll be able to edit it out of the human genepool. Full heads of hair are attractive, completely shaved heads can also be attractive, but heads covered in visibly thinning or receded hair are universally seen as unattractive. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07579-y
Twelve people were hospitalized after getting infections from poorly regulated stem cell clinics in the U.S. Stem cell therapies have enormous long-term potential, but at present, the clinical field is dominated by quacks peddling unproven, expensive treatments to desperately ill people. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/health/stem-cell-shots-bacteria-fda.html
A German company has invented a way to safely identify the sexes of chickens while they’re still in their eggs. The eggs with males in them could be pulverized as early as the ninth day, when the chicks are still embryos with undeveloped nervous systems. Currently, the egg industry disposes of 4-6 billion hatched male chicks per year by drowning them or grinding them up in huge machines. http://www.seleggt.com/supply-chain-of-shell-eggs/
More proof that California’s decision to put out every wildfire–even if no humans or infrastructure are threatened–interferes with nature’s cycle and only increases the amount of dead, dry wood that will serve as fodder for mega-fires. Global warming doesn’t cause every problem. https://apnews.com/f92cc1767c33459c9312d6fa408cdd50
Syrian government forces have reoccupied the northern city of Manbij for the first time in six years. At last, and for better or worse, the country’ civil war is ending. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-46701095
Alan Watts postulated that, if you were a Godlike being with billions of years on your hands, you would eventually start doing mental exercises where you simulated what it would be like to live as a random human on Earth, with no knowledge of your divine nature. Eventually, you would simulate the person you are now. https://steemit.com/christianity/@gbolson/alan-watt-s-perfect-description-of-simulation-theory-or-hell
Humans have a natural bias towards pessimism, attach more weight to bad news than to good news, and in surveys usually underestimate how much things have improved in the world, such as the growth of the global middle class. http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-persistent-appeal-of-pessimism/
As promised, I’ve written my thoughts on Alvin Toffler’s outstanding futurist book, The Third Wave. I finished it in November, but was delayed writing this due to travel.
First, I think Toffler’s vision of the future was mostly correct, but that his timetable for his predictions was too optimistic. Of note is the fact that I’ve long said the same thing about Ray Kurzweil, who is another famous futurist. It now occurs to me that Toffler’s ideas could have in fact influenced Kurzweil’s, as both of them were well-known American futurists from the same part of the country. I’ll keep this mind when I read Kurzweil’s first futurist book, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), which was published just ten years after The Third Wave.
Another similarity between the two men is their prediction that undeveloped countries could skip the “Industrial Era” phase of economic, social, and political development and go directly to the “Postmodern Era” characterized by economies based on services, information and science, and cultures centered around personal freedom decentralized government. While it’s a hopeful vision and may someday provide a pathway to real prosperity for poor countries, I think it has failed to materialize so far: some poor countries with underdeveloped manufacturing sectors such as India have gotten richer recently thanks to growth in information jobs and service sector jobs–like telemarketing and computer services–but it’s far too early to say if enough positions will ever be created in those positions to employ most adults or to have a truly “transformative” effect on the nature or size of their economies. Additionally, India has been rapidly urbanizing and will continue doing to for decades, bucking Toffler’s prediction that it might avoid such a population transfer (a development pathway he called “Gandhi with satellites”).
To the contrary, the greatest economic growth miracle of the last 40 years happened in China thanks to a government-led strategy to rapidly industrialize and build enormous numbers of factories. China didn’t skip the Industrial Era (aka “The Second Wave”), it aggressively embraced it, and today, it’s the world’s largest manufacturer of goods. China’s success also presents a rival model of national development to Toffler’s “Third Wave”: a competent, efficient, technocratic dictatorship that provides prosperity but limited freedom. Of note, the recent book How Democracy Ends explores the possible decline of liberal democracy theorizes the rise of a benevolent AI dictatorship that humans accept because it is simply better than any other system (could that be “The Fourth Wave”?).
It’s interesting to examine the minority of Toffler’s predictions that have already failed or seem likely to fail, and to consider the reasons why. For starters, Toffler predicted that fossil fuel supplies would steadily dwindle into the future, exacerbating the civil strife that he thought would accompany the transition to the Third Wave, and accelerating the development of clean energy technologies. At the time he wrote Future Shock, inflation-adjusted oil prices were the highest they had been in the 20th century thanks to the Arab Oil Embargo and to disruptions to Iranian oil exports owing to that country’s Islamic Revolution. However, by the mid-80s, oil prices crashed for a number of reasons, and fears that the world would run out of oil eased.
Oil prices were very high when The Third Wave was written.
Toffler lacked expertise about the energy sector (which is a big no-no for forecasting), and was making his Third Wave forecasts during an unusually bleak time characterized by rapidly rising fuel prices and dwindling U.S. reserves. It’s easy to see how those two factors, coupled with the inherent unpredictability of fossil fuel prices (a person able to consistently predict oil prices could quickly become a billionaire by trading in the futures market), led Toffler to make such an erroneously pessimistic prediction.
Toffler’s predictions about the rise of telecommuting were basically right, with some important caveats. First, the practice hasn’t grown as quickly as he predicted. Second, full-time telecommuting has proven surprisingly unpopular, for reasons Toffler can’t be blamed for having foreseen. Given the choice, many workers would opt to be in the office at least some of the time to maintain personal and professional relationships that they’ve discovered require face-to-face interaction. Working from home alone can also be isolating and stressful, especially to extroverts. Some people also find it unproductive or negative in some other way to blur the boundaries between their professional and personal lives by working from home. Others prefer going to the office because it gives them an excuse to escape stressful domestic environments. (Note that Alvin Toffler worked with his wife for decades, and she co-wrote many of his books. I think he probably failed to appreciate how odd this arrangement was, and as a result he projected it onto his assumptions about average peoples’ preferences, and then it made its way into his predictions about the future of work. To a large extent, I think Ray Kurzweil’s fascination with speech interfaces replacing text and keyboards is also an example of a futurist failing to fully distinguish between his own preferences and those of typical people.)
Alvin and Heidi Toffler were married and spent their lives working together as writers and futurists.
Additionally, being in the office carries important productivity-boosting benefits, like being able to physically handle office papers, and to quickly arrange face-to-face meetings with colleagues to efficiently discuss things rather than communicating through time-delayed emails. In predicting the rise of full-time telecommuting, I think Toffler ran afoul of what futurist Michio Kaku later (in 2011) identified as “The Caveman Principle.” The Principle holds that human nature was shaped by nomadic, tribal, low-tech, resource-scarce lifestyles that we had during the first 95% of our species’ existence; that human nature has not changed even though we are now several generations removed from that type of existence; and that predictions about future technologies and future lifestyles should be doubted if they conflict with inbuilt human instincts. I agree the Kaku’s insight is right, and it poses a major stumbling block to telecommuting.
Human beings are, by nature, social animals who like to see and be seen, and we are also tactile and like interacting with physical objects like papers and photos, and like being able to spread them out on a desk in any arrangement. Clearly, spending eight hours a day sitting alone at home, viewing abstracted images of things through a small, glowing portal, and navigating virtual file cabinets and directories clashes with some innate human preferences. While telecommuting also has important advantages (e.g. – no time wasted commuting to work; ability to work for distant organizations without relocating your home), the Caveman Principle and the other factors I listed have proven to be important counterweights to its expansion, and will continue to be.
Moreover, I think the Caveman Principle poses a major challenge to Toffler’s prediction that cities would become obsolete and depopulate, and to the predictions made by others more recently that shopping malls are becoming obsolete. Since The Third Wave was published, the U.S. and all other Western countries have only urbanized more, and there are no signs the trend will letup. In particular, many American cities have undergone a renaissance since then, and are vastly safer, cleaner, and more attractive to live in. Toffler was writing at a time when urban decay and white flight were near their worst in America, and it’s quite possible he let this influence his thinking about where cities were headed.
U.S. Census figures show the country’s population has been getting more urbanized since at least 1910.
Though the vast majority of metro areas in rich countries show no signs of depopulating, I can think of reasons it might happen in the distant future. Much better telecommuting/telepresence technologies–like full immersion virtual reality, augmented reality glasses, and holograms–might allow workers to stay in their homes while also genuinely feeling like they were physically in their offices, and for workers actually at offices to feel as if they could meet face-to-face with remote colleagues. If that were the case, 100% telecommuting would become more popular, and many workers would choose to move far from their work sites in order to save money (cities are expensive) or just be somewhere more pleasant. The array of technologies I’m describing could be available in as little as 15 years, will probably have roots in video gaming and remote warfare, and can be thought of as engendering a “new paradigm” of telecommuting that is qualitatively different from today’s practices. Additionally, it will vastly improve the distance learning experience, posing a challenge to the brick-and-mortar classroom model, and, presuming there are no protectionist legal obstacles, it could accelerate international job outsourcing.
Mass unemployment, caused by machines and/or outsourcing, could also impel people to move out of cities in rich countries. Without jobs to keep them tethered in any one place, large numbers of people in metro areas would probably leave for more scenic locales, places with lower costs of living, and places with friendlier people. As I said in my travel blog about the Dakotas and Nebraska, uprooted people would congregate in certain types of places instead of dispersing evenly across the country.
Also, bear in mind that the Caveman Principle stops influencing human behavior if 1) humans gain the ability to change their own nature, or 2) humans cease to exist. If humans use technology to radically alter our minds and instincts in the distant future, then we won’t be burdened with our Caveman instincts, and would be comfortable living our lives very differently. Tweak enough genes and create good enough virtual reality, and you might love spending your life in a coffin-sized pod plugged into the Matrix, in which case it wouldn’t make any difference whether your pod were in a city or the middle of a desert. Moving on to the second point, if the human race ceased to exist–either because another intelligent species destroyed us or we evolved into a radically different species–then concentrating people and infrastructure in specific places to make cities might be undesirable for any number of reasons.
So, it remains to be seen whether Toffler’s prediction about the obsolescence of cities will come true. I doubt cities will ever completely disappear, since it will make sense from the standpoint of resource efficiency to move physical cargo by ship where possible, which will necessitate the existence of ports, which will in turn necessitate the existence of auxiliary structures like warehouses, and it’s easy to see how it could make further sense from a logistics standpoint to cluster other purpose-specific facilities (factories, power stations, etc.) near them until the aggregation gets city-sized. And while all of the work that happens in this hypothetical machine port city could be done remotely, by an AI located in a server warehouse 8,000 miles away, it might be more efficient to put it inside the city to reduce communications time lag (note that high-frequency stock trade companies put their computers in New York or New Jersey to minimize lag of their stock trade orders to the New York Stock Exchange).
In fleshing out his theory of history, Toffler also makes very useful observations about the past, yielding a new perspective on the present. Many fundamental facets of modern life that we accept as normal–such as living in cities, living among large numbers of strangers who are also very different from us, spending little time outdoors, having jobs where we are subordinate to strangers and work fixed hours, having to spend large amounts of time away from family members each day, and being constantly overloaded with information, material abundance, and choices–are in fact recent advents. As I wrote earlier, human life was totally different for the first 95% of our species’ existence, and it should come as no surprise that our biology and instincts are honed for that kind of existence and not for today’s industrialized, diverse, high-tech world. This “mis-fit” has been causing miseries and problems that Toffler and many thinkers have examined and drawn connections between (though people like Gregory Clark say some groups have adapted to modern life better than others). Fortunately, I agree with Toffler’s view that coming changes to technology, culture, and politics (e.g. – the automation of drudge work, the spread of telecommuting and flexible work schedules, personal assistant AIs tailoring themselves to the needs of individual humans, an expanded welfare state) will break down some of the worst aspects of the current paradigm and let us return to lifestyles more in tune with our natures.
Toffler’s descriptions of the problems of the late 1970s are very enlightening since they remind us that, relatively recently, the Western world went through a period of upheaval and self-doubt like we have today, and not only survived but thrived. I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck while reading these sections of the book, since they could perfectly describe the problems of 2018: widespread job dissatisfaction, widespread frustration with a lack of purpose in life, a feeling of being overwhelmed with new and conflicting ideas and with the pace of technological change, unjustified popular fears of machines “taking over” in the near future, fears of international chaos, frustration with a deeply flawed U.S. President, seemingly insoluble political gridlock in democratic countries, upheaval from minorities demanding more rights, and the rise of highly visible and often-violent extremist political groups on the Far Right and Far Left.
I wasn’t born until the 1980s, and I haven’t read much about the 1970s, but Toffler makes me want to so I can put the present era into a better historical context. The fact that the West emerged from that dark era stronger and reinvigorated gives me hope for us today, and leaves me more convinced than ever that much of the dourness about the world today owes to the media presenting a distorted, negatively-tinted view of things, and to the public’s ignorance of history and thus of how much the world has improved.
I think Toffler’s prognosis that the U.S. Constitution has become outdated, and that the many of the U.S. government’s rules and practices are obsolete, is 100% right, and it’s remarkable that he grasped this in 1980. Contemporary governments throughout the West were designed for long-gone eras when the pace of change was slower, there were fewer issues for governments to contend with, citizens were less diverse and had lower expectations, and public opinion was more homogenous due to the small number of news sources. Consensus was easier to achieve.
One of this blog’s big rules is “No politics/partisanship,” so I’ll just say that I think a new Constitutional Convention–led by principled, smart people who put country before party–would be very healthy for America and would sharply reduce the amount of gridlock and acrimony we have. Sadly, I doubt such a thing is politically possible now, which dovetails with Toffler’s second observation that making fundamental changes to the government would only get harder as time passed. We’ll still muddle through, though at much greater cost and annoyance than is necessary.
So I strongly agree with Toffler in a broad sense about this, but I disagree with some of the specific solutions he proposes, such as making voting ballots more complex (he proposed ideas that went way beyond ranked choice voting) and tallying votes on some other basis than geographic divisions. Radical ideas like that might have a chance in countries with highly educated populations (e.g. – Switzerland or Singapore), but would backfire in the U.S. by sowing confusion.
But make no mistake, I think Toffler is the most accurate futurist I know of. In fact, his predictions in The Third Wave have proven so accurate thus far (as of 2018), that I think his unfulfilled-but-not-implausible predictions are a good guidepost to what is in store for us. Here they are:
Reusable spacecraft will dramatically lower the costs of getting people and cargo into space, and a self-sustaining, off-world industrial base will be created.
We will gain the ability to filter bits of precious metal from the seas. (Toffler specifies that genetically engineered bacteria will do this, though much better filters could also.)
Genetically engineered humans will be made. (This may have just happened.)
We will start making clones of human organs–each person will have “backup” organs made from their unique DNA stored somewhere. (This is essentially the plot of the film The Island.)
Oil-free manufacture of plastic will become widespread.
We will discover ways to artificially synthesize organic materials like wood and wool. (I recently posted a science article about a wood substitute made of polymer resin and chitosan.)
Genetically modified food crops that need fewer fertilizers and pesticides and that can grow on poorer soils will be invented. This will benefit farmers in poor countries more than the Green Revolution’s earlier methods and technologies did. (This is developing slower than Toffler predicted, in part due to unexpected political resistance.)
Speech will become the primary means of human-computer interface. As a result, people will read and write less, and illiterate people will be able to get good jobs. (I agree that verbal/auditory computer interfaces will become more dominant over time, but text won’t disappear, if anything because it protects user privacy better. Also, being illiterate usually goes hand-in-hand with other deficiencies of skills and cognition, so highly advanced speech interfaces won’t level the job playing field for illiterate people.)
Once computers and sensors are embedded everywhere, the environment will become much more “interactive,” and human IQs might increase thanks to the added stimulation. (At the very least, having instant access to information, like a semi-intelligent AI that can answer your questions and walk you through unfamiliar tasks, would be kind of equivalent to having a higher IQ.)
Before the invention of writing, the body of human knowledge was in a constant steady-state because things were always being forgotten and relearned. Mass literacy was a second inflection point in the growth of human knowledge. The third inflection point will owe to data being stored in computers and sensors being everywhere in the environment, recording all events. Our civilization will achieve “total recall.” (Futurist Kevin Kelly calls this “Globenet” and “Memorex.”)
Computers will be programmed to think in unorthodox ways and to recombine existing knowledge in strange ways that humans would have never thought to do. This will lead to “a flood of new theories, ideas, ideologies, artistic insights, technical advances, economic and political innovations…” It will accelerate the pace of change in many domains, even if the computers lack “superhuman intelligence” as it is classically conceptualized.
Transit networks will become less congested as the population decentralizes, more people telework, and asynchronous work schedules become common (e.g. – fewer people working 9 – 5 and clogging up the roads at the same times each work day).
