
The World in 2076 - fitzwatermellow
https://www.newscientist.com/round-up/world-2076
======
eliben
It's curious how these predictions always turn out to be based on the current
technology, pushed to its limits. Kinda like sci-fi from the 1950s predicts
advanced space travel but barely any computers in the early 21st century.

~~~
Cyph0n
I could have sworn that Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov both had computers in
their sci-fi universes, but now that I try to think about it, you're probably
right. The closest thing I can think of to a computer is HAL from 2001.

~~~
zardo
They had computers, but they usually remained gigantic expensive machines.
They could forsee supercomputing, but not personal computing.

~~~
Cyph0n
But you have to hand it to them, they and many of their contemporaries did an
amazing job building the tech for their futuristic worlds. You could read
Foundation or Childhood's End now and you probably wouldn't notice that they
were written in the 50s.

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bwindels
I feel it's unfortunate articles like these don't put more emphasis on climate
change, and instead still keep up the narrative that we will innovate
ourselves out of the problem. There is not reason to believe we will, and I
expect society as a whole to already be heavily impacted by climate change by
2076.

The more people are talking about the fact that human civilization won't
survive 4 degrees of warming in a 100 year time span (current projection by
2100), maybe the more society will see that although innovation is important,
it's even more important is that we all accept to give up things deemed
indispensable today.

Since that might not happen, 60 years time from now the future might look a
lot more dystopian than this article would suggest.

~~~
cowl
I feel it's unfortunate that comments like this continue to spread the naive
idea that anything but innovation will resolve the climate issue. Human nature
is what it is. There is plenty of historic evidence to believe that innovation
is our way out. Like we innovated ourselves out of material scarcity during
the industrial revolution. Like we innovated ourselves out of the coal
Industrial era using other carbon fuels. Like we have already started to
innovate ourselves out of the hydrocarbon era with other energetic sources
which by the way will need to be out-innovated again by our grandchildren
because they are not perfect too.

~~~
marssaxman
Innovation is not magic; it is the product of investment. The time to innovate
was 20 years ago; now it's effectively too late. The climate has already
changed and the rate of change is not slowing. We will "innovate", all right,
by necessity, and ride it out as best we can; but we can't innovate our way
back to the climate we had before.

~~~
cowl
the "too late" death bell has been ringing since antiquity.

------
hbt
The anti-innovation backlash is the most likely thing to happen.

Today, politicians are winning the populace by lamenting on unfair trade
deals, globalism and foreigners taking jobs. Those jobs are not coming back,
if they are, certainly not to humans.

We will see a growing class of people who are economically useless. (read
Professor Yuval Noah Harari new book
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_Tomorrow)
) And, no, the answer is not basic income. It's intelligence augmentation.

Intelligence is the only valuable currency nowadays and we are not acquiring
enough of it fast enough compared to the machines.

Our only tool for intelligence augmentation is still education. Not good
enough at all. It's already impossible to keep up; let alone learn something
from scratch at a late stage in life and be expected to contribute something
significant enough to derive long term economic advantage that can't be taken
by a machine or globalists.

I think all other issues will fix themselves or reach a natural equilibrium
(overpopulation, climate change etc.). But lack of intelligence is our doom.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The anti-innovation backlash is here.

Shiv Sena, the racist party of Maharashtra, has also been pushing luddism
mixed with racism. No Biharis should get an auto driver license, and they want
to stop technology (Uber, Ola) from allowing Biharis/etc to compete via other
means.

[http://www.afternoondc.in/city-news/shiv-sena-mns-raise-
red-...](http://www.afternoondc.in/city-news/shiv-sena-mns-raise-red-flag-
over-ola-uber-cabs/article_147645) [http://www.newsgram.com/maharashtra-only-
marathi-auto-driver...](http://www.newsgram.com/maharashtra-only-marathi-auto-
drivers-to-receive-permit/)

There were even riots in my town.
[http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/news/auto-
strike-...](http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/news/auto-strike-in-
pune-turns-violent-cabs-attacked/article9056540.ece)

Terrorists (or "illegal armed groups" to use TechCrunch's euphamism) in
Columbia and France have engaged in political violence to stop technology, and
the government has sided with them.

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/ubers-colombian-speed-
bump...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/ubers-colombian-speed-bumps/)
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3417215/Riot-
police-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3417215/Riot-police-
called-Paris-taxi-drivers-torch-car-tyres-block-traffic-anti-Uber-protest-
British-travellers-warned-expect-severe-delays-reaching-France.html)

See also SF/NY attacking AirBnB.

The anti-innovation backlash is a 2016 issue which we will hopefully resolve
before 2076.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I wouldn't exactly call Uber a piece of _innovation_. It's a phone app for
hiring taxi drivers from a pool of cheap labor. You want to claim innovation?
Let's find the people torching self-driving cars.

~~~
yummyfajitas
There is a world of difference between "hiring X from a pool of cheap labor"
and what Uber does. ODesk is hiring X from a cheap pool of labor. Uber is push
a button and you get where you are going.

Fundamentally, Uber is a Walrasian auctioneer that solves the socialist
calculation problem within the transportation sector.

I consider that to be innovation.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Go ahead and consider, but it's an _accounting_ innovation, not a
technological one.

------
drinchev
As older as I get ( 30 now ) I feel more and more the world is going to
dystopia, rather than utopia.

Instead of having a world-wide federation, we will most probably have a period
of dissonance around the nations where people will close more and more inside
their borders, until they feel they have the power of their lives in their
hands again.

I know you won't like it, but I will blame unregulated capitalism for this
one. Media is so sensational, because they know nobody will watch / read
anything that has a boring title. Social networks are becoming click-junky.
Advertisement is fraudulent on a lot of levels. Globalization, instead of
making poorest people not so poor has made rich people richer and so on. And
no wonder this tendency is going worse with such a high-priced education.

~~~
knz
I'm not sure capitalism deserves the entire blame - some of it is just human
nature (it's harder to care about something that happens in a distant location
or time).

The question is what can we do about it? How do we rebuild public trust in the
institutions (science and education) that should guide the country in the
right path even if the people are asleep at the wheel? Trust in experts is at
an all time low. Fact checking appears to have failed = "The fact checkers are
biased!". And people are retreating into their media bubbles.

I often see the "Pass it on" billboards ([http://www.values.com/inspirational-
sayings-billboards](http://www.values.com/inspirational-sayings-billboards)) -
perhaps we need something for science and education? ("Clean air regulations
save x lives a year in your community", "Every $1 spent on education saves $x
on welfare down the road". I hate billboards but at least they would break
through the media bubble many of us live in.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>The question is what can we do about it? How do we rebuild public trust in
the institutions (science and education) that should guide the country in the
right path even if the people are asleep at the wheel? Trust in experts is at
an all time low. Fact checking appears to have failed = "The fact checkers are
biased!". And people are retreating into their media bubbles.

Experts and institutions need to care about the people and stand up against
the malign parts of the capitalist establishment.

------
tsaprailis
Though it's always fun to read/watch such predictions, chaos theory suggests
we have absolutely no clue as to what the future will look like. The black
swan is a nice book explaining why predictions generally fail.

~~~
mason240
When I was a middle schooler in the 90s my grandpa would bring over stacks of
old Popular Mechanics magazines from the 50s-70s that were predicting what
life would be like in future decades.

I think it gave me a good perspective when reading these same kinds of
predictions made today. For the most part, they complely missed on the
existence, much less the impact, on things like social media.

It was easy to predict the physical nature of small, hand-held computing
devices, but their actual impact on how society functions was missed.

Even watching "realistic" contemporary sc-fi like The Expanse, they focus on
the physical aspect of how realistic space colonization would work with slow
space travel, but completely ignore the role of AI and drones. Will we even
need real people to live on an asteroid city, even if Mars is colonized?

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kbutler
How long until this feels dated?

Maybe I'm getting too jaded.

~~~
gagege
You aren't. Look at predictions about the future from 1916. They're the
definition of quaint.

~~~
unethical_ban
I've gotten the opposite impression. There was a set of drawings from 1910
predicting Paris in 2010. There were some obvious whiffs, but it broadly
predicted automation, remote audio/video communications, and other things.

~~~
mason240
Predicting advances in technology are easy. What's hard is predict is it's
impact on society.

How many people in 1950 would have guessed that social media would be a thing?

------
guard-of-terra
Right now I'm more concerned about society changes than technology changes.

Will we make democracy work for the average citizen? Will they have control of
their data? Do we get to preserve our culture and the rights deriving from it
given the continuing mass migration? Will we figure out basic income? If not,
what's the job all those people are going to hold? Will we stop concentrating
people in a few attractive megacities surrounded by population desert? Will we
stop preying on young like we do today? Perhaps when there'll be no young to
speak of? What'll happen to religions? To parenting?

~~~
mobiuscog
You'll have to decide what an 'average' citizen is, first.

~~~
mason240
I think the "average" person on earth is 35 year old Indian male.

------
lordnacho
Some of these are science predictions, and some are economics predictions.

Here's my take:

\- Replicator is unlikely. The machine that makes everything is like the drug
that cures everything and the man who knows everything. We already have
specialist replicators, specialist drugs, and specialist professors. For the
same reason, we won't get a generalist AI, just a bunch of very good
specialists.

\- James Webb will tell us within a few years whether there's lots of life or
none. Some realisation about just how likely life is will happen as we use the
JWT to scan various planets.

\- Similarly with superconductivity, we'll either find a way to do it, or a
reason why it can't be done.

\- Economics: the revolution here is how society changes when there's a bunch
of old people around, mostly healthy and mostly skilled. I suspect people will
want to be able to retrain, and so the old model where there was only time
(opportunity cost) to go to school when you were young will change. It
probably already has for some people.

\- Tech/Econ: society will have thought hard about giving everyone a decent
living while the tech people build just about everything.

------
EwanG
Link to a page about their special issue, though it does have a TL;DR of each
article. Seems that they are almost equally split between utopia (energy is
free and we can make everything) and dystopia (everyone is becoming anti-
science and oh about that nuclear war...)

------
EGreg
One of the best ways to get me to sign up for a magazine I've ever seen! Great
tantalizing content list all in one place followed by an article with a
paywall a bit beyond the fold.

------
guard-of-terra
This one is funny:

> The world in 2076: The anti-science backlash has begun

Science is like fashion. We (as a society) might be pro-science in 2025, anti-
science in 2040, pro-science again in 2055 and finally begin to recover from
anti-science in 2076. In other words, this one might change very very fast.
There might be much more options, like "everybody likes science but it grinds
to halt" and "science is loudly disapproved but a lot of fruitful private
research goes on"

~~~
goalieca
Countries that turn their back on science will fall behind.

~~~
acqq
Exactly. "What has happened in these nations to support these discoveries and
what has happened when they ended?"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3mtDC2fQo&t=22m47s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3mtDC2fQo&t=22m47s)

Around 10 minutes on that subject, that part of the presentation is called the
"Naming Rights."

~~~
guard-of-terra
That's an awesome video, I think you should post it separately.

~~~
acqq
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it. I'm not in an way involved with the videos, I
just remembered the talk and searched for it for the post. It's just a part of
the talks that happened in Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA, November 5-7, 2006.
There is more, but it can possibly disappear from the internet in this form if
it gets too much attention. Maybe it's better leaving them in the comments.

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kkotak
Every decade brings a technology movement that steers the path of humanity in
a certain direction. Nobody would've predicted the rise of social media (yes,
including Snapchat, Instagram, Pokemon Go)and how much of the humanity gets
consumed by it, thereby derailing us from the track we were on the decade
prior to it.

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komali2
Why did this website want to have notifications enabled for it?

------
amelius
No singularity?

~~~
ivraatiems
It's always 20 years away.

~~~
notahacker
And will be 20 years away in 2076, like it was in 1976 and (in its previous
incarnation as millenialist religious beliefs) 1876 and 76BC

At least human predictions about the future are relatively predictable.

