

What the World Will Look Like by 2050 - tokenadult
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1890927,00.html

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jbrun
Simply put, that is ridiculous. I find it remarkable to see apparently very
intelligent people predict insane xenophobic doomsday scenarios as the future.
Often, they seem to be reminiscing about a simpler past they were familiar
with and how we [the young] have shot it all to hell, and are thus on a path
towards self-destruction and reckoning.

~~~
electromagnetic
I love that they claim they're predicting things from the past, but actually
aren't. They claim the future will see a 'polycentric' (see: multipolarity;
they got the name wrong) world where we will be ruled by many powers instead
of one.

Aside from the fact this has rarely been seen in history, and only during
transitional periods (After WW2, briefly we had USA, USSR and the British
Empire as superpowers) when it has been seen. When we look back, with
hindsight it becomes clear that there is a direct line of superpowers back to
the dawn of civilization and, largely, one superpower passed off the power to
its successor. The example here would be that the British Empire, instead of
fighting to the death stepped aside for the USA. This has been played for
thousands of years, during the Classical period it was passed between Greece
and Rome, who was the super power. After the Roman Empire was defeated by the
Hunnic Empire (Atilla the Hun) the power moved so far to the east no one in
Europe had a clue, which led to the Dark Ages, because the people who had
spread their technology (the Romans) rarely taught the locals how to build it
themselves.

This meant that after the Roman Empire, and the fairly swift collapse of the
Hunnic Empire with the death of Atilla, Europe was left without a power and so
was the world. It was quite ironic, it would be like if the USSR had beat the
USA in 1990, and a year later still collapsed. The effect was profound,
especially moving into the medieval period, due to the fact that people relied
on these Empires to shift around technology and without them there was no one
big enough to move the information.

(Ed: This is also why when moving into the late Medieval Period and the
Colonial Era, we had multiple powers all handing the superpower status between
them as one got a clear advantage. In hindsight this largely centered between
England and France, a play reminiscent of how Greece and Rome passed the
superpower title between themselves many times during the classical period,
but at no point was there two true superpowers.)

I find that their predictions are based on personal opinions, and they choose
to use history to back themselves up whenever it's convenient, but in many of
the examples they wholly ignore it. There's no historical basis to assume
suicide bombings, it's an exceptionally rare development with the invention of
compact explosives and religious brainwashing. Why would a pirate perform a
suicide bombing, it's absurd they're in it for personal gain not religious
gain.

This article is very stupid merely for trying to predict the future. I'll
trust a Sci-Fi writer on the future before I trust an economist, if we could
trust economists to predict the future then we wouldn't be in the financial
crisis we are.

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rsheridan6
>The example here would be that the British Empire, instead of fighting to the
death stepped aside for the USA.

Uhh, no. There will always be a premiere power and the British Empire was it,
but they weren't head and shoulders above everybody else the way the US is
now, or Rome was in its day. Neither was any other power ever an undisputed
champion between Rome and the post Cold War US.

Edit: not in Western Europe, anyway. The Mongol Empire and the Caliphate were
supreme at certain times and places.

>After the Roman Empire was defeated by the Hunnic Empire

WTF? That never happened. The Romans defeated the Huns at Chalons and were
then conquered by Goths a few decades later.

~~~
electromagnetic
> WTF? That never happened. The Romans defeated the Huns at Chalons and were
> then conquered by Goths a few decades later.

We're discussing superpowers here, not military battles. The Hunnic Empire
overtook Rome in power and size long before Rome fell. However, after the
battle at Chalons the Roman army was fatally weakened, it didn't help that the
Vandals sacked Rome for 14 days only 2 years after the battle at Chalons.
Sucks to be Roman when coincidental invasions happen, I guess.

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tom_rath
I love these articles.

Ten years ago, the same dreck would claim 2010 would see us away on extended
vacation while WebVan and Pets.com delivered goodies to our internet-automated
homes. Of course, everything would be paid for by effortless automated day-
trading, with the Dow at 50,000 and markets headed higher due to Western
nations celebrating some multi-decade milestone for time without conflict.

If someone claims to have the future figured out, it's pretty safe to assume
you can ignore 'em.

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AndrewO
> As the cofounder and first president of the European Bank for Reconstruction
> and Development, Attali won fame for calling the U.S. financial collapse as
> early as 2006...

But somehow he managed to not predict Europe's own financial troubles. Yes,
quite the soothsaying there...

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ankeshk
I wish more people would read Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Just as we could not predict in 1968 what the world would look like in 2009 -
similarly we can't predict what the world will look like in 2050 today.

I've heard some crazy predictions... world will end in 2012 (when the Mayan
calendar ends)... USA will break down into 2-5 different countries and there
will be a civil war there... the arctic cap will melt submerging all the major
port cities: NY Tokyo Mumbai...

Not gonna happen!

~~~
randallsquared
Would you have predicted in 1975 that by 1995 there'd be no Soviet Union? Big
changes and breakups do happen; they're inevitable over long enough. I'll
agree, though, that prediction (especially of technology-affected things,
which is more and more of the world) is getting considerably harder, and that
_that_ trend, at least, will continue absent some other radical change like an
asteroid strike or a US police state.

~~~
tokenadult
_Would you have predicted in 1975 that by 1995 there'd be no Soviet Union?_

I know a man who is now a United States diplomat who predicted to me (when he
was still a student of Chinese) in 1984 that the Soviet Union would be around
well into the twenty-first century. Sometimes empires that have little press
freedom are especially hard to make predictions about.

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rjprins
The problem with prediction on this scale is that it's becomes a function of
chaotic effects. i.e., Some small unpredictable thing like an invention or
some trait of a president can have very profound effects over time akin to the
butterfly effect.

Even solid statistics will fail horribly over a longer time period.

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gaius
Why would a pirate blow themselves up? It makes no sense.

~~~
AndrewO
Because they're in the news now and Time has a pessimistic opinion of its
readers' attention spans.

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rsheridan6
This guy is kind of an over-the-top doomsayer, but I would note that he's also
a Jewish pied noir (French people born in Algeria) born during WWII, probably
regaled with stories about relatives back at the mainland who ended up in
concentration camps from an early age, and who would have been ethnically
cleansed out of Algiera as a young man if he hadn't left already. If you could
go back to the time of his birth (or a little before) and tell people what
actually happened, they'd probably think you were over the top too. I'm sure
this has influenced his way of thinking.

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Gibbon
In the Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer-Dixon, he covers the prognostications of
futurists and discovers that they are wildy wrong something like 91% of the
time.

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aoeu
To me the article reads like an extension of current popular news stories..
which don't all reflect reality.

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pj
I didn't see anything in here that was stricking or insightful. Pretty run of
the mill introspection will lead you to the conclusions in the article.

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edw519
Thank you for giving me something to think about instead of, "Was this last
request part of the origInal spec or not?"

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apstuff
I agree with the statement on water. Other than that, thanks, but I have to
get back to work.

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swombat
_In the belief that past experiences are indicative future events ..._

Epic mega-fail.

~~~
randallsquared
Well, leaving out "of" is hardly a mega-fail.

But maybe you meant that the meaning of the snippet, that experience and
evidence can guide us in what to expect for the future, is somehow profoundly
wrong?

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swombat
I did indeed mean the latter. Didn't even notice the missing "of".

For some things, past experience is of use. For guessing at the general trends
of history, past experience should, in fact, teach us that it's completely
useless. On a personal, immediate scale, it is useful to try and figure out
what's about to happen, but when it comes to large trends, there are too much
chaos and wild swings involved for past experience to be of any use.

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mrbgty
By 2015 we will have hoverboards

~~~
warfangle
But they still won't work on water. Unless you've got power...

