#futurology — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #futurology, aggregated by home.social.
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Dance your way to the stars? Maybe not *quite*, but the physics of maglev in vacuum tubes is shockingly forgiving. Footfall, captured, can provide enough energy to cross continents in mere hours...
Read more at my #blog: https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2026/04/12/the-silent-city-and-the-space-elevator/
This post's featured rendering is of a space elevator by Pat Rawlings for NASA.
#technology #science #sciencefiction #physics #scifi #futurism #futurology #future #spaceelevator #spaceflight #transportation #trains #maglev #vactrains
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Often we seek to "cheat" relativity, but if we instead follow time dilation to its logical conclusion, the picture is unexpectedly...divine?
Read more at my #blog: https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2026/04/01/by-the-light-of-genesis/
This post's featured image is Witold Pruszkowski's "Falling Star".
#relativity #science #physics #spaceflight #worldbuilding #sciencefiction #scifi #timedilation #technology #futurism #futurology #future
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Arthur C. Clarke predicts the future
https://www.bbc.com/videos/crezjvd55gro
#ArthurCClarke #prediction #futurology #technology #evolution
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Arthur C. Clarke predicts the future
https://www.bbc.com/videos/crezjvd55gro
#ArthurCClarke #prediction #futurology #technology #evolution
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Arthur C. Clarke predicts the future
https://www.bbc.com/videos/crezjvd55gro
#ArthurCClarke #prediction #futurology #technology #evolution
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Arthur C. Clarke predicts the future
https://www.bbc.com/videos/crezjvd55gro
#ArthurCClarke #prediction #futurology #technology #evolution
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Manic Street Preachers - Futurology - 2014
#Music #AlbumSuggestions #NowPlaying #NowListening
#ManicStreetPreachers #Futurology -
Hopefully #CristianoRonaldo gets 4 games for a blatant show of violence.
Imagine being on the Portugal squad on the World Cup, and lose that game and go home. That would be hilarious.
#Futurology #CR7 #Soccer #Futbol #Football #Portugal #Europe #UEFA
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Yesterday I shared a couple of charts from a speculative preprint.
Today I tracked down the DOI for the full paper:
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17228412
https://zenodo.org/records/17228412Curious what people think — serious thought experiment, or pseudoscience dressed up in academic style?
#Anthropology #AI #SpeculativeScience #Consciousness #Futurology
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"Personally, I’m in the lonely camp of being skeptical about many of AI 2027’s predictions, but appreciative of the format and conversation it sparked. When Jessica and Saffron compare AI 2027 to Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, I think: The Ministry for the Future was awesome, and I’m glad it exists! There are plenty of others writing policy reports and op-eds; we need new styles to shock people into thinking in new ways, and to consider a broader-than-usual range of possible outcomes (e.g. I loved this delightful AGI parable from Zhengdong Wang).
I also think it takes real guts to put out predictions that can be so concretely disproven: putting dates on predictions requires skin in the game. The authors will be clowned on when they inevitably get stuff wrong. That suggests the AI 2027 authors really believe in their scenario, rather than doing weird wish fulfillment as some critics say (like I doubt they want us all to die).
Therefore, I invited AI 2027 author Daniel Kokotajlo on the podcast to discuss his team’s approach to creating AI 2027, answers to common critiques of forecasting (e.g. is it just bad sci-fi), and why he thinks writing scenarios can improve your thinking."
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"At first, I liked AI 2027 anyway. The authors are trying to call attention to a real problem: we are not sufficiently prepared for what happens when and if “superhuman intelligence” arrives, especially not if it is misaligned with humans. And you could worry about that even if you don’t expect machines to go rogue, since bad human actors could certainly use further advances in intelligence to cause mayhem, if those advances are left unchecked. They want to slow down the race dynamic in AI, and I can well understand why.
And even though I highly doubt AGI will arrive in three years, I can’t absolutely promise you it won’t happen in 10. We certainly aren’t prepared now, and if we don’t get moving, we won’t be prepared in 10, either.
But here’s the thing - projects like AI 2027 are probably having a paradoxical effect. They are written with the intention of slowing down an arms race to build a technology that we can’t control, but what they are actually doing is speeding up that very arms race, in two different ways."
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-ai-2027-scenario-how-realistic
#AI #GenerativeAI #AGI #AI2027 #Futurism #Futurology #Forecasting
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Key principles on in-game virtual currencies in the EU
https://tiendil.org/en/posts/eu-key-principles-on-in-game-virtual-currencies
#ycombinator #development #futurology #game_design #gamedev #monetization #state #theory -
Applied Futurology
A Bit of Security for December 27, 2024
Here’s how to predict the future, and how to get better at it. Listen to this -
https://youtu.be/MfDsxOvcCug
#cybersecuritytips #futurology #scenaricplanning #strategy #planning #BitofSec -
#RachellPowell - #Philosophy of #Transhumanism & #ArtificialIntelligence (#AI)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeXQ4m9BigE
#PhilosophyOfTranshumanism #Humanity #Human #Humans #Life #HumanLife #Descendants #Future #Futurology #Futurism #Risk #Risks #Good #Longtermism #HumanSpecies #Biology #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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Dear Free Friends, :anarchy:
Just for now.
I will be singing with the Dawn Chorus. I will be voting for the Greens. I will be meditating with the Buddhas. I will be typing from LibreOffice.
For the future.
Dancing with robots. Synchronising with Alien AI. Creating Darker matter.
Being a portal through 11 or more dimensions.
Join me?
Completely broken? Piece of meat? X-X? Welcome.
You may be:
They. Other. Incomplete. Welcome.
It’s OK. KO. Okey-dokey. ✔️
Prise the prose. Hex the nasty. Stroke away.
Nurture Nature. Speak crazy. Raise the dying.
UR Ban. Wee R Hear. Yeah! Year. Yeah!
Thank you for having my short back and sides.
Whiskers and Tea party. Rebel Babylon.
Free all. Forever. This day is our UBI bread.
Did I make sense? Does anything?
Onward and upward, sideways and inward...
Lobster ❤️
#know #dawn #everyone #singinganddancing #buddhist #libreopensource #greenwitch #meditation #futurology #dimensional #X-X #wellbeing #welcometoot #prosepoetry #foreverstudent #UBI #lobsters -
@lenlayton @carnage4life
#Computing #AGI #Futurology(2/n)
...#SecondVariety 1) or #TheMatrix 2) type.
Besides, in contrast to the average #AI specialist that does not believe in an #AI induced extinction-level event for humanity (#ELE,) I believe that the chances are way higher than most researchers think (90% don't 3).)
As I have explained elsewhere 1), once an #AGI becomes self-aware, not being subject to #Asimov's/ #Kesarovski's #FiveLawsOfRobotics, it will..
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We’ve all been there. You are walking down the street, minding your own business, and a clinically cheerful chugger with a bolt-on grin moves to block your path asking for “just a moment of your time”. If you are lucky, your averted gaze and mumbled “no thank you” sees them seeking out their next victim. If you are unlucky, you end up taking away a leaflet, or worse.
I tend to be very good at fending off unwanted interaction. Usually, the wife is equally effective at walking on by without engaging. That is until last week. She claims she was distracted. Out walking with the baby in the pram, she claims she did not registered being accosted until it was too late.
Regardless of how it happened, in the end she left clutching a leaflet in hand. On this occasion, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had been the ones trying to get her attention.
The leaflet she came home with is titled How do you view the future? and includes a drawing of a young girl holding a handful of soil with a seedling growing out of it. Below the picture, the leaflet asks Will our world… stay the same? get worse? get better?
The pedant in me wants to point out it must be one of the three options, providing we can agree by what metric we are judging ‘better’, but I’m not here to just point out the obvious. Slightly less obvious, there is nothing on the front cover to identify where the leaflet came from, or the real purpose of handing them out.
Open up the leaflet and those questions are quickly answered. It is full of bible verses which are purported to answer the questions on the front cover. Finally, when you turn to the back of the leaflet, you discover the authors and are invited to find out more about the religion by requesting further information, or heaven offend (pun very much intended) a visit from church members.
I have spoken before about my lack of belief in any kind of deity. I certainly do not subscribe to any particular religion. When I first saw the leaflet on the kitchen counter and heard the story I was tempted to go through the details inside the leaflet and give my thoughts on why they are (probably) wrong. Having paused for a moment to think about it, I realise there are much more informed people out there who can critique the content.
I thought instead, I would tackle the question at the heart of the pamphlet. Set aside the religious elements for now. How do I view the future? Do I think it will get better, worse or stay the same?
I should make clear I am not looking to make specific or short-term predictions about the future. Invariably, they will be wrong. Just look at the likes of Back to the Future Part II predicting the world of 2015 back in 1989 (where is my hoverboard?). I’m also not going to be making really long term predictions. Ironically, the further we look into the future (and we’re talking millions and billions of years here) the better the predictions get. Scientists have a pretty good idea for example how our planet will meet its end, and roughly when. What I am aiming for is the sweet spot in between too soon and specific, and too far away and easy.
The planet
The leaflet the wife was given leant heavily on environmental imagery as part of its visual appeal, so let’s start with the planet, or more specifically the environment including the climate. How do I see the future for the only planet we call home?
In short, bad, really bad and then probably good.
In not quite as short, I’m sadly a realist when it comes to the environment. There are glimmers of hope for the natural world here and there with genuine positive change to lessen humanity’s impact upon it, but overall the current trend is business as usual. And by business as usual, I of course mean biodiversity loss, over-exploitation of limited resources and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The planet will get warmer, animals will go extinct, and everything including humans will suffer as a result.
The planet’s climate is already showing signs of instability, but as it gets worse, and particularly as sea levels rise displacing a lot of people, we are going to see a huge surge of climate refugees moving across the planet. I’m going to talk about politics below, but for this section it is enough to guess there will be conflict. If we are lucky, it will be no more than passionate debate and legal cases. If we are unlucky, well…
This is all a bit doom and gloomy, and unfortunately I think we have reached a point where it will be, at least temporarily. But there is hope. Because almost without exception, when humanity stops being entitled fools and gives nature the chance to regrow, it does. Countless examples exist of woodlands and meadows and lakes which have been left to their own devices after industrial processes have ceased, and they are beautiful landscapes (albeit not exactly how things would have appeared originally).
This will happen for the planet as a whole, and I can say this with confidence as two options will occur; either humanity will see the error of their ways and start to ease up on nature (dare I say work in harmony with it?), or option two humanity will die out because of our hubris and the planet will be left to heal and go on its merry way. Either option leads to a better, greener, healthier world. I just hope we go for option one to make sure our descendants are around to enjoy it.
Not the planet
I love the idea of space and space travel. As a child this would be Star Wars and Star Trek, as an adult the Foundation and Dune novels. If someone asks me what I have on my bucket list, I only half-jokingly say go into space. I would like to say here that I envisage an interplanetary future for humanity in the medium term, but more and more I think it is neither an option nor desirable. I’ve given my thoughts here and here about space exploration and stand by my conclusions (if anything I have become a more staunch ProGaian) so here I will stick to what I actually think will happen in space in the medium term.
In short, nothing much. There are those out there advocating for colonies on Mars and mining asteroids and the like by the middle of the century, but I have been persuaded this is something we neither should nor could achieve. I am currently reading A City on Mars, a fantastic book by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith which explores just this topic, and it is clear the odds of actually getting functioning colonies on other planets in even the next century or two are slim. As I have said in my posts linked above, I think we should keep exploring space, with bigger and bigger space telescopes and robotic missions across the solar system likely options, but short of occasional trips to the moon and possibly non-permanent trips to Mars, I do not envisage humanity reaching for the stars any time soon.
Politics, politics, politics
I have a post which I started several years ago titled Independence, Together. If you are frantically searching through my blog to give it a read you will not find it because I never actually finished it, and probably never will. In it, I wrote about my support of Scottish independence (which failed) and my opposition to Brexit (which did not, clearly political punditry is not in my future…), and attempted to square the circle of the seeming contradiction in those two points of view. This post here is not an attempt to complete that blog post, so you will just have to accept it was brilliantly argued and was persuasive…
Why I bring this up is I still feel the position I hold (despite short-term failures) is the future for the global politic sphere, namely a move towards greater localism and also a more connected supranational cooperative framework. Think globally, act locally is the political position I hold most dearly, and I think it is likely to be one humanity moves closer towards in the next couple of centuries.
This might sound utopian, and obviously I hope it will be, but both positions come with risks. The more fragmented political systems are, the greater the risk of local conflicts which can then escalate to bigger conflicts through the implementation of alliances, while equally the more monolithic a political system, the greater the risk the individual person is lost in it and suffers as a result. Both of these actions could happen as a result of local globalism. Like with the environment I will have to hope humanity picks the utopian option instead before it is too late.
It’s the economy stupid
When I was at school, I was taught there are three* broad levels to the economy. Primary economical activity is things like farming, fishing and mining, gathering stuff. Secondary activities include building and manufacturing and food production, making stuff. Tertiary economic activities are the provision of services like restaurants, healthcare and transport, selling stuff. The more advanced an economy becomes, the more it moves along the path from mostly primary to mostly tertiary activities. When crusty old politicians moan about a country not making things anymore, they are moaning about what is supposed to be a good thing and a sign of progress.
The general trend of economies moving from primary to tertiary has been going on for a couple of hundred years now, and I can see this starting to reverse in the next couple of hundred. No, I am not imagining we will all resort to subsistence farming as we abandon industrial processes, but rather as people become more and more concerned about the provenance of the stuff they are buying, the more people will shift into farming and the like to provide the higher quality products people want. Today we, often snidely, call these artisanal products, but I think this trend is something which will continue. Couple this with the general trend towards more vegetarians and vegans living on the planet, and particularly those who produce non-meat foods will have a bonanza.
For those in the secondary industry business, I can see this desire for higher quality affecting them too, particularly the right to repair movement. Mass producing cheap but easily breakable tat is going to become less and less acceptable (if it ever was), and people are going to demand higher quality products with the ability to be fixed or upgraded when they break or are worn out. In short, I see the current levels of consumerism damping down in the coming years, and for the planet (see above) it cannot come a moment too soon,
(*I think I would add two more levels** to this schema; quaternary activity where people with too much money trade that money with other people with too much money and then use it to buy tertiary businesses, hoarding stuff, and quinary activity where tech bros invent digital tech they think everyone will want a part of but in the end this becomes a badge of idiocy when the bubble bursts, imagining stuff.)
(**yes, I know additional levels of the economy already exist, shush…)
The end is science
As a lover of and applier of science, I could not finish a post about the future without considering some of the advances science may well make in the no too distant future (and contrary to some people’s views, even if science has an end point, I don’t think we are anywhere near there yet).
Understanding the mind and consciousness is the big question I would like to see answered. My personal expectation, they are both an emergent property, an inevitable result of such a complex system as the brain, but what that means at a fundamental level would be fantastic to see elucidated.
After this, abiogenesis, or the origins of life, would be an excellent second prize. I am resigned to the fact we will probably never conclusively demonstrate how life on Earth began, but a plausible theoretical model would be the next best thing.
The third big discovery I see us making in the medium term is related to the space bit above, extraterrestrial life. I’m not expecting little green men and flying saucers, but with the likes of JWST and future telescope projects, I think the idea of confirming biosignatures on other planets is just a matter of time.
And there we have it, a blog post about the future which manages to avoid mentioning AI (wait a minute… dammit!).
OK, OK, I’ll talk about it, but only for one paragraph***. Do we have AI at the moment, no. Not by any stretch of the imagination (and don’t come at me with large language models. Excessively wasteful, inaccurate algorithms don’t count). But will we reach a point when we have proper AI, often called artificial general intelligence? Also no. The reason I see it like this is partly because of my comments above on emergent properties and consciousness. The brain is really complicated, and while computers can be made exceptionally complex, they are essentially binary decision makers, yes or no, on or off. The ion channels at the heart of neuronal function can be considered binary, open or closed, but how they get to that state can include inputs which can fully open or close them, partially open or close them, block them or otherwise do the exact opposite action to that which you would imagine. The brain is not a binary thinking machine, it is far more complicated than that, so expecting we can ever reach a point where we will create an artificial general intelligence, at least in the medium term, seems too much of a stretch for me.
(*** yes I know it’s a long one, but it’s just the one paragraph so it counts!)
To the future and beyond
So there you have it. How do I see the future? Fair to say a mixed bag. From the moment I publish this blog I am going to leave it up as is without amendments, typos and all. Assuming Twaddle lasts a few hundred years (…) it will be interesting to see how close I get.
What do you think about my predictions? Do you have any ideas of your own about the future? Drop them below in the comments and let’s see who is closer to the mark.
https://twaddle.blog/2024/04/01/care-to-take-a-leaflet/
#AI #Future #Futurology #Idealist #Politics #Positivity #Pragmatist #Predictions #Prophecy #Religion #Science #Space #TheEconomy #TheEnvironment
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We’ve all been there. You are walking down the street, minding your own business, and a clinically cheerful chugger with a bolt-on grin moves to block your path asking for “just a moment of your time”. If you are lucky, your averted gaze and mumbled “no thank you” sees them seeking out their next victim. If you are unlucky, you end up taking away a leaflet, or worse.
I tend to be very good at fending off unwanted interaction. Usually, the wife is equally effective at walking on by without engaging. That is until last week. She claims she was distracted. Out walking with the baby in the pram, she claims she did not registered being accosted until it was too late.
Regardless of how it happened, in the end she left clutching a leaflet in hand. On this occasion, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had been the ones trying to get her attention.
The leaflet she came home with is titled How do you view the future? and includes a drawing of a young girl holding a handful of soil with a seedling growing out of it. Below the picture, the leaflet asks Will our world… stay the same? get worse? get better?
The pedant in me wants to point out it must be one of the three options, providing we can agree by what metric we are judging ‘better’, but I’m not here to just point out the obvious. Slightly less obvious, there is nothing on the front cover to identify where the leaflet came from, or the real purpose of handing them out.
Open up the leaflet and those questions are quickly answered. It is full of bible verses which are purported to answer the questions on the front cover. Finally, when you turn to the back of the leaflet, you discover the authors and are invited to find out more about the religion by requesting further information, or heaven offend (pun very much intended) a visit from church members.
I have spoken before about my lack of belief in any kind of deity. I certainly do not subscribe to any particular religion. When I first saw the leaflet on the kitchen counter and heard the story I was tempted to go through the details inside the leaflet and give my thoughts on why they are (probably) wrong. Having paused for a moment to think about it, I realise there are much more informed people out there who can critique the content.
I thought instead, I would tackle the question at the heart of the pamphlet. Set aside the religious elements for now. How do I view the future? Do I think it will get better, worse or stay the same?
I should make clear I am not looking to make specific or short-term predictions about the future. Invariably, they will be wrong. Just look at the likes of Back to the Future Part II predicting the world of 2015 back in 1989 (where is my hoverboard?). I’m also not going to be making really long term predictions. Ironically, the further we look into the future (and we’re talking millions and billions of years here) the better the predictions get. Scientists have a pretty good idea for example how our planet will meet its end, and roughly when. What I am aiming for is the sweet spot in between too soon and specific, and too far away and easy.
The planet
The leaflet the wife was given leant heavily on environmental imagery as part of its visual appeal, so let’s start with the planet, or more specifically the environment including the climate. How do I see the future for the only planet we call home?
In short, bad, really bad and then probably good.
In not quite as short, I’m sadly a realist when it comes to the environment. There are glimmers of hope for the natural world here and there with genuine positive change to lessen humanity’s impact upon it, but overall the current trend is business as usual. And by business as usual, I of course mean biodiversity loss, over-exploitation of limited resources and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The planet will get warmer, animals will go extinct, and everything including humans will suffer as a result.
The planet’s climate is already showing signs of instability, but as it gets worse, and particularly as sea levels rise displacing a lot of people, we are going to see a huge surge of climate refugees moving across the planet. I’m going to talk about politics below, but for this section it is enough to guess there will be conflict. If we are lucky, it will be no more than passionate debate and legal cases. If we are unlucky, well…
This is all a bit doom and gloomy, and unfortunately I think we have reached a point where it will be, at least temporarily. But there is hope. Because almost without exception, when humanity stops being entitled fools and gives nature the chance to regrow, it does. Countless examples exist of woodlands and meadows and lakes which have been left to their own devices after industrial processes have ceased, and they are beautiful landscapes (albeit not exactly how things would have appeared originally).
This will happen for the planet as a whole, and I can say this with confidence as two options will occur; either humanity will see the error of their ways and start to ease up on nature (dare I say work in harmony with it?), or option two humanity will die out because of our hubris and the planet will be left to heal and go on its merry way. Either option leads to a better, greener, healthier world. I just hope we go for option one to make sure our descendants are around to enjoy it.
Not the planet
I love the idea of space and space travel. As a child this would be Star Wars and Star Trek, as an adult the Foundation and Dune novels. If someone asks me what I have on my bucket list, I only half-jokingly say go into space. I would like to say here that I envisage an interplanetary future for humanity in the medium term, but more and more I think it is neither an option nor desirable. I’ve given my thoughts here and here about space exploration and stand by my conclusions (if anything I have become a more staunch ProGaian) so here I will stick to what I actually think will happen in space in the medium term.
In short, nothing much. There are those out there advocating for colonies on Mars and mining asteroids and the like by the middle of the century, but I have been persuaded this is something we neither should nor could achieve. I am currently reading A City on Mars, a fantastic book by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith which explores just this topic, and it is clear the odds of actually getting functioning colonies on other planets in even the next century or two are slim. As I have said in my posts linked above, I think we should keep exploring space, with bigger and bigger space telescopes and robotic missions across the solar system likely options, but short of occasional trips to the moon and possibly non-permanent trips to Mars, I do not envisage humanity reaching for the stars any time soon.
Politics, politics, politics
I have a post which I started several years ago titled Independence, Together. If you are frantically searching through my blog to give it a read you will not find it because I never actually finished it, and probably never will. In it, I wrote about my support of Scottish independence (which failed) and my opposition to Brexit (which did not, clearly political punditry is not in my future…), and attempted to square the circle of the seeming contradiction in those two points of view. This post here is not an attempt to complete that blog post, so you will just have to accept it was brilliantly argued and was persuasive…
Why I bring this up is I still feel the position I hold (despite short-term failures) is the future for the global politic sphere, namely a move towards greater localism and also a more connected supranational cooperative framework. Think globally, act locally is the political position I hold most dearly, and I think it is likely to be one humanity moves closer towards in the next couple of centuries.
This might sound utopian, and obviously I hope it will be, but both positions come with risks. The more fragmented political systems are, the greater the risk of local conflicts which can then escalate to bigger conflicts through the implementation of alliances, while equally the more monolithic a political system, the greater the risk the individual person is lost in it and suffers as a result. Both of these actions could happen as a result of local globalism. Like with the environment I will have to hope humanity picks the utopian option instead before it is too late.
It’s the economy stupid
When I was at school, I was taught there are three* broad levels to the economy. Primary economical activity is things like farming, fishing and mining, gathering stuff. Secondary activities include building and manufacturing and food production, making stuff. Tertiary economic activities are the provision of services like restaurants, healthcare and transport, selling stuff. The more advanced an economy becomes, the more it moves along the path from mostly primary to mostly tertiary activities. When crusty old politicians moan about a country not making things anymore, they are moaning about what is supposed to be a good thing and a sign of progress.
The general trend of economies moving from primary to tertiary has been going on for a couple of hundred years now, and I can see this starting to reverse in the next couple of hundred. No, I am not imagining we will all resort to subsistence farming as we abandon industrial processes, but rather as people become more and more concerned about the provenance of the stuff they are buying, the more people will shift into farming and the like to provide the higher quality products people want. Today we, often snidely, call these artisanal products, but I think this trend is something which will continue. Couple this with the general trend towards more vegetarians and vegans living on the planet, and particularly those who produce non-meat foods will have a bonanza.
For those in the secondary industry business, I can see this desire for higher quality affecting them too, particularly the right to repair movement. Mass producing cheap but easily breakable tat is going to become less and less acceptable (if it ever was), and people are going to demand higher quality products with the ability to be fixed or upgraded when they break or are worn out. In short, I see the current levels of consumerism damping down in the coming years, and for the planet (see above) it cannot come a moment too soon,
(*I think I would add two more levels** to this schema; quaternary activity where people with too much money trade that money with other people with too much money and then use it to buy tertiary businesses, hoarding stuff, and quinary activity where tech bros invent digital tech they think everyone will want a part of but in the end this becomes a badge of idiocy when the bubble bursts, imagining stuff.)
(**yes, I know additional levels of the economy already exist, shush…)
The end is science
As a lover of and applier of science, I could not finish a post about the future without considering some of the advances science may well make in the no too distant future (and contrary to some people’s views, even if science has an end point, I don’t think we are anywhere near there yet).
Understanding the mind and consciousness is the big question I would like to see answered. My personal expectation, they are both an emergent property, an inevitable result of such a complex system as the brain, but what that means at a fundamental level would be fantastic to see elucidated.
After this, abiogenesis, or the origins of life, would be an excellent second prize. I am resigned to the fact we will probably never conclusively demonstrate how life on Earth began, but a plausible theoretical model would be the next best thing.
The third big discovery I see us making in the medium term is related to the space bit above, extraterrestrial life. I’m not expecting little green men and flying saucers, but with the likes of JWST and future telescope projects, I think the idea of confirming biosignatures on other planets is just a matter of time.
And there we have it, a blog post about the future which manages to avoid mentioning AI (wait a minute… dammit!).
OK, OK, I’ll talk about it, but only for one paragraph***. Do we have AI at the moment, no. Not by any stretch of the imagination (and don’t come at me with large language models. Excessively wasteful, inaccurate algorithms don’t count). But will we reach a point when we have proper AI, often called artificial general intelligence? Also no. The reason I see it like this is partly because of my comments above on emergent properties and consciousness. The brain is really complicated, and while computers can be made exceptionally complex, they are essentially binary decision makers, yes or no, on or off. The ion channels at the heart of neuronal function can be considered binary, open or closed, but how they get to that state can include inputs which can fully open or close them, partially open or close them, block them or otherwise do the exact opposite action to that which you would imagine. The brain is not a binary thinking machine, it is far more complicated than that, so expecting we can ever reach a point where we will create an artificial general intelligence, at least in the medium term, seems too much of a stretch for me.
(*** yes I know it’s a long one, but it’s just the one paragraph so it counts!)
To the future and beyond
So there you have it. How do I see the future? Fair to say a mixed bag. From the moment I publish this blog I am going to leave it up as is without amendments, typos and all. Assuming Twaddle lasts a few hundred years (…) it will be interesting to see how close I get.
What do you think about my predictions? Do you have any ideas of your own about the future? Drop them below in the comments and let’s see who is closer to the mark.
https://twaddle.blog/2024/04/01/care-to-take-a-leaflet/
#AI #Future #Futurology #Idealist #Politics #Positivity #Pragmatist #Predictions #Prophecy #Religion #Science #Space #TheEconomy #TheEnvironment
-
We’ve all been there. You are walking down the street, minding your own business, and a clinically cheerful chugger with a bolt-on grin moves to block your path asking for “just a moment of your time”. If you are lucky, your averted gaze and mumbled “no thank you” sees them seeking out their next victim. If you are unlucky, you end up taking away a leaflet, or worse.
I tend to be very good at fending off unwanted interaction. Usually, the wife is equally effective at walking on by without engaging. That is until last week. She claims she was distracted. Out walking with the baby in the pram, she claims she did not registered being accosted until it was too late.
Regardless of how it happened, in the end she left clutching a leaflet in hand. On this occasion, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had been the ones trying to get her attention.
The leaflet she came home with is titled How do you view the future? and includes a drawing of a young girl holding a handful of soil with a seedling growing out of it. Below the picture, the leaflet asks Will our world… stay the same? get worse? get better?
The pedant in me wants to point out it must be one of the three options, providing we can agree by what metric we are judging ‘better’, but I’m not here to just point out the obvious. Slightly less obvious, there is nothing on the front cover to identify where the leaflet came from, or the real purpose of handing them out.
Open up the leaflet and those questions are quickly answered. It is full of bible verses which are purported to answer the questions on the front cover. Finally, when you turn to the back of the leaflet, you discover the authors and are invited to find out more about the religion by requesting further information, or heaven offend (pun very much intended) a visit from church members.
I have spoken before about my lack of belief in any kind of deity. I certainly do not subscribe to any particular religion. When I first saw the leaflet on the kitchen counter and heard the story I was tempted to go through the details inside the leaflet and give my thoughts on why they are (probably) wrong. Having paused for a moment to think about it, I realise there are much more informed people out there who can critique the content.
I thought instead, I would tackle the question at the heart of the pamphlet. Set aside the religious elements for now. How do I view the future? Do I think it will get better, worse or stay the same?
I should make clear I am not looking to make specific or short-term predictions about the future. Invariably, they will be wrong. Just look at the likes of Back to the Future Part II predicting the world of 2015 back in 1989 (where is my hoverboard?). I’m also not going to be making really long term predictions. Ironically, the further we look into the future (and we’re talking millions and billions of years here) the better the predictions get. Scientists have a pretty good idea for example how our planet will meet its end, and roughly when. What I am aiming for is the sweet spot in between too soon and specific, and too far away and easy.
The planet
The leaflet the wife was given leant heavily on environmental imagery as part of its visual appeal, so let’s start with the planet, or more specifically the environment including the climate. How do I see the future for the only planet we call home?
In short, bad, really bad and then probably good.
In not quite as short, I’m sadly a realist when it comes to the environment. There are glimmers of hope for the natural world here and there with genuine positive change to lessen humanity’s impact upon it, but overall the current trend is business as usual. And by business as usual, I of course mean biodiversity loss, over-exploitation of limited resources and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The planet will get warmer, animals will go extinct, and everything including humans will suffer as a result.
The planet’s climate is already showing signs of instability, but as it gets worse, and particularly as sea levels rise displacing a lot of people, we are going to see a huge surge of climate refugees moving across the planet. I’m going to talk about politics below, but for this section it is enough to guess there will be conflict. If we are lucky, it will be no more than passionate debate and legal cases. If we are unlucky, well…
This is all a bit doom and gloomy, and unfortunately I think we have reached a point where it will be, at least temporarily. But there is hope. Because almost without exception, when humanity stops being entitled fools and gives nature the chance to regrow, it does. Countless examples exist of woodlands and meadows and lakes which have been left to their own devices after industrial processes have ceased, and they are beautiful landscapes (albeit not exactly how things would have appeared originally).
This will happen for the planet as a whole, and I can say this with confidence as two options will occur; either humanity will see the error of their ways and start to ease up on nature (dare I say work in harmony with it?), or option two humanity will die out because of our hubris and the planet will be left to heal and go on its merry way. Either option leads to a better, greener, healthier world. I just hope we go for option one to make sure our descendants are around to enjoy it.
Not the planet
I love the idea of space and space travel. As a child this would be Star Wars and Star Trek, as an adult the Foundation and Dune novels. If someone asks me what I have on my bucket list, I only half-jokingly say go into space. I would like to say here that I envisage an interplanetary future for humanity in the medium term, but more and more I think it is neither an option nor desirable. I’ve given my thoughts here and here about space exploration and stand by my conclusions (if anything I have become a more staunch ProGaian) so here I will stick to what I actually think will happen in space in the medium term.
In short, nothing much. There are those out there advocating for colonies on Mars and mining asteroids and the like by the middle of the century, but I have been persuaded this is something we neither should nor could achieve. I am currently reading A City on Mars, a fantastic book by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith which explores just this topic, and it is clear the odds of actually getting functioning colonies on other planets in even the next century or two are slim. As I have said in my posts linked above, I think we should keep exploring space, with bigger and bigger space telescopes and robotic missions across the solar system likely options, but short of occasional trips to the moon and possibly non-permanent trips to Mars, I do not envisage humanity reaching for the stars any time soon.
Politics, politics, politics
I have a post which I started several years ago titled Independence, Together. If you are frantically searching through my blog to give it a read you will not find it because I never actually finished it, and probably never will. In it, I wrote about my support of Scottish independence (which failed) and my opposition to Brexit (which did not, clearly political punditry is not in my future…), and attempted to square the circle of the seeming contradiction in those two points of view. This post here is not an attempt to complete that blog post, so you will just have to accept it was brilliantly argued and was persuasive…
Why I bring this up is I still feel the position I hold (despite short-term failures) is the future for the global politic sphere, namely a move towards greater localism and also a more connected supranational cooperative framework. Think globally, act locally is the political position I hold most dearly, and I think it is likely to be one humanity moves closer towards in the next couple of centuries.
This might sound utopian, and obviously I hope it will be, but both positions come with risks. The more fragmented political systems are, the greater the risk of local conflicts which can then escalate to bigger conflicts through the implementation of alliances, while equally the more monolithic a political system, the greater the risk the individual person is lost in it and suffers as a result. Both of these actions could happen as a result of local globalism. Like with the environment I will have to hope humanity picks the utopian option instead before it is too late.
It’s the economy stupid
When I was at school, I was taught there are three* broad levels to the economy. Primary economical activity is things like farming, fishing and mining, gathering stuff. Secondary activities include building and manufacturing and food production, making stuff. Tertiary economic activities are the provision of services like restaurants, healthcare and transport, selling stuff. The more advanced an economy becomes, the more it moves along the path from mostly primary to mostly tertiary activities. When crusty old politicians moan about a country not making things anymore, they are moaning about what is supposed to be a good thing and a sign of progress.
The general trend of economies moving from primary to tertiary has been going on for a couple of hundred years now, and I can see this starting to reverse in the next couple of hundred. No, I am not imagining we will all resort to subsistence farming as we abandon industrial processes, but rather as people become more and more concerned about the provenance of the stuff they are buying, the more people will shift into farming and the like to provide the higher quality products people want. Today we, often snidely, call these artisanal products, but I think this trend is something which will continue. Couple this with the general trend towards more vegetarians and vegans living on the planet, and particularly those who produce non-meat foods will have a bonanza.
For those in the secondary industry business, I can see this desire for higher quality affecting them too, particularly the right to repair movement. Mass producing cheap but easily breakable tat is going to become less and less acceptable (if it ever was), and people are going to demand higher quality products with the ability to be fixed or upgraded when they break or are worn out. In short, I see the current levels of consumerism damping down in the coming years, and for the planet (see above) it cannot come a moment too soon,
(*I think I would add two more levels** to this schema; quaternary activity where people with too much money trade that money with other people with too much money and then use it to buy tertiary businesses, hoarding stuff, and quinary activity where tech bros invent digital tech they think everyone will want a part of but in the end this becomes a badge of idiocy when the bubble bursts, imagining stuff.)
(**yes, I know additional levels of the economy already exist, shush…)
The end is science
As a lover of and applier of science, I could not finish a post about the future without considering some of the advances science may well make in the no too distant future (and contrary to some people’s views, even if science has an end point, I don’t think we are anywhere near there yet).
Understanding the mind and consciousness is the big question I would like to see answered. My personal expectation, they are both an emergent property, an inevitable result of such a complex system as the brain, but what that means at a fundamental level would be fantastic to see elucidated.
After this, abiogenesis, or the origins of life, would be an excellent second prize. I am resigned to the fact we will probably never conclusively demonstrate how life on Earth began, but a plausible theoretical model would be the next best thing.
The third big discovery I see us making in the medium term is related to the space bit above, extraterrestrial life. I’m not expecting little green men and flying saucers, but with the likes of JWST and future telescope projects, I think the idea of confirming biosignatures on other planets is just a matter of time.
And there we have it, a blog post about the future which manages to avoid mentioning AI (wait a minute… dammit!).
OK, OK, I’ll talk about it, but only for one paragraph***. Do we have AI at the moment, no. Not by any stretch of the imagination (and don’t come at me with large language models. Excessively wasteful, inaccurate algorithms don’t count). But will we reach a point when we have proper AI, often called artificial general intelligence? Also no. The reason I see it like this is partly because of my comments above on emergent properties and consciousness. The brain is really complicated, and while computers can be made exceptionally complex, they are essentially binary decision makers, yes or no, on or off. The ion channels at the heart of neuronal function can be considered binary, open or closed, but how they get to that state can include inputs which can fully open or close them, partially open or close them, block them or otherwise do the exact opposite action to that which you would imagine. The brain is not a binary thinking machine, it is far more complicated than that, so expecting we can ever reach a point where we will create an artificial general intelligence, at least in the medium term, seems too much of a stretch for me.
(*** yes I know it’s a long one, but it’s just the one paragraph so it counts!)
To the future and beyond
So there you have it. How do I see the future? Fair to say a mixed bag. From the moment I publish this blog I am going to leave it up as is without amendments, typos and all. Assuming Twaddle lasts a few hundred years (…) it will be interesting to see how close I get.
What do you think about my predictions? Do you have any ideas of your own about the future? Drop them below in the comments and let’s see who is closer to the mark.
https://twaddle.blog/2024/04/01/care-to-take-a-leaflet/
#AI #Future #Futurology #Idealist #Politics #Positivity #Pragmatist #Predictions #Prophecy #Religion #Science #Space #TheEconomy #TheEnvironment
-
We’ve all been there. You are walking down the street, minding your own business, and a clinically cheerful chugger with a bolt-on grin moves to block your path asking for “just a moment of your time”. If you are lucky, your averted gaze and mumbled “no thank you” sees them seeking out their next victim. If you are unlucky, you end up taking away a leaflet, or worse.
I tend to be very good at fending off unwanted interaction. Usually, the wife is equally effective at walking on by without engaging. That is until last week. She claims she was distracted. Out walking with the baby in the pram, she claims she did not registered being accosted until it was too late.
Regardless of how it happened, in the end she left clutching a leaflet in hand. On this occasion, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had been the ones trying to get her attention.
The leaflet she came home with is titled How do you view the future? and includes a drawing of a young girl holding a handful of soil with a seedling growing out of it. Below the picture, the leaflet asks Will our world… stay the same? get worse? get better?
The pedant in me wants to point out it must be one of the three options, providing we can agree by what metric we are judging ‘better’, but I’m not here to just point out the obvious. Slightly less obvious, there is nothing on the front cover to identify where the leaflet came from, or the real purpose of handing them out.
Open up the leaflet and those questions are quickly answered. It is full of bible verses which are purported to answer the questions on the front cover. Finally, when you turn to the back of the leaflet, you discover the authors and are invited to find out more about the religion by requesting further information, or heaven offend (pun very much intended) a visit from church members.
I have spoken before about my lack of belief in any kind of deity. I certainly do not subscribe to any particular religion. When I first saw the leaflet on the kitchen counter and heard the story I was tempted to go through the details inside the leaflet and give my thoughts on why they are (probably) wrong. Having paused for a moment to think about it, I realise there are much more informed people out there who can critique the content.
I thought instead, I would tackle the question at the heart of the pamphlet. Set aside the religious elements for now. How do I view the future? Do I think it will get better, worse or stay the same?
I should make clear I am not looking to make specific or short-term predictions about the future. Invariably, they will be wrong. Just look at the likes of Back to the Future Part II predicting the world of 2015 back in 1989 (where is my hoverboard?). I’m also not going to be making really long term predictions. Ironically, the further we look into the future (and we’re talking millions and billions of years here) the better the predictions get. Scientists have a pretty good idea for example how our planet will meet its end, and roughly when. What I am aiming for is the sweet spot in between too soon and specific, and too far away and easy.
The planet
The leaflet the wife was given leant heavily on environmental imagery as part of its visual appeal, so let’s start with the planet, or more specifically the environment including the climate. How do I see the future for the only planet we call home?
In short, bad, really bad and then probably good.
In not quite as short, I’m sadly a realist when it comes to the environment. There are glimmers of hope for the natural world here and there with genuine positive change to lessen humanity’s impact upon it, but overall the current trend is business as usual. And by business as usual, I of course mean biodiversity loss, over-exploitation of limited resources and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The planet will get warmer, animals will go extinct, and everything including humans will suffer as a result.
The planet’s climate is already showing signs of instability, but as it gets worse, and particularly as sea levels rise displacing a lot of people, we are going to see a huge surge of climate refugees moving across the planet. I’m going to talk about politics below, but for this section it is enough to guess there will be conflict. If we are lucky, it will be no more than passionate debate and legal cases. If we are unlucky, well…
This is all a bit doom and gloomy, and unfortunately I think we have reached a point where it will be, at least temporarily. But there is hope. Because almost without exception, when humanity stops being entitled fools and gives nature the chance to regrow, it does. Countless examples exist of woodlands and meadows and lakes which have been left to their own devices after industrial processes have ceased, and they are beautiful landscapes (albeit not exactly how things would have appeared originally).
This will happen for the planet as a whole, and I can say this with confidence as two options will occur; either humanity will see the error of their ways and start to ease up on nature (dare I say work in harmony with it?), or option two humanity will die out because of our hubris and the planet will be left to heal and go on its merry way. Either option leads to a better, greener, healthier world. I just hope we go for option one to make sure our descendants are around to enjoy it.
Not the planet
I love the idea of space and space travel. As a child this would be Star Wars and Star Trek, as an adult the Foundation and Dune novels. If someone asks me what I have on my bucket list, I only half-jokingly say go into space. I would like to say here that I envisage an interplanetary future for humanity in the medium term, but more and more I think it is neither an option nor desirable. I’ve given my thoughts here and here about space exploration and stand by my conclusions (if anything I have become a more staunch ProGaian) so here I will stick to what I actually think will happen in space in the medium term.
In short, nothing much. There are those out there advocating for colonies on Mars and mining asteroids and the like by the middle of the century, but I have been persuaded this is something we neither should nor could achieve. I am currently reading A City on Mars, a fantastic book by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith which explores just this topic, and it is clear the odds of actually getting functioning colonies on other planets in even the next century or two are slim. As I have said in my posts linked above, I think we should keep exploring space, with bigger and bigger space telescopes and robotic missions across the solar system likely options, but short of occasional trips to the moon and possibly non-permanent trips to Mars, I do not envisage humanity reaching for the stars any time soon.
Politics, politics, politics
I have a post which I started several years ago titled Independence, Together. If you are frantically searching through my blog to give it a read you will not find it because I never actually finished it, and probably never will. In it, I wrote about my support of Scottish independence (which failed) and my opposition to Brexit (which did not, clearly political punditry is not in my future…), and attempted to square the circle of the seeming contradiction in those two points of view. This post here is not an attempt to complete that blog post, so you will just have to accept it was brilliantly argued and was persuasive…
Why I bring this up is I still feel the position I hold (despite short-term failures) is the future for the global politic sphere, namely a move towards greater localism and also a more connected supranational cooperative framework. Think globally, act locally is the political position I hold most dearly, and I think it is likely to be one humanity moves closer towards in the next couple of centuries.
This might sound utopian, and obviously I hope it will be, but both positions come with risks. The more fragmented political systems are, the greater the risk of local conflicts which can then escalate to bigger conflicts through the implementation of alliances, while equally the more monolithic a political system, the greater the risk the individual person is lost in it and suffers as a result. Both of these actions could happen as a result of local globalism. Like with the environment I will have to hope humanity picks the utopian option instead before it is too late.
It’s the economy stupid
When I was at school, I was taught there are three* broad levels to the economy. Primary economical activity is things like farming, fishing and mining, gathering stuff. Secondary activities include building and manufacturing and food production, making stuff. Tertiary economic activities are the provision of services like restaurants, healthcare and transport, selling stuff. The more advanced an economy becomes, the more it moves along the path from mostly primary to mostly tertiary activities. When crusty old politicians moan about a country not making things anymore, they are moaning about what is supposed to be a good thing and a sign of progress.
The general trend of economies moving from primary to tertiary has been going on for a couple of hundred years now, and I can see this starting to reverse in the next couple of hundred. No, I am not imagining we will all resort to subsistence farming as we abandon industrial processes, but rather as people become more and more concerned about the provenance of the stuff they are buying, the more people will shift into farming and the like to provide the higher quality products people want. Today we, often snidely, call these artisanal products, but I think this trend is something which will continue. Couple this with the general trend towards more vegetarians and vegans living on the planet, and particularly those who produce non-meat foods will have a bonanza.
For those in the secondary industry business, I can see this desire for higher quality affecting them too, particularly the right to repair movement. Mass producing cheap but easily breakable tat is going to become less and less acceptable (if it ever was), and people are going to demand higher quality products with the ability to be fixed or upgraded when they break or are worn out. In short, I see the current levels of consumerism damping down in the coming years, and for the planet (see above) it cannot come a moment too soon,
(*I think I would add two more levels** to this schema; quaternary activity where people with too much money trade that money with other people with too much money and then use it to buy tertiary businesses, hoarding stuff, and quinary activity where tech bros invent digital tech they think everyone will want a part of but in the end this becomes a badge of idiocy when the bubble bursts, imagining stuff.)
(**yes, I know additional levels of the economy already exist, shush…)
The end is science
As a lover of and applier of science, I could not finish a post about the future without considering some of the advances science may well make in the no too distant future (and contrary to some people’s views, even if science has an end point, I don’t think we are anywhere near there yet).
Understanding the mind and consciousness is the big question I would like to see answered. My personal expectation, they are both an emergent property, an inevitable result of such a complex system as the brain, but what that means at a fundamental level would be fantastic to see elucidated.
After this, abiogenesis, or the origins of life, would be an excellent second prize. I am resigned to the fact we will probably never conclusively demonstrate how life on Earth began, but a plausible theoretical model would be the next best thing.
The third big discovery I see us making in the medium term is related to the space bit above, extraterrestrial life. I’m not expecting little green men and flying saucers, but with the likes of JWST and future telescope projects, I think the idea of confirming biosignatures on other planets is just a matter of time.
And there we have it, a blog post about the future which manages to avoid mentioning AI (wait a minute… dammit!).
OK, OK, I’ll talk about it, but only for one paragraph***. Do we have AI at the moment, no. Not by any stretch of the imagination (and don’t come at me with large language models. Excessively wasteful, inaccurate algorithms don’t count). But will we reach a point when we have proper AI, often called artificial general intelligence? Also no. The reason I see it like this is partly because of my comments above on emergent properties and consciousness. The brain is really complicated, and while computers can be made exceptionally complex, they are essentially binary decision makers, yes or no, on or off. The ion channels at the heart of neuronal function can be considered binary, open or closed, but how they get to that state can include inputs which can fully open or close them, partially open or close them, block them or otherwise do the exact opposite action to that which you would imagine. The brain is not a binary thinking machine, it is far more complicated than that, so expecting we can ever reach a point where we will create an artificial general intelligence, at least in the medium term, seems too much of a stretch for me.
(*** yes I know it’s a long one, but it’s just the one paragraph so it counts!)
To the future and beyond
So there you have it. How do I see the future? Fair to say a mixed bag. From the moment I publish this blog I am going to leave it up as is without amendments, typos and all. Assuming Twaddle lasts a few hundred years (…) it will be interesting to see how close I get.
What do you think about my predictions? Do you have any ideas of your own about the future? Drop them below in the comments and let’s see who is closer to the mark.
https://twaddle.blog/2024/02/23/care-to-take-a-leaflet/
#AI #Future #Futurology #Idealist #Politics #Positivity #Pragmatist #Predictions #Prophecy #Religion #Science #Space #TheEconomy #TheEnvironment
-
We’ve all been there. You are walking down the street, minding your own business, and a clinically cheerful chugger with a bolt-on grin moves to block your path asking for “just a moment of your time”. If you are lucky, your averted gaze and mumbled “no thank you” sees them seeking out their next victim. If you are unlucky, you end up taking away a leaflet, or worse.
I tend to be very good at fending off unwanted interaction. Usually, the wife is equally effective at walking on by without engaging. That is until last week. She claims she was distracted. Out walking with the baby in the pram, she claims she did not registered being accosted until it was too late.
Regardless of how it happened, in the end she left clutching a leaflet in hand. On this occasion, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had been the ones trying to get her attention.
The leaflet she came home with is titled How do you view the future? and includes a drawing of a young girl holding a handful of soil with a seedling growing out of it. Below the picture, the leaflet asks Will our world… stay the same? get worse? get better?
The pedant in me wants to point out it must be one of the three options, providing we can agree by what metric we are judging ‘better’, but I’m not here to just point out the obvious. Slightly less obvious, there is nothing on the front cover to identify where the leaflet came from, or the real purpose of handing them out.
Open up the leaflet and those questions are quickly answered. It is full of bible verses which are purported to answer the questions on the front cover. Finally, when you turn to the back of the leaflet, you discover the authors and are invited to find out more about the religion by requesting further information, or heaven offend (pun very much intended) a visit from church members.
I have spoken before about my lack of belief in any kind of deity. I certainly do not subscribe to any particular religion. When I first saw the leaflet on the kitchen counter and heard the story I was tempted to go through the details inside the leaflet and give my thoughts on why they are (probably) wrong. Having paused for a moment to think about it, I realise there are much more informed people out there who can critique the content.
I thought instead, I would tackle the question at the heart of the pamphlet. Set aside the religious elements for now. How do I view the future? Do I think it will get better, worse or stay the same?
I should make clear I am not looking to make specific or short-term predictions about the future. Invariably, they will be wrong. Just look at the likes of Back to the Future Part II predicting the world of 2015 back in 1989 (where is my hoverboard?). I’m also not going to be making really long term predictions. Ironically, the further we look into the future (and we’re talking millions and billions of years here) the better the predictions get. Scientists have a pretty good idea for example how our planet will meet its end, and roughly when. What I am aiming for is the sweet spot in between too soon and specific, and too far away and easy.
The planet
The leaflet the wife was given leant heavily on environmental imagery as part of its visual appeal, so let’s start with the planet, or more specifically the environment including the climate. How do I see the future for the only planet we call home?
In short, bad, really bad and then probably good.
In not quite as short, I’m sadly a realist when it comes to the environment. There are glimmers of hope for the natural world here and there with genuine positive change to lessen humanity’s impact upon it, but overall the current trend is business as usual. And by business as usual, I of course mean biodiversity loss, over-exploitation of limited resources and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The planet will get warmer, animals will go extinct, and everything including humans will suffer as a result.
The planet’s climate is already showing signs of instability, but as it gets worse, and particularly as sea levels rise displacing a lot of people, we are going to see a huge surge of climate refugees moving across the planet. I’m going to talk about politics below, but for this section it is enough to guess there will be conflict. If we are lucky, it will be no more than passionate debate and legal cases. If we are unlucky, well…
This is all a bit doom and gloomy, and unfortunately I think we have reached a point where it will be, at least temporarily. But there is hope. Because almost without exception, when humanity stops being entitled fools and gives nature the chance to regrow, it does. Countless examples exist of woodlands and meadows and lakes which have been left to their own devices after industrial processes have ceased, and they are beautiful landscapes (albeit not exactly how things would have appeared originally).
This will happen for the planet as a whole, and I can say this with confidence as two options will occur; either humanity will see the error of their ways and start to ease up on nature (dare I say work in harmony with it?), or option two humanity will die out because of our hubris and the planet will be left to heal and go on its merry way. Either option leads to a better, greener, healthier world. I just hope we go for option one to make sure our descendants are around to enjoy it.
Not the planet
I love the idea of space and space travel. As a child this would be Star Wars and Star Trek, as an adult the Foundation and Dune novels. If someone asks me what I have on my bucket list, I only half-jokingly say go into space. I would like to say here that I envisage an interplanetary future for humanity in the medium term, but more and more I think it is neither an option nor desirable. I’ve given my thoughts here and here about space exploration and stand by my conclusions (if anything I have become a more staunch ProGaian) so here I will stick to what I actually think will happen in space in the medium term.
In short, nothing much. There are those out there advocating for colonies on Mars and mining asteroids and the like by the middle of the century, but I have been persuaded this is something we neither should nor could achieve. I am currently reading A City on Mars, a fantastic book by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith which explores just this topic, and it is clear the odds of actually getting functioning colonies on other planets in even the next century or two are slim. As I have said in my posts linked above, I think we should keep exploring space, with bigger and bigger space telescopes and robotic missions across the solar system likely options, but short of occasional trips to the moon and possibly non-permanent trips to Mars, I do not envisage humanity reaching for the stars any time soon.
Politics, politics, politics
I have a post which I started several years ago titled Independence, Together. If you are frantically searching through my blog to give it a read you will not find it because I never actually finished it, and probably never will. In it, I wrote about my support of Scottish independence (which failed) and my opposition to Brexit (which did not, clearly political punditry is not in my future…), and attempted to square the circle of the seeming contradiction in those two points of view. This post here is not an attempt to complete that blog post, so you will just have to accept it was brilliantly argued and was persuasive…
Why I bring this up is I still feel the position I hold (despite short-term failures) is the future for the global politic sphere, namely a move towards greater localism and also a more connected supranational cooperative framework. Think globally, act locally is the political position I hold most dearly, and I think it is likely to be one humanity moves closer towards in the next couple of centuries.
This might sound utopian, and obviously I hope it will be, but both positions come with risks. The more fragmented political systems are, the greater the risk of local conflicts which can then escalate to bigger conflicts through the implementation of alliances, while equally the more monolithic a political system, the greater the risk the individual person is lost in it and suffers as a result. Both of these actions could happen as a result of local globalism. Like with the environment I will have to hope humanity picks the utopian option instead before it is too late.
It’s the economy stupid
When I was at school, I was taught there are three* broad levels to the economy. Primary economical activity is things like farming, fishing and mining, gathering stuff. Secondary activities include building and manufacturing and food production, making stuff. Tertiary economic activities are the provision of services like restaurants, healthcare and transport, selling stuff. The more advanced an economy becomes, the more it moves along the path from mostly primary to mostly tertiary activities. When crusty old politicians moan about a country not making things anymore, they are moaning about what is supposed to be a good thing and a sign of progress.
The general trend of economies moving from primary to tertiary has been going on for a couple of hundred years now, and I can see this starting to reverse in the next couple of hundred. No, I am not imagining we will all resort to subsistence farming as we abandon industrial processes, but rather as people become more and more concerned about the provenance of the stuff they are buying, the more people will shift into farming and the like to provide the higher quality products people want. Today we, often snidely, call these artisanal products, but I think this trend is something which will continue. Couple this with the general trend towards more vegetarians and vegans living on the planet, and particularly those who produce non-meat foods will have a bonanza.
For those in the secondary industry business, I can see this desire for higher quality affecting them too, particularly the right to repair movement. Mass producing cheap but easily breakable tat is going to become less and less acceptable (if it ever was), and people are going to demand higher quality products with the ability to be fixed or upgraded when they break or are worn out. In short, I see the current levels of consumerism damping down in the coming years, and for the planet (see above) it cannot come a moment too soon,
(*I think I would add two more levels** to this schema; quaternary activity where people with too much money trade that money with other people with too much money and then use it to buy tertiary businesses, hoarding stuff, and quinary activity where tech bros invent digital tech they think everyone will want a part of but in the end this becomes a badge of idiocy when the bubble bursts, imagining stuff.)
(**yes, I know additional levels of the economy already exist, shush…)
The end is science
As a lover of and applier of science, I could not finish a post about the future without considering some of the advances science may well make in the no too distant future (and contrary to some people’s views, even if science has an end point, I don’t think we are anywhere near there yet).
Understanding the mind and consciousness is the big question I would like to see answered. My personal expectation, they are both an emergent property, an inevitable result of such a complex system as the brain, but what that means at a fundamental level would be fantastic to see elucidated.
After this, abiogenesis, or the origins of life, would be an excellent second prize. I am resigned to the fact we will probably never conclusively demonstrate how life on Earth began, but a plausible theoretical model would be the next best thing.
The third big discovery I see us making in the medium term is related to the space bit above, extraterrestrial life. I’m not expecting little green men and flying saucers, but with the likes of JWST and future telescope projects, I think the idea of confirming biosignatures on other planets is just a matter of time.
And there we have it, a blog post about the future which manages to avoid mentioning AI (wait a minute… dammit!).
OK, OK, I’ll talk about it, but only for one paragraph***. Do we have AI at the moment, no. Not by any stretch of the imagination (and don’t come at me with large language models. Excessively wasteful, inaccurate algorithms don’t count). But will we reach a point when we have proper AI, often called artificial general intelligence? Also no. The reason I see it like this is partly because of my comments above on emergent properties and consciousness. The brain is really complicated, and while computers can be made exceptionally complex, they are essentially binary decision makers, yes or no, on or off. The ion channels at the heart of neuronal function can be considered binary, open or closed, but how they get to that state can include inputs which can fully open or close them, partially open or close them, block them or otherwise do the exact opposite action to that which you would imagine. The brain is not a binary thinking machine, it is far more complicated than that, so expecting we can ever reach a point where we will create an artificial general intelligence, at least in the medium term, seems too much of a stretch for me.
(*** yes I know it’s a long one, but it’s just the one paragraph so it counts!)
To the future and beyond
So there you have it. How do I see the future? Fair to say a mixed bag. From the moment I publish this blog I am going to leave it up as is without amendments, typos and all. Assuming Twaddle lasts a few hundred years (…) it will be interesting to see how close I get.
What do you think about my predictions? Do you have any ideas of your own about the future? Drop them below in the comments and let’s see who is closer to the mark.
https://twaddle.blog/2024/02/23/care-to-take-a-leaflet/
#AI #Future #Futurology #Idealist #Politics #Positivity #Pragmatist #Predictions #Prophecy #Religion #Science #Space #TheEconomy #TheEnvironment
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Please repost for visibility, so I can find people with similar interests. Like or comment for me to take a look at your profile, and possibly follow.
Likes/Interests: #Programming #Technology #OpenSource #FreeSoftware #FOSS #FLOSS #Fediverse #OnlineFreedom #Privacy #Anonymity #Anonymous #InfoSec #CyberSecurity #Manjaro #Linux #Science #Socialism #HumanRights #SocialJustice #MultipolarWorld #Programming #Python #Golang #Rust #RetroGaming #Gaming #SelfHosted #TechNews #Matrix #Youtube #Movies #Anime #Hentai #Erotica #Futurology #AI #Singularity #Fitness #Health #Collapse #ClimateCrisis #Audiobooks #Books #Fantasy #SciFi #StarWars #Fanfiction #Conspiracy #CriticalThinking #Cooking #DataHoarding #Piracy #FileSharing #Meshnet #Decentralized #Distributed #P2P #PeerToPeer #IPFS #Zeronet #Freenet #I2P #Tor
Dislikes/Disinterests: #Music #Memes #Sports #Coffee #Animals #Cats #Dogs #Nazis #CIA #NATO #UsEmpire #Oligarchy #Plutocracy #Kleptocracy #Imperialism #Fascism #Racism #Capitalism #Billionaires #Woke #Wokeism #Liberals #Democrats #Republicans #Conservatives #BigTech #ClosedSource #Microsoft #Discord #Copyright #Censorship #WesternMedia #MaintreamNews #OfficialPropaganda #Surveillance #PoliticalCorrectness #SurveillanceCapitalism #DRM #DataMining #FakeNews #Misinformation #Disinformation #EchoChamber #FilterBubble #CorporateMedia #Consumerism #Materialism #Overconsumption #PlannedObsolescence #FastFashion #Waste #EnvironmentalDegradation #Gentrification #Inequality #Neoliberalism #Globalization #FantasyFootball #Apple #Tech #BoardGames #TTRPG #DnD
Best to worst: #fopnu #nicotine+ ( #soulseek ) #aMule ( #edonkey2000 #ed2k ) #EiskaltDC++ ( #dcpp ) #gnutella #Shareaza #qBittorrent ( #BitTorrent #torrent )
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Grey has ruled too long. From housing to apparel, figures to hairstyle, what replaces it? The future of fashion is the backlash of color.
Read more at my #blog: https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2023/08/14/the-future-of-fashion-after-greige/
This post's featured image is Edmund Blair Leighton's "God Speed!".
#fashion #style #aesthetics #grey #greige #housing #apparel #hair #hairstyles #figures #clothes #future #futurology
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#DimitarSasselov - What is the Far #Future of #Intelligence in the #Universe?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9p3qy7ZZiE&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Futurology #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #Cosmology #PhilosophyOfCosmology #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Life #Evolution #Planets #Stars #Galaxies #Chemistry #Biochemistry #Exobiology #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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Ageless immortals of the future may become encrusted with the burden of memory; small children's ability to forget might show us the way...
Read more at my #blog: https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2023/04/14/lethe-to-the-future/
This post's featured image is Gustave Dore's "Dante and the River of Lethe".
#immortality #ageing #aging #immortals #biologicalimmortality #technology #geneticengineering #neoteny #rejuvenation #childhoodamnesia #infantileamnesia #future #futurology #futurism
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1966: #Children imagine life in the year 2000 - #TomorrowsWorld - #Retro #Futurology - #BBCArchive
Pupils from Marlborough college, Roedean and Chippenham schools predict what life will be like for them in the year 2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS8xX3usi4c&ab_channel=BBCArchive
#Future #NuclearArmageddon #Overpopulation #Automation #BatteryFarming #MassUnemployment #Unemploymnt #BBC #Archive #BBCTVArchive #BBCTV #BBCTelevision #PeterPurves
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1966: #Children imagine life in the year 2000 - #TomorrowsWorld - #Retro #Futurology - #BBCArchive
Pupils from Marlborough college, Roedean and Chippenham schools predict what life will be like for them in the year 2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS8xX3usi4c&ab_channel=BBCArchive
#Future #NuclearArmageddon #Overpopulation #Automation #BatteryFarming #MassUnemployment #Unemploymnt #BBC #Archive #BBCTVArchive #BBCTV #BBCTelevision #PeterPurves
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1966: #Children imagine life in the year 2000 - #TomorrowsWorld - #Retro #Futurology - #BBCArchive
Pupils from Marlborough college, Roedean and Chippenham schools predict what life will be like for them in the year 2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS8xX3usi4c&ab_channel=BBCArchive
#Future #NuclearArmageddon #Overpopulation #Automation #BatteryFarming #MassUnemployment #Unemploymnt #BBC #Archive #BBCTVArchive #BBCTV #BBCTelevision #PeterPurves
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1966: #Children imagine life in the year 2000 - #TomorrowsWorld - #Retro #Futurology - #BBCArchive
Pupils from Marlborough college, Roedean and Chippenham schools predict what life will be like for them in the year 2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS8xX3usi4c&ab_channel=BBCArchive
#Future #NuclearArmageddon #Overpopulation #Automation #BatteryFarming #MassUnemployment #Unemploymnt #BBC #Archive #BBCTVArchive #BBCTV #BBCTelevision #PeterPurves
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1966: #Children imagine life in the year 2000 - #TomorrowsWorld - #Retro #Futurology - #BBCArchive
Pupils from Marlborough college, Roedean and Chippenham schools predict what life will be like for them in the year 2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS8xX3usi4c&ab_channel=BBCArchive
#Future #NuclearArmageddon #Overpopulation #Automation #BatteryFarming #MassUnemployment #Unemploymnt #BBC #Archive #BBCTVArchive #BBCTV #BBCTelevision #PeterPurves
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#GregoryBenford - What is the Far Far #Future of #Humans in the #Universe?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPTF_KZnzOE&ab_channel=CloserToTruth
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #Physics #Futurology #DeepTime #Engineering #PlanetaryEngineering #Time #Human #HumanSpecies #Earth #PlanetEarth #Climate #HotSun #Mars #Terraform #Terraforming #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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Antarctica isn't well-suited to conventional cities...but it *is* well-suited to floating cities, technology we can take off-world. As crazy as it might sound, might Earth's coldest continent be a proving ground for the solar system's hottest planet?
#zeppelins #airships #colonization #futurology #futurism #worldbuilding #future #technology #cities #cloudcities #Antarctica #CloudNine #Venus #spacecolonization
https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2022/12/27/cloud-cities-of-antarctica/
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Antarctica isn't well-suited to conventional cities...but it *is* well-suited to floating cities, technology we can take off-world. As crazy as it might sound, might Earth's coldest continent be a proving ground for the solar system's hottest planet?
#zeppelins #airships #colonization #futurology #futurism #worldbuilding #future #technology #cities #cloudcities #Antarctica #CloudNine #Venus #spacecolonization
https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2022/12/27/cloud-cities-of-antarctica/
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Antarctica isn't well-suited to conventional cities...but it *is* well-suited to floating cities, technology we can take off-world. As crazy as it might sound, might Earth's coldest continent be a proving ground for the solar system's hottest planet?
#zeppelins #airships #colonization #futurology #futurism #worldbuilding #future #technology #cities #cloudcities #Antarctica #CloudNine #Venus #spacecolonization
https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2022/12/27/cloud-cities-of-antarctica/
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Antarctica isn't well-suited to conventional cities...but it *is* well-suited to floating cities, technology we can take off-world. As crazy as it might sound, might Earth's coldest continent be a proving ground for the solar system's hottest planet?
#zeppelins #airships #colonization #futurology #futurism #worldbuilding #future #technology #cities #cloudcities #Antarctica #CloudNine #Venus #spacecolonization
https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2022/12/27/cloud-cities-of-antarctica/
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Antarctica isn't well-suited to conventional cities...but it *is* well-suited to floating cities, technology we can take off-world. As crazy as it might sound, might Earth's coldest continent be a proving ground for the solar system's hottest planet?
#zeppelins #airships #colonization #futurology #futurism #worldbuilding #future #technology #cities #cloudcities #Antarctica #CloudNine #Venus #spacecolonization
https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2022/12/27/cloud-cities-of-antarctica/
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If you ask me a sensible partition would be metropolitan, driven not by red and blue but by the far more enduring city and hinterland. Not a quick fix for polarization, but unlike the quick fix it's the sort of solution that could keep paying off for centuries to come.
Image is by Juan Velasco, for an old New York Times piece on the world order of the future.
#geography #geopolitics #politics #thoughts #future #futurology #futurism #secession #citystate
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Beyond #Human: A Billion Years of #Evolution and the Fate of Our #Species
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I08UUBViP1A&ab_channel=CoolWorlds
#Humanity #FutureOfHumanity #HumanRace #HumanSpecies #Futurology #Time #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Mediocrity #PrincipleOfMediocrity #GeologicalTime #DeepTime
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What a ride depuis le début de l'année 2019 et la première session de travail deep en Champagne avec des paons dans le brouillard... Très heureux de pouvoir vous retrouver ce jeudi pour fêter ces 440 pages de papier 49 gr/m² farcis depuis des dizaines de mois dans les mijoteuses padestoelen + #ethertoff + html + css avec @smag
"We are pleased to announce that the publication "#Grimoire" resulting from the research "The #Futurology of #Cooperation" is ready. And we are very happy to present both, the research and the book at bookshop #PeintureFraîche on the 26/01/23 18h. And a party will follow @Prima, 80 rue Dethy at Saint-Gilles.
Een Grimoire is a book of magic spells and recipes. The spells found in deze Grimoire take the form of practical tools, techniques, games and structures to be used by anyone interested in experimenting with tijdreizen and time-travel in collectieve processen. [...]
The Grimoire also exists in the form of a website (the beast is alive) http://futurology.be
This website and the print publication were designed #OSP using Etherthoff, a simple collaborative web platform, very much like a wiki but offering real time editing through #Etherpad with an equal love for web and print publishing, through #pagedjs" -
What will be the biggest human advancement on planet earth during your lifetime?
#science #ScifiProblems #scificoncept #technologyrisk #ArtificialintelligenceAI #FutureDays #futurology #scifi #fiction #discussions -
Cloud cities are oft thought impractical, but they may hold the key to opening up Interior Antarctica, Venus, and destinations beyond.
Read my full thoughts at my #blog: https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2022/12/27/cloud-cities-of-antarctica/
This post's featured image is my own "Daytime snowfall in front of airships, softened version".
#zeppelins #airships #colonization #futurology #futurism #worldbuilding #future #technology #cities #cloudcities #Antarctica #CloudNine #Venus #spacecolonization
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Cloud cities are oft thought impractical, but they may hold the key to opening up Interior Antarctica, Venus, and destinations beyond.
Read my full thoughts at my #blog: https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2022/12/27/cloud-cities-of-antarctica/
This post's featured image is my own "Daytime snowfall in front of airships, softened version".
#zeppelins #airships #colonization #futurology #futurism #worldbuilding #future #technology #cities #cloudcities #Antarctica #CloudNine #Venus #spacecolonization
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Cloud cities are oft thought impractical, but they may hold the key to opening up Interior Antarctica, Venus, and destinations beyond.
Read my full thoughts at my #blog: https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2022/12/27/cloud-cities-of-antarctica/
This post's featured image is my own "Daytime snowfall in front of airships, softened version".
#zeppelins #airships #colonization #futurology #futurism #worldbuilding #future #technology #cities #cloudcities #Antarctica #CloudNine #Venus #spacecolonization
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Cloud cities are oft thought impractical, but they may hold the key to opening up Interior Antarctica, Venus, and destinations beyond.
Read my full thoughts at my #blog: https://www.adamasnemesis.com/2022/12/27/cloud-cities-of-antarctica/
This post's featured image is my own "Daytime snowfall in front of airships, softened version".
#zeppelins #airships #colonization #futurology #futurism #worldbuilding #future #technology #cities #cloudcities #Antarctica #CloudNine #Venus #spacecolonization
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Interior Antarctica, therefore, might be a good training ground for *Venus*, in as much as aerostats will be the best way to settle both places.
#zeppelins #airships #colonization #futurology #futurism #worldbuilding #future #technology #cities #cloudcities #Antarctica #CloudNine #Venus #spacecolonization
