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These are all very mundane predictions. I have a more interesting one (I think)... We will be living in a post-work and post scarcity economy and we will need

by throwaway2016a 9y ago

These are all very mundane predictions. I have a more interesting one (I think)... We will be living in a post-work and post scarcity economy and we will need to decide as a culture how to handle that. Automation, robotics, and AI will replace all jobs that aren't creative tasks. And things where scarcity breads economic disparity such as food[1], energy[2], and water[3] will no longer be scarce due to advances in technology. And advances in medicine will make us live longer, increasing the average age. How do we as a society deal with that? [1] vertical farming, bioengineering, artificial meats [2] renewables [3] harvesting and recycling

varjag 9y ago
> We will be living in a post-work and post scarcity economy In 12 years? No way.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  I bet some people would be more than willing to fight wars to prevent that from happening in such a short timeframe.
- contingencies 9y ago
  I estimate there are 100 million people or more in China alone who work in sales and sourcing departments on manual supply chain processes that could easily be replaced with a single decent piece of open source software and a manager who can be assed typing in some figures or buying a smart factory upgrade to do it for him. That's very much tending towards post-work, for a significant chunk - 1/14th - of China, which is now I believe the world's largest economy. And that's the white collar scenario! And yet, by removing overheads and allocating resources to produce goods and services less wastefully for everyone, it will produce a net positive for the environment, despite the social upheaval. Then there's other areas at high risk from automation including transportation, QA/QC, law enforcement, financial and legal services, retail, manufacturing, construction, etc. I personally have no problem believing that at least 1/3 of society in developing or developed economies will see their lives change significantly through automation in the next 12 years.
  - varjag 9y ago
    Structural unemployment isn't quite 'post-work'.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      Structural unemployment is a first symptom of 'post-work'. Of it and a lot of other things, but it's something one should expect to see.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  It sounds far fetched and maybe it is, but one thing to consider is that AI, robotics, and automation have compounding impact. Each generation makes developing the new generation faster. We've already seen more advancement in 5 years than the past 20, at least in terms of mainstream adoption.
  - varjag 9y ago
    I disagree. The pace of automation has been rather steady, and the way of living 20 years ago was almost indistinguishable from now.
bitL 9y ago
A pesimistic view - the inequality will be rampant, well-paid IT-jobs will evaporate due to advances in ML and a huge surplus of developers will be fighting for scraps, requiring 1-2 side-jobs to pay their expenses. 25% of jobs will be gone due to self-driving cars boom, causing another round of consolidation among car manufacturers as people stop buying cars. Most of 1st world will resemble Brazil, gated communities of lucky ones and shanty towns for the rest. There will be a significant population decline in the 1st world due to widespread cheap availability of sexbots, with universities researching "baby factories" to keep humanity going. Eugenics will be alive and well and culture completely shifts to survival of the fittest, with hunger games becoming main sports TV broadcast. Global warming causes massive ocean die off, prompts massive emigration out of the area between two tropics, disrupting economies world-wide. Fossil fuels will be largely depleted, people would lose the knowledge how to extract them from great depths as the productive generation passes away. Most people will be selfish narcissists with no regards to each other, living their artificial life on social media and in advanced VR. Cryptocurrencies cause governments to lose any effect on economy, advanced cryptology prevents effective capital control, allowing largest players to completely dominate.
- iamdeedubs 9y ago
  This sounds like the Idiocracy plot summary, which is still predicting the future more accurately than I'd prefer. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
  - tomaskafka 9y ago
    Oh boy, this is a #1 on my 'underrated movies' list.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  >well-paid IT-jobs will evaporate due to advances in ML The first thing I started to code in was Delphi 3, which I think was one of the first IDEs to have code-completion, which speeds up development quite a lot. It still required you to manually handle memory. Today we have much more powerful computers, much more power languages, far more powerful IDEs, tools like code testing, code review and commonly use version control systems - and a shortage of programmers, with their salaries just going up. I am not saying that AI won't ever make devs obsolete, just that it will be one of the last fields to be made obsolete, as we are likely to integrate it into our tooling (perhaps in the future, rather than write code you review and fix AI generated code). Sexbots will definitely be a thing, but I still think they will be a niche, because the real sexy times will happen with AR (it is both far more deniable than sex-bots and, according to reviews I have read, way better than internet porn). As for fertility, that has been in decline in the US for years, and the rest of the west. The average European rate is only a tad above 1.5, so in the future net-import of brains (zombie-mode) will be required, but the world is also full of smart people who wants very much to go to the west. The main problem will be reaching political consensus. Given that the US have a problem of reaching much, if any, consensus this may be the biggest hurdle.
protomyth 9y ago
vertical farming How can anyone in a city justify vertical farming when there is already very little housing available for lower income folks? Vertical farming doesn't make any sense to me in the real world where an efficient cargo delivery infrastructure exists.
nwah1 9y ago
Vertical farming has been a perennial favorite of "futurists" much like flying cars. Unlike flying cars, the technology itself is fully proven and has been for a long time. The reason why it isn't common is due to economic factors, not so much technology. Urban land is a very expensive speculative commodity and under-used, because there's little penalty for doing nothing with it, thus causing sprawl. Simultaneously, we subsidize transportation, so we encourage sprawl in lots of senses... including in an agricultural sense. The wear and tear on highways is almost entirely from trucking, but we all pay equally for it. Cultured meat, however, is something that I am very hopeful about. I'd be thrilled if we achieved it by 2030, but that seems overly optimistic. I'd love to be proven wrong, however... the sooner the better.
ameister14 9y ago
Vertical farming is significantly less efficient than regular farming, enough that it doesn't make sense outside of really specific use-cases.

varjag 9y ago

> We will be living in a post-work and post scarcity economy In 12 years? No way.

rbanffy 9y ago
I bet some people would be more than willing to fight wars to prevent that from happening in such a short timeframe.
contingencies 9y ago
I estimate there are 100 million people or more in China alone who work in sales and sourcing departments on manual supply chain processes that could easily be replaced with a single decent piece of open source software and a manager who can be assed typing in some figures or buying a smart factory upgrade to do it for him. That's very much tending towards post-work, for a significant chunk - 1/14th - of China, which is now I believe the world's largest economy. And that's the white collar scenario! And yet, by removing overheads and allocating resources to produce goods and services less wastefully for everyone, it will produce a net positive for the environment, despite the social upheaval. Then there's other areas at high risk from automation including transportation, QA/QC, law enforcement, financial and legal services, retail, manufacturing, construction, etc. I personally have no problem believing that at least 1/3 of society in developing or developed economies will see their lives change significantly through automation in the next 12 years.
- varjag 9y ago
  Structural unemployment isn't quite 'post-work'.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    Structural unemployment is a first symptom of 'post-work'. Of it and a lot of other things, but it's something one should expect to see.
throwaway2016a 9y ago
It sounds far fetched and maybe it is, but one thing to consider is that AI, robotics, and automation have compounding impact. Each generation makes developing the new generation faster. We've already seen more advancement in 5 years than the past 20, at least in terms of mainstream adoption.
- varjag 9y ago
  I disagree. The pace of automation has been rather steady, and the way of living 20 years ago was almost indistinguishable from now.

bitL 9y ago

A pesimistic view - the inequality will be rampant, well-paid IT-jobs will evaporate due to advances in ML and a huge surplus of developers will be fighting for scraps, requiring 1-2 side-jobs to pay their expenses. 25% of jobs will be gone due to self-driving cars boom, causing another round of consolidation among car manufacturers as people stop buying cars. Most of 1st world will resemble Brazil, gated communities of lucky ones and shanty towns for the rest. There will be a significant population decline in the 1st world due to widespread cheap availability of sexbots, with universities researching "baby factories" to keep humanity going. Eugenics will be alive and well and culture completely shifts to survival of the fittest, with hunger games becoming main sports TV broadcast. Global warming causes massive ocean die off, prompts massive emigration out of the area between two tropics, disrupting economies world-wide. Fossil fuels will be largely depleted, people would lose the knowledge how to extract them from great depths as the productive generation passes away. Most people will be selfish narcissists with no regards to each other, living their artificial life on social media and in advanced VR. Cryptocurrencies cause governments to lose any effect on economy, advanced cryptology prevents effective capital control, allowing largest players to completely dominate.

iamdeedubs 9y ago
This sounds like the Idiocracy plot summary, which is still predicting the future more accurately than I'd prefer. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
- tomaskafka 9y ago
  Oh boy, this is a #1 on my 'underrated movies' list.
tomjen3 9y ago
>well-paid IT-jobs will evaporate due to advances in ML The first thing I started to code in was Delphi 3, which I think was one of the first IDEs to have code-completion, which speeds up development quite a lot. It still required you to manually handle memory. Today we have much more powerful computers, much more power languages, far more powerful IDEs, tools like code testing, code review and commonly use version control systems - and a shortage of programmers, with their salaries just going up. I am not saying that AI won't ever make devs obsolete, just that it will be one of the last fields to be made obsolete, as we are likely to integrate it into our tooling (perhaps in the future, rather than write code you review and fix AI generated code). Sexbots will definitely be a thing, but I still think they will be a niche, because the real sexy times will happen with AR (it is both far more deniable than sex-bots and, according to reviews I have read, way better than internet porn). As for fertility, that has been in decline in the US for years, and the rest of the west. The average European rate is only a tad above 1.5, so in the future net-import of brains (zombie-mode) will be required, but the world is also full of smart people who wants very much to go to the west. The main problem will be reaching political consensus. Given that the US have a problem of reaching much, if any, consensus this may be the biggest hurdle.

protomyth 9y ago

vertical farming How can anyone in a city justify vertical farming when there is already very little housing available for lower income folks? Vertical farming doesn't make any sense to me in the real world where an efficient cargo delivery infrastructure exists.

nwah1 9y ago

Vertical farming has been a perennial favorite of "futurists" much like flying cars. Unlike flying cars, the technology itself is fully proven and has been for a long time. The reason why it isn't common is due to economic factors, not so much technology. Urban land is a very expensive speculative commodity and under-used, because there's little penalty for doing nothing with it, thus causing sprawl. Simultaneously, we subsidize transportation, so we encourage sprawl in lots of senses... including in an agricultural sense. The wear and tear on highways is almost entirely from trucking, but we all pay equally for it. Cultured meat, however, is something that I am very hopeful about. I'd be thrilled if we achieved it by 2030, but that seems overly optimistic. I'd love to be proven wrong, however... the sooner the better.

ameister14 9y ago

Vertical farming is significantly less efficient than regular farming, enough that it doesn't make sense outside of really specific use-cases.