6 ms·

The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020 (1997)

80 points by solomonb 3y ago

solomonb 3y ago
I thought re-visiting The Long Boom would be interesting given the a16z manifesto. In addition to simply being better written, I find The Long Boom to be far more consistent of a vision and far less self serving.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Haven't read the manifesto but the article did get quite a few things right. If anything they underestimated a few things and were overly optimistic on the politics side. For example, the US hasn't really moved on health care. China seems to be stagnating. One topic that was woefully underestimated is that of alternative energy and batteries. The article talks about Toyota and hybrids and basically parrots their version of the future as of 25 years ago. Which of course half happened and then stopped happening entirely. Because another thing happened that the article missed: lithium ion batteries. Those were invented in the early nineties. By 2008, Tesla had its roadster on the roads. And by now batteries can power everything with wheels from heavy mining vehicles, Australian 200 tonne road trains, heavy trucks, vans, cars, muscle cars, super cars, bikes, scooters, etc. You name it and there probably already is a company doing a battery electric version of it. The bigger topic with energy is that clean energy also means cheap energy. And this is creating the next boom. A lot of stuff in our economy is bottle necked on energy being expensive and dirty. Renewable energy solves both problems: it's clean and cheap. And that's starting to unlock a whole lot of new growth that looks like it might define the rest of this century.
dang 3y ago
Related: The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020. (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37605795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37605795 - Sept 2023 (1 comment) The Long Boom (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26734647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26734647 - April 2021 (37 comments) The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 – 2020 (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705439 - Dec 2015 (1 comment) The Long Boom: A History of the Future (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505143 - April 2013 (4 comments)
fullarr 3y ago
I like how there's a list of 10 things that could ruin his prediction and basically all of them happened It's amazing that he got so much right including how he's wrong
- russdill 3y ago
  "This is only a scenario of the future, by no means an outright prediction of what is to come. We can be reasonably confident of the continuation of certain trends. Much of the long boom's technology is already in motion and almost inevitably will appear within that span. Asia is ascendant whether we like it or not. Barring some bizarre catastrophe, that large portion of the world will continue to boom. But there are many unknowns, all kinds of critical uncertainties. Will Europe summon the political will to make the transition to the new economy? Will Russia avoid a nationalist retrenchment and establish a healthy market economy - let alone democracy? Will China fully embrace capitalism and avoid causing a new cold - or hot - war? Will a rise in terrorism cause the world to pull back in constant fear? It's not technology or economics that pose the biggest challenges to the long boom. It's political factors, the ones dependent on strong leadership."
  - alanbernstein 3y ago
    If only the pandemic hadn't happened in early 2020, we'd have probably gotten those four astronauts to mars by the end of that year...
- harry8 3y ago
  > We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy... 1997.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  Agreed. This is one of the most well informed, across a vast spectrum of info, articles I've ever read. And.. in Wired? Unsurprisingly it seems this was a segment/paraphrasing from a book he wrote. Here [1] is his Wiki page, which includes published works and the like. All that said, I think there's one big miss he made, and did not consider. While so much of what he said came true, I think many people would love to reset society back to 1997. And I don't think it's just because of the misses. It simply seems that economic prosperity is not increasing personal contentedness, which seems a much more meaningful metric than 'happiness'. If anything contentedness and prosperity seem to run into conflict, beyond a certain point. Obviously an area in Africa with a genuinely high food insecurity rate needs more prosperity. But going from relatively rich, in terms of economy, as we were in 1997, to absurdly rich as we are today, does not seem to have brought the corresponding changes one would have expected. If anything, it seems that more prosperity just drives people to want even more, with all notions of contentedness collapsing. --- Yeah, in searching on this topic I bumped into this. [2] Apparently $75k (2011) is peak 'happiness', though again what a myopic metric contrasted against contentedness. The odd thing is that it was $75k period. Whether in Bodunk where $75k means you're rich, or NYC where $75k means you're living far from comfortably. It was just $75k. There were no meaningful gains in measures of happiness beyond that magic number. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schwartz_(futurist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schwartz_(futurist) [2] - https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/150671/Happiness-Is-Love-and-75K.aspx https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/150671/Happiness-Is-...
beefman 3y ago
https://archive.ph/hWKgL https://archive.ph/hWKgL
- midasuni 3y ago
  Gave up after several attempts to pass the captcha Somewhat ironic that a scraper is worried about scrapers.
doe88 3y ago
Peak end of history era.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Yeah, and a couple years later the US was bombing Afghanistan, invading Iraq, international borders became far more intensely hostile, surveillance state intensified, and the entire economy blew up in 2008, and only held on by its nails with zero interest rates and QE. Long "boom" indeed. FWIW my eyes rolled completely back into my head when this essay first came out.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Heh. I also am old enough to remember when this first came out (back when you could read Wired online without captcha or paywall). I was also cynical, though not nearly as cynical as you...
dr_dshiv 3y ago
Awesome read. Anything like this updated for the present, or do I have to ask chatGPT? “Tasks like handwriting recognition become a breeze… By 2015, reliable simultaneous language translation has been cracked—with immediate consequences for the multilingual world.” Hey, that just happened this year. Looking forward to the benefits!
simonh 3y ago
It’s always interesting to compare to see how and why some of the hits and misses happen. The optimism is exaggerated, but overall there has been a sustained global boom. The thing is the benefits have disproportionately accrued to modernising economies in the developing world. China, and much of East Asia has seen an incredible transformation. Catching up is always much easier than forging ahead. Genetic computing is obviously not a thing, genes are long terms storage, not processing. On the other hand while we don't compute biologically, all the latest advances in AI are based on neural networks, inspired by biological neurons. We’re not on Mars, and thinking back to 1998 I don’t see where that optimism came from. There was no indication of the technology or appetite for a project like that. It’s only with the advent of reusable rockets that it’s becoming viable. Nanotechnology was the big buzz back then, but it isn’t pushed that much in the article. Other futurists were making absurd claims of what would be possible in 5 years. Impressive restraint. China on the road to democracy, and a Russia modernising? Oh well. Both are on the list of major risks though. As a Brit it’s conflicting to see the optimism for us leading the way in Europe in the main article, and the fact that we basically opted for 10 on the risks list instead.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kevindamm 3y ago
  > Genetic computing is obviously not a thing, genes are long terms storage, not processing. That's like saying the tape in Turing's machine is not computing. But if you include the RNA transcription and protein interactions and utilize the complementary base pairs, you can do processing. I recall seeing a paper where solving an NPC problem like Traveling Salesperson could be done with DNA chains being mixed and matched. There was a lot of excitement about this in the 90s and that was before we'd invented microchannels for faster codon analysis. But, to be clear, I don't think it's a computing area worth further investigation, I think the hype being built up during the development of the Human Genome Project, especially as they were building a lot of new tech and managed to finish sequencing two years ahead of schedule, got a lot of other industries excited. They were still years from completion in '97 but the biological process seemed like massively parallel compute that could scale faster than an effort to build the equivalent data centers.. EDIT: dug up an article in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/news000113-10 https://www.nature.com/articles/news000113-10 "DNA computer helps traveling salesman" in January 2000. Liu,Q., Wang, L., Frutos, A.G., Condon, A.E., Corn, R.M. & Smith, L.M. DNA computing on surfaces Nature 403, 175 2000.
zeristor 3y ago
Timely since I just found out that the publisher Usborne has reprinted their Book of the Future, which first came out in 1979. https://usborne.com/gb/book-of-the-future-9781803709543 https://usborne.com/gb/book-of-the-future-9781803709543 I've bought 7 copies to give to friends that I have been going on about this book for most of my life.
coopierez 3y ago
The idea that Russia or China would magically become democratic utopias without violent social upheaval is extraordinarily naive. In addition to the US just deciding to "solve seemingly intractable social problems, like drug addiction" - human-made problems caused by the same human-made systems that the article is praising. The only thing I really feel they got close was all 10 of the "Scenario Spoilers". If they wrote an article just focusing on those instead I think all of our minds would have been truly blown. But I suppose this article was written at a particularly optimistic point in time.
- pavlov 3y ago
  In retrospect 1997-2000 was probably the most optimistic time in the entire history of mankind so far. I’m 43 and in my heart I don’t honestly believe we will see another such era of relative peace and global alignment during my lifetime. It’s somewhat depressing. (Not for myself, but more about the prospects for my children who statistically have a 50% chance of being alive in the year 2120. The world of climate change we’re leaving doesn’t look like a happy one.)
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    Personally I'm highly optimistic about the post-war period of ~2035. Wars usually bring about extremely rapid development and adoption of new technologies. I suspect that my kids, if they survive, will enter a world I can only dream about. Plus, killing off several billion people will alleviate resource pressures on the planet, and likely reverse global warming through nuclear winter. And world wars usually bring about the downfall of governments and major institutions, which have been major blockers to the adoption of technology on a societal level and development of a social structure that fits the world of today rather than the world of 1945. It's going to be a pretty grim 10-15 years in the near future. I think a 50% chance of them being alive in 2120 is pretty darn optimistic; I'm figuring they have a 20-30% chance of surviving to adulthood. But if they make it, life after a population bottleneck is usually pretty good for the survivors.
    - pavlov 3y ago
sgt101 3y ago
Several things struck me: first no real presaging of social media, but instead a view of personalised and interactive "media". Maybe this is what we are now transitioning to with the apparent collapse of twitter and facebook? I think that the change in "community" that the last 40 years has brought is one of the most shocking things. So many of the mechanisms of connection that I vaguely remember from my childhood and youth seem to have been transformed or destroyed. Local bars are either not there, or just not places that you can go and hang out. There are no clubs, no associations. We don't go to church or join community groups. The article sees some of the geographic drivers that have brought change but misses at least one obvious and huge one - the one child policy in China. This is now (I think) probably the most plangent fact of the 21st Century. The article sees a path forward into the future, but in fact from then to now has been a series of discontinuities. Maybe history is more like the sea coming in and going out with waves crashing and receeding. I wonder which way it's really going. Of note I think that the scenario spoilers in the article have largely materialised. Perhaps there's a lesson for futurists there - the things that you see as contingencies are more likely to be real than the things that you write in the main narrative because the main narrative is what you are hoping to happen; that's where your bias is. >>>> 10 Scenario Spoilers The long boom is a scenario, one possible future. It’s built upon the convergence of many big forces and even more little pieces falling into place—all of them with a positive twist. The future of course, could turn out to be very different—particularly if a few of those big pieces go haywire. Here are 10 things that could cut short the long boom. 1. Tensions between China and the US escalate into a new Cold War—bordering on a hot one. <<< well, we're getting there on this >>> 2. New technologies turn out to be a bust. They simply don’t bring the expected productivity increases or the big economic boosts. <<< I think that this is both completely true and completely false. We haven't seen measurable gains, but I think everyone is very suspicious that this is because we are not measuring properly. We are missing something about this. >>> 3. Russia devolves into a kleptocracy run by a mafia or retreats into quasicommunist nationalism that threatens Europe. <<< yup >>> 4. Europe’s integration process grinds to a halt. Eastern and western Europe can’t finesse a reunification, and even the European Union process breaks down. <<< It nearly broke, but it didn't and I think that there is growing reason to think that Europe can strengthen itself again. The wild card is the German economy. For the last 20 years Germany has dominated the union and distorted everything around itself with a booming labour market and capital flow from the periphery to the core. Now cheap energy is gone it could be that these trends reverse. This will strengthen (at least relatively) the periphery of the eurozone. I wonder if German politics will be able to adapt to this and whether the German economy can transition to a new stable state successfully and relatively painlessly? I don't see the concerted investments and reorientation that I think that Germany needs to do, and if it doesn't come soon it may be too late and not possible. >>> 5. Major ecological crisis causes a global climate change that, among other things, disrupts the food supply—causing big price increases everywhere and sporadic famines. <<< scary close >>> 6. Major rise in crime and terrorism forces the world to pull back in fear. People who constantly feel they could be blown up or ripped off are not in the mood to reach out and open up. <<< yup 9/11 and beyond. >>> 7. The cumulative escalation in pollution causes a dramatic increase in cancer, which overwhelms the ill-prepared health system. <<< It's in the stats - cancer is on the rise in the young. Is it due to pollution? Possibly. Is it overwhelming the health system - maybe. Old people are probably a bigger issue. >>> 8. Energy prices go through the roof. Convulsions in the Middle East disrupt the oil supply, and the alternative energy sources fail to materialize. <<< we rode this wave for a long time. The energy system is getting more diverse, we have permian oil and gas in quantities that were not forseen in 1997. We have wind and solar at a higher level than anticipated, but in reality we are still vulnerable to this one. >>> 9. An uncontrollable plague—a modern-day influenza epidemic or its equivalent—takes off like wildfire, killing upward of 200 million people. <<< "only" 7 million or so died of Covid. I had imagined that the number was much higher than that, but I think global societies response was pretty good. Of course we got lucky in a way, we were able to manage it - another virus might have done much more damage. Maybe we will see the advances in vaccines that we took advantage of during Covid as a way that we stop this sort of disaster in the future. I hope I don't live to see that proposition tested though. >>> 10. A social and cultural backlash stops progress dead in its tracks. Human beings need to choose to move forward. They just may not … <<< Well, I read facebook and Twitter and I wonder about this.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
What we have with the old Wired / Kevin Kelly article (which was ridiculous at the time and I and others lambasted it at publication BTW), and also with the recent Andreesen thing is textbook ideology: I insist that what makes my livelihood possible and makes me prosperous and powerful is what is true and universal and natural for everyone. It's not surprising or anything that people would think this in these patterns, but it betrays a lack of critical conscience. It's a class of people mostly centered around California, who have strong interests economically and politically and who benefit directly by promulgating that vision to the whole world. Whether the rest of the world benefits is always a matter of dispute -- some will, some won't. Both this and Andreesen's recent screed lack any subtlety on this matter. I commented elsewhere about how that era was by no means some neo-liberal utopia. There was war all over the world and there's clearly in retrospect nothing prophetically smart about declaring a "long boom" right on the cusp of the insane .com crash and the 2008 blow-up right after (arguably part of a contiguous economic crisis.) It's no different than climate change denial by people working in the energy sector.
- solomonb 3y ago
  I agree 100%. Its the California Ideology through and through. I just wish more high profile leaders today had a bit of historical perspective.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Hah I was going to name-drop The California Ideology article, but figured that has gotten enough discussion here over the year, and would only muddy the waters.
sproketboy 3y ago
[dead]
RexFactorem 3y ago
[dead]

80 points by solomonb 3y ago

I thought re-visiting The Long Boom would be interesting given the a16z manifesto. In addition to simply being better written, I find The Long Boom to be far more consistent of a vision and far less self serving.

jillesvangurp 3y ago
Haven't read the manifesto but the article did get quite a few things right. If anything they underestimated a few things and were overly optimistic on the politics side. For example, the US hasn't really moved on health care. China seems to be stagnating. One topic that was woefully underestimated is that of alternative energy and batteries. The article talks about Toyota and hybrids and basically parrots their version of the future as of 25 years ago. Which of course half happened and then stopped happening entirely. Because another thing happened that the article missed: lithium ion batteries. Those were invented in the early nineties. By 2008, Tesla had its roadster on the roads. And by now batteries can power everything with wheels from heavy mining vehicles, Australian 200 tonne road trains, heavy trucks, vans, cars, muscle cars, super cars, bikes, scooters, etc. You name it and there probably already is a company doing a battery electric version of it. The bigger topic with energy is that clean energy also means cheap energy. And this is creating the next boom. A lot of stuff in our economy is bottle necked on energy being expensive and dirty. Renewable energy solves both problems: it's clean and cheap. And that's starting to unlock a whole lot of new growth that looks like it might define the rest of this century.

dang 3y ago

Related: The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020. (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37605795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37605795 - Sept 2023 (1 comment) The Long Boom (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26734647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26734647 - April 2021 (37 comments) The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 – 2020 (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705439 - Dec 2015 (1 comment) The Long Boom: A History of the Future (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505143 - April 2013 (4 comments)

fullarr 3y ago

I like how there's a list of 10 things that could ruin his prediction and basically all of them happened It's amazing that he got so much right including how he's wrong

russdill 3y ago
"This is only a scenario of the future, by no means an outright prediction of what is to come. We can be reasonably confident of the continuation of certain trends. Much of the long boom's technology is already in motion and almost inevitably will appear within that span. Asia is ascendant whether we like it or not. Barring some bizarre catastrophe, that large portion of the world will continue to boom. But there are many unknowns, all kinds of critical uncertainties. Will Europe summon the political will to make the transition to the new economy? Will Russia avoid a nationalist retrenchment and establish a healthy market economy - let alone democracy? Will China fully embrace capitalism and avoid causing a new cold - or hot - war? Will a rise in terrorism cause the world to pull back in constant fear? It's not technology or economics that pose the biggest challenges to the long boom. It's political factors, the ones dependent on strong leadership."
- alanbernstein 3y ago
  If only the pandemic hadn't happened in early 2020, we'd have probably gotten those four astronauts to mars by the end of that year...
harry8 3y ago
> We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy... 1997.
somenameforme 3y ago
Agreed. This is one of the most well informed, across a vast spectrum of info, articles I've ever read. And.. in Wired? Unsurprisingly it seems this was a segment/paraphrasing from a book he wrote. Here [1] is his Wiki page, which includes published works and the like. All that said, I think there's one big miss he made, and did not consider. While so much of what he said came true, I think many people would love to reset society back to 1997. And I don't think it's just because of the misses. It simply seems that economic prosperity is not increasing personal contentedness, which seems a much more meaningful metric than 'happiness'. If anything contentedness and prosperity seem to run into conflict, beyond a certain point. Obviously an area in Africa with a genuinely high food insecurity rate needs more prosperity. But going from relatively rich, in terms of economy, as we were in 1997, to absurdly rich as we are today, does not seem to have brought the corresponding changes one would have expected. If anything, it seems that more prosperity just drives people to want even more, with all notions of contentedness collapsing. --- Yeah, in searching on this topic I bumped into this. [2] Apparently $75k (2011) is peak 'happiness', though again what a myopic metric contrasted against contentedness. The odd thing is that it was $75k period. Whether in Bodunk where $75k means you're rich, or NYC where $75k means you're living far from comfortably. It was just $75k. There were no meaningful gains in measures of happiness beyond that magic number. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schwartz_(futurist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schwartz_(futurist) [2] - https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/150671/Happiness-Is-Love-and-75K.aspx https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/150671/Happiness-Is-...

beefman 3y ago

https://archive.ph/hWKgL https://archive.ph/hWKgL

midasuni 3y ago
Gave up after several attempts to pass the captcha Somewhat ironic that a scraper is worried about scrapers.

doe88 3y ago

Peak end of history era.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Yeah, and a couple years later the US was bombing Afghanistan, invading Iraq, international borders became far more intensely hostile, surveillance state intensified, and the entire economy blew up in 2008, and only held on by its nails with zero interest rates and QE. Long "boom" indeed. FWIW my eyes rolled completely back into my head when this essay first came out.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Heh. I also am old enough to remember when this first came out (back when you could read Wired online without captcha or paywall). I was also cynical, though not nearly as cynical as you...

dr_dshiv 3y ago

Awesome read. Anything like this updated for the present, or do I have to ask chatGPT? “Tasks like handwriting recognition become a breeze… By 2015, reliable simultaneous language translation has been cracked—with immediate consequences for the multilingual world.” Hey, that just happened this year. Looking forward to the benefits!

simonh 3y ago

It’s always interesting to compare to see how and why some of the hits and misses happen. The optimism is exaggerated, but overall there has been a sustained global boom. The thing is the benefits have disproportionately accrued to modernising economies in the developing world. China, and much of East Asia has seen an incredible transformation. Catching up is always much easier than forging ahead. Genetic computing is obviously not a thing, genes are long terms storage, not processing. On the other hand while we don't compute biologically, all the latest advances in AI are based on neural networks, inspired by biological neurons. We’re not on Mars, and thinking back to 1998 I don’t see where that optimism came from. There was no indication of the technology or appetite for a project like that. It’s only with the advent of reusable rockets that it’s becoming viable. Nanotechnology was the big buzz back then, but it isn’t pushed that much in the article. Other futurists were making absurd claims of what would be possible in 5 years. Impressive restraint. China on the road to democracy, and a Russia modernising? Oh well. Both are on the list of major risks though. As a Brit it’s conflicting to see the optimism for us leading the way in Europe in the main article, and the fact that we basically opted for 10 on the risks list instead.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kevindamm 3y ago
> Genetic computing is obviously not a thing, genes are long terms storage, not processing. That's like saying the tape in Turing's machine is not computing. But if you include the RNA transcription and protein interactions and utilize the complementary base pairs, you can do processing. I recall seeing a paper where solving an NPC problem like Traveling Salesperson could be done with DNA chains being mixed and matched. There was a lot of excitement about this in the 90s and that was before we'd invented microchannels for faster codon analysis. But, to be clear, I don't think it's a computing area worth further investigation, I think the hype being built up during the development of the Human Genome Project, especially as they were building a lot of new tech and managed to finish sequencing two years ahead of schedule, got a lot of other industries excited. They were still years from completion in '97 but the biological process seemed like massively parallel compute that could scale faster than an effort to build the equivalent data centers.. EDIT: dug up an article in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/news000113-10 https://www.nature.com/articles/news000113-10 "DNA computer helps traveling salesman" in January 2000. Liu,Q., Wang, L., Frutos, A.G., Condon, A.E., Corn, R.M. & Smith, L.M. DNA computing on surfaces Nature 403, 175 2000.

zeristor 3y ago

Timely since I just found out that the publisher Usborne has reprinted their Book of the Future, which first came out in 1979. https://usborne.com/gb/book-of-the-future-9781803709543 https://usborne.com/gb/book-of-the-future-9781803709543 I've bought 7 copies to give to friends that I have been going on about this book for most of my life.

coopierez 3y ago

The idea that Russia or China would magically become democratic utopias without violent social upheaval is extraordinarily naive. In addition to the US just deciding to "solve seemingly intractable social problems, like drug addiction" - human-made problems caused by the same human-made systems that the article is praising. The only thing I really feel they got close was all 10 of the "Scenario Spoilers". If they wrote an article just focusing on those instead I think all of our minds would have been truly blown. But I suppose this article was written at a particularly optimistic point in time.

pavlov 3y ago
In retrospect 1997-2000 was probably the most optimistic time in the entire history of mankind so far. I’m 43 and in my heart I don’t honestly believe we will see another such era of relative peace and global alignment during my lifetime. It’s somewhat depressing. (Not for myself, but more about the prospects for my children who statistically have a 50% chance of being alive in the year 2120. The world of climate change we’re leaving doesn’t look like a happy one.)
- nostrademons 3y ago
  Personally I'm highly optimistic about the post-war period of ~2035. Wars usually bring about extremely rapid development and adoption of new technologies. I suspect that my kids, if they survive, will enter a world I can only dream about. Plus, killing off several billion people will alleviate resource pressures on the planet, and likely reverse global warming through nuclear winter. And world wars usually bring about the downfall of governments and major institutions, which have been major blockers to the adoption of technology on a societal level and development of a social structure that fits the world of today rather than the world of 1945. It's going to be a pretty grim 10-15 years in the near future. I think a 50% chance of them being alive in 2120 is pretty darn optimistic; I'm figuring they have a 20-30% chance of surviving to adulthood. But if they make it, life after a population bottleneck is usually pretty good for the survivors.
  - pavlov 3y ago

sgt101 3y ago

Several things struck me: first no real presaging of social media, but instead a view of personalised and interactive "media". Maybe this is what we are now transitioning to with the apparent collapse of twitter and facebook? I think that the change in "community" that the last 40 years has brought is one of the most shocking things. So many of the mechanisms of connection that I vaguely remember from my childhood and youth seem to have been transformed or destroyed. Local bars are either not there, or just not places that you can go and hang out. There are no clubs, no associations. We don't go to church or join community groups. The article sees some of the geographic drivers that have brought change but misses at least one obvious and huge one - the one child policy in China. This is now (I think) probably the most plangent fact of the 21st Century. The article sees a path forward into the future, but in fact from then to now has been a series of discontinuities. Maybe history is more like the sea coming in and going out with waves crashing and receeding. I wonder which way it's really going. Of note I think that the scenario spoilers in the article have largely materialised. Perhaps there's a lesson for futurists there - the things that you see as contingencies are more likely to be real than the things that you write in the main narrative because the main narrative is what you are hoping to happen; that's where your bias is. >>>> 10 Scenario Spoilers The long boom is a scenario, one possible future. It’s built upon the convergence of many big forces and even more little pieces falling into place—all of them with a positive twist. The future of course, could turn out to be very different—particularly if a few of those big pieces go haywire. Here are 10 things that could cut short the long boom. 1. Tensions between China and the US escalate into a new Cold War—bordering on a hot one. <<< well, we're getting there on this >>> 2. New technologies turn out to be a bust. They simply don’t bring the expected productivity increases or the big economic boosts. <<< I think that this is both completely true and completely false. We haven't seen measurable gains, but I think everyone is very suspicious that this is because we are not measuring properly. We are missing something about this. >>> 3. Russia devolves into a kleptocracy run by a mafia or retreats into quasicommunist nationalism that threatens Europe. <<< yup >>> 4. Europe’s integration process grinds to a halt. Eastern and western Europe can’t finesse a reunification, and even the European Union process breaks down. <<< It nearly broke, but it didn't and I think that there is growing reason to think that Europe can strengthen itself again. The wild card is the German economy. For the last 20 years Germany has dominated the union and distorted everything around itself with a booming labour market and capital flow from the periphery to the core. Now cheap energy is gone it could be that these trends reverse. This will strengthen (at least relatively) the periphery of the eurozone. I wonder if German politics will be able to adapt to this and whether the German economy can transition to a new stable state successfully and relatively painlessly? I don't see the concerted investments and reorientation that I think that Germany needs to do, and if it doesn't come soon it may be too late and not possible. >>> 5. Major ecological crisis causes a global climate change that, among other things, disrupts the food supply—causing big price increases everywhere and sporadic famines. <<< scary close >>> 6. Major rise in crime and terrorism forces the world to pull back in fear. People who constantly feel they could be blown up or ripped off are not in the mood to reach out and open up. <<< yup 9/11 and beyond. >>> 7. The cumulative escalation in pollution causes a dramatic increase in cancer, which overwhelms the ill-prepared health system. <<< It's in the stats - cancer is on the rise in the young. Is it due to pollution? Possibly. Is it overwhelming the health system - maybe. Old people are probably a bigger issue. >>> 8. Energy prices go through the roof. Convulsions in the Middle East disrupt the oil supply, and the alternative energy sources fail to materialize. <<< we rode this wave for a long time. The energy system is getting more diverse, we have permian oil and gas in quantities that were not forseen in 1997. We have wind and solar at a higher level than anticipated, but in reality we are still vulnerable to this one. >>> 9. An uncontrollable plague—a modern-day influenza epidemic or its equivalent—takes off like wildfire, killing upward of 200 million people. <<< "only" 7 million or so died of Covid. I had imagined that the number was much higher than that, but I think global societies response was pretty good. Of course we got lucky in a way, we were able to manage it - another virus might have done much more damage. Maybe we will see the advances in vaccines that we took advantage of during Covid as a way that we stop this sort of disaster in the future. I hope I don't live to see that proposition tested though. >>> 10. A social and cultural backlash stops progress dead in its tracks. Human beings need to choose to move forward. They just may not … <<< Well, I read facebook and Twitter and I wonder about this.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

What we have with the old Wired / Kevin Kelly article (which was ridiculous at the time and I and others lambasted it at publication BTW), and also with the recent Andreesen thing is textbook ideology: I insist that what makes my livelihood possible and makes me prosperous and powerful is what is true and universal and natural for everyone. It's not surprising or anything that people would think this in these patterns, but it betrays a lack of critical conscience. It's a class of people mostly centered around California, who have strong interests economically and politically and who benefit directly by promulgating that vision to the whole world. Whether the rest of the world benefits is always a matter of dispute -- some will, some won't. Both this and Andreesen's recent screed lack any subtlety on this matter. I commented elsewhere about how that era was by no means some neo-liberal utopia. There was war all over the world and there's clearly in retrospect nothing prophetically smart about declaring a "long boom" right on the cusp of the insane .com crash and the 2008 blow-up right after (arguably part of a contiguous economic crisis.) It's no different than climate change denial by people working in the energy sector.

solomonb 3y ago
I agree 100%. Its the California Ideology through and through. I just wish more high profile leaders today had a bit of historical perspective.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Hah I was going to name-drop The California Ideology article, but figured that has gotten enough discussion here over the year, and would only muddy the waters.

sproketboy 3y ago

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RexFactorem 3y ago

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