I have a long blog post planned covering 5 future scenarios. This thread would be a good place to test-drive an MVP... Scenario 1 is exponential progress - the

I have a long blog post planned covering 5 future scenarios. This thread would be a good place to test-drive an MVP... Scenario 1 is exponential progress - the Singularity which Ray Kurzweil thinks is inevitable and which Eliezer Yudkowsky is trying to bring about. Progress feeds into progress until we enter technology heaven. Scenario 2 is steady progress - the worldview of TED talks and most of Silicon Valley. We gradually solve social and technological problems, and the future is an improved version of the present. Scenario 3 is stagnation. We reach a point where our ingenuity and resources are only sufficient to maintain our current level of civilisation. Peter Thiel might be a proponent of this worldview. If you think "business as usual" is taking us nowhere fast, you're likely more interested in out there ideas such as seasteading, charter cities and bitcoin which promise to open up new vistas of innovation. Scenario 4 is steady decline. Dwindling resources lead to fraying social structures which lead to cascading problems - new problems arise faster than we can deal with them. It's not a popular viewpoint, but it's happened to many complex societies in history. Note that if scenario 2 tends to be a liberal viewpoint, and scenario 3 tends to be a somewhat libertarian viewpoint, then scenario 4 is probably a traditionalist conservative viewpoint (conservatism as in Edmund Burke, not George Bush). Scenario 5 is sudden collapse: everything appears to be going fine until suddenly we're all killed by global warming/nuclear war/asteroids/etc. Surprisingly, scenario 5 is more popular than scenario 4, usually because certain groups believe they will live out the apocalypse and get to see the rest of decadent society destroyed.