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3 pressing issues for this decade: 1.) Automation, intelligent agents, and the end of wage labour as a means of redistributing money. Unconditional Basic Incom

by nkoren 13y ago

3 pressing issues for this decade: 1.) Automation, intelligent agents, and the end of wage labour as a means of redistributing money. Unconditional Basic Incomes will need to be phasing in by the end of the decade, or else we'll be in substantial trouble. 2.) Solar becoming cheaper than petrochemicals, increasingly high-density and fast-charging forms of electricity storage, and the very substantial disruptions (both positive and negative) this will entail. Geopolitically, Copper and Rare Earth Elements become the new oil. 3.) The collapsing legitimacy of Western Democracy as an institution, as it crumbles under the pressure of crony capitalism and a pervasive surveillance state. Western democracies will look more and more like China, rather than vice versa, prompting increasing Ukraine/Brazil-style unrest throughout the Western world (particularly acute if issue #1 is not dealt with). Many will propose new forms of governance (ala Liquid Democracy) but they won't be implemented within this timeframe. Top three issues in 50 years: 1.) Climate change impacts will be maximally hitting the fan at this point. A significant migration away from flood- and storm-lashed coastlines. Adaptation measures (eg. seawall construction) will be big business; cowboy geoengineering efforts will be one of the main thing that starts wars. 2.) This will be right around peak population (~9.3 billion). Combined with pervasive automation, standards of living will have risen dramatically, particularly in Asia and Africa. Although technologies will generally be more efficient and ephemeral, the combination of rising population + rising wealth means that peak resource consumption will be right about now. Competition over resources will reach its peak. 3.) Driven in part by the above conflicts, and in part by the dramatically falling cost of spaceflight (~2 orders of magnitude cheaper than than today), it will now make sense to begin importing significant amounts of energy and material from beyond the Earth. The opening of this frontier will entail a host of political, legal, and commercial conflicts. (#1 and #2 are really the killer issues here. This is the moment when technological civilisation gets has to thread the eye of its needle.) Top three issues in 100 years: 1.) How to support a sharply ageing and decreasing global population? 2.) How to integrate sentient AIs and highly modified humans into society? 3.) Sovereignty for the small-but-growing off-world colonies?

tedsanders 13y ago
I politely disagree with all 3 of your pressing issues for this decade. 1) Automation of human jobs has been happening since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It may end up being a serious problem for us, but I see no reason why the next ten years will be so different than the last 50. [Edit: Maybe it was a mistake to mention the industrial revolution. My main point is that why will the automation from 2014-2024 be significantly different than the automation from 2004-2014? I agree that automation will continue, but I am skeptical that we'll hit some breaking point.] 2) Solar is getting cheap, I agree. Nonetheless, there's no way in a mere ten years that we can manufacture TW of solar panels and upgrade the grid to handle them. The grid is extremely capital intensive, and power plants and power lines have lifetimes of ~50 years. Again, I agree with your assessment of the trend, but disagree with the timespan. 10 years from now things will look similar to how they look today. 3) Collapse of Western Democracy because of capitalism and pervasive surveillance? It hasn't happened in the last fifty years; what's different about the next ten?
- sitkack 13y ago
  3) Growth curves are curves, not linear. As per 2) changes in efficiencies across the board (end use, production, transmission) along with the point of use for solar means that the grid will be less relevant in the future, not more.
- nkoren 13y ago
  1.) Yes, automation has been replacing jobs (and creating new ones) since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The difference is that when it destroyed agricultural jobs, for example, it was relatively easy for workers to transfer to new jobs in factories with relatively little training. If you had reasonable manual dexterity and half a brain, you could make the shift in a few weeks. Today, the new jobs being created require VASTLY more education to enter, making the mobility of labour type much more difficult than in the past. This has actually been a growing problem since the mid 1970s, when industrial robotics began eliminating most factory labour and microcomputers began eliminating most secretarial labour. Not coincidentally, that's the point where wages and productivity gains became completely decoupled, as human labour became less valuable. This trend has been accelerating continuously since then, and will continue to accelerate into the next decade -- at the same time as the difficulty of entering new jobs is moving in the other direction. This has now led to pervasive structural unemployment and underemployment; those problems will continue to become worse. Left unchecked, they are fully capable of destabilising societies. 2.) Yes, the apparatus of the oil industry has a long lifespan and will have tremendous inertia, and I think we're in agreement that the balance of power production will be nowhere close to having shifted by then. However by the end of this decade, the writing will very much be on the wall as far as the petrochemicals are concerned, and energy companies and governments will be much more proactive about scrambling for a position (territory and IP-wise) in the post-oil world than they are today -- even though the actual balance of production will probably take a further 20 years to shift to solar. 3.) What's different about the next 10, relative to the last 50? 50 years ago, the Western Democracies hadn't dropped taxes on the rich to historically low levels, leading to the most extreme wealth inequalities in history; hadn't built a domestic surveillance apparatus surpassing the wildest dreams of the East German Stasi; hadn't militarised their police forces; and (fairly brief Red Scares notwithstanding) were more outwardly-directed in their paranoia, rather than declaring perpetual "wars" (largely upon their own populations) in the names drugs and terrorism and such. All of these are corrosive to democracy, and it's pretty obvious to me that toxicity has reached very unhealthy and ultimately unsustainable levels. [Edit: Just to be clear, I didn't say that Western Democracy will collapse in this decade; I said that its legitimacy will collapse (arguably is collapsing right now), which is something else. This has both internal repercussions in the nature of the political discourse/conflict, and external repercussions in that Western-style Democracy will less and less be what the rest of world aspires to. Also to be clear: I'm a big fan of Western Democracy -- more than any other form of government around -- I just think that in practice, they've been buggering things up pretty badly for the last decade or two, and consequently are going to have an extremely challenging decade relative to much of the rest of the world.]

by nkoren 13y ago

tedsanders 13y ago

I politely disagree with all 3 of your pressing issues for this decade. 1) Automation of human jobs has been happening since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It may end up being a serious problem for us, but I see no reason why the next ten years will be so different than the last 50. [Edit: Maybe it was a mistake to mention the industrial revolution. My main point is that why will the automation from 2014-2024 be significantly different than the automation from 2004-2014? I agree that automation will continue, but I am skeptical that we'll hit some breaking point.] 2) Solar is getting cheap, I agree. Nonetheless, there's no way in a mere ten years that we can manufacture TW of solar panels and upgrade the grid to handle them. The grid is extremely capital intensive, and power plants and power lines have lifetimes of ~50 years. Again, I agree with your assessment of the trend, but disagree with the timespan. 10 years from now things will look similar to how they look today. 3) Collapse of Western Democracy because of capitalism and pervasive surveillance? It hasn't happened in the last fifty years; what's different about the next ten?

sitkack 13y ago
3) Growth curves are curves, not linear. As per 2) changes in efficiencies across the board (end use, production, transmission) along with the point of use for solar means that the grid will be less relevant in the future, not more.
nkoren 13y ago
1.) Yes, automation has been replacing jobs (and creating new ones) since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The difference is that when it destroyed agricultural jobs, for example, it was relatively easy for workers to transfer to new jobs in factories with relatively little training. If you had reasonable manual dexterity and half a brain, you could make the shift in a few weeks. Today, the new jobs being created require VASTLY more education to enter, making the mobility of labour type much more difficult than in the past. This has actually been a growing problem since the mid 1970s, when industrial robotics began eliminating most factory labour and microcomputers began eliminating most secretarial labour. Not coincidentally, that's the point where wages and productivity gains became completely decoupled, as human labour became less valuable. This trend has been accelerating continuously since then, and will continue to accelerate into the next decade -- at the same time as the difficulty of entering new jobs is moving in the other direction. This has now led to pervasive structural unemployment and underemployment; those problems will continue to become worse. Left unchecked, they are fully capable of destabilising societies. 2.) Yes, the apparatus of the oil industry has a long lifespan and will have tremendous inertia, and I think we're in agreement that the balance of power production will be nowhere close to having shifted by then. However by the end of this decade, the writing will very much be on the wall as far as the petrochemicals are concerned, and energy companies and governments will be much more proactive about scrambling for a position (territory and IP-wise) in the post-oil world than they are today -- even though the actual balance of production will probably take a further 20 years to shift to solar. 3.) What's different about the next 10, relative to the last 50? 50 years ago, the Western Democracies hadn't dropped taxes on the rich to historically low levels, leading to the most extreme wealth inequalities in history; hadn't built a domestic surveillance apparatus surpassing the wildest dreams of the East German Stasi; hadn't militarised their police forces; and (fairly brief Red Scares notwithstanding) were more outwardly-directed in their paranoia, rather than declaring perpetual "wars" (largely upon their own populations) in the names drugs and terrorism and such. All of these are corrosive to democracy, and it's pretty obvious to me that toxicity has reached very unhealthy and ultimately unsustainable levels. [Edit: Just to be clear, I didn't say that Western Democracy will collapse in this decade; I said that its legitimacy will collapse (arguably is collapsing right now), which is something else. This has both internal repercussions in the nature of the political discourse/conflict, and external repercussions in that Western-style Democracy will less and less be what the rest of world aspires to. Also to be clear: I'm a big fan of Western Democracy -- more than any other form of government around -- I just think that in practice, they've been buggering things up pretty badly for the last decade or two, and consequently are going to have an extremely challenging decade relative to much of the rest of the world.]