The present is disappointing when taken from that perspective, but fortunately Elon Musk probably grew up reading the same books and dreaming about the same future.
The more people are talking about the fact that human civilization won't survive 4 degrees of warming in a 100 year time span (current projection by 2100), maybe the more society will see that although innovation is important, it's even more important is that we all accept to give up things deemed indispensable today.
Since that might not happen, 60 years time from now the future might look a lot more dystopian than this article would suggest.
Let's hope it doesn't come to that and we figure this out sooner rather than later.
To paraphrase a 70 year old man I talked to "I'm glad I have been alive in the time period I have", and that was before Trump and everything that stands for too.
I come from a formerly communist eastern European country where, before the fall of communism, media was tightly controlled and censored. We had more road fatalities than now with only 1/10 the amount of cars, much more work-related injuries, a significantly worse and lower-tech medical care, political prisoners tortured in God knows what ways. Yet, most people who are old enough to remember it feel nostalgic about that period and constantly say "look at the news nowadays".
Today, politicians are winning the populace by lamenting on unfair trade deals, globalism and foreigners taking jobs. Those jobs are not coming back, if they are, certainly not to humans.
We will see a growing class of people who are economically useless. (read Professor Yuval Noah Harari new book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_... ) And, no, the answer is not basic income. It's intelligence augmentation.
Intelligence is the only valuable currency nowadays and we are not acquiring enough of it fast enough compared to the machines.
Our only tool for intelligence augmentation is still education. Not good enough at all. It's already impossible to keep up; let alone learn something from scratch at a late stage in life and be expected to contribute something significant enough to derive long term economic advantage that can't be taken by a machine or globalists.
I think all other issues will fix themselves or reach a natural equilibrium (overpopulation, climate change etc.). But lack of intelligence is our doom.
Should we build our society on the imperative that every citizen must be "economically useful"? If production of basic goods and services is automated to such a high degree that only a small portion of people are needed to develop and maintain this machinery, aren't we just creating artificial, unproductive niches by trying to employ every citizen?
1. those superseded by tech who are incapable of adding "value" as defined by our current economy
2. those using the state to appropriate labour, such as banks using their monopoly on credit creation to force up land prices to extract labour
We should be focusing on taxing rentier activity to provide for the former in order to obliterate the latter.
Land value tax must be used to fund a basic income.
Shiv Sena, the racist party of Maharashtra, has also been pushing luddism mixed with racism. No Biharis should get an auto driver license, and they want to stop technology (Uber, Ola) from allowing Biharis/etc to compete via other means.
http://www.afternoondc.in/city-news/shiv-sena-mns-raise-red-... http://www.newsgram.com/maharashtra-only-marathi-auto-driver...
There were even riots in my town. http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/news/auto-strike-...
Terrorists (or "illegal armed groups" to use TechCrunch's euphamism) in Columbia and France have engaged in political violence to stop technology, and the government has sided with them.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/ubers-colombian-speed-bump... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3417215/Riot-police-...
See also SF/NY attacking AirBnB.
The anti-innovation backlash is a 2016 issue which we will hopefully resolve before 2076.
First, anti-innovation and anti-technology are two different things. Your parent seems to be referring to innovation in the tech innovation sense.
Second, opposing specific companies that market themselves as the epitome of innovation (Uber, AirBnB) is not the same as being genuinely anti-innovation. It's possible to oppose specific (esp. business model!!!) innovations without adopting an anti-innovation or anti-technology mindset.
I don't see anything particularly worrying about people opposing specific innovations -- especially innovations tied more to business innovation than technology innovation (e.g., human Ubers and AirBnB's). Municipalities opposed to sharing economy apps aren't blinding following some unsubstantiated populist sentiment. They typically have a different set of priorities and assessments, but it's not generally accurate to characterize those concerns as luddism.
Anti-technology is much scarier than and very different from opposition to "sharing economy" apps. Conflating to two cheapens the meaning of anti-technology and makes it harder to oppose true luddism.
Acid test: would cities leave Airbnb alone if they were getting all these guests through conventional travel agents? Would they protest this as hard if it were used to get rooms in neighborhoods/buildings zoned for it? Do they equally object to apps that streamline the reporting of antagonistic neighbors, like those who abuse Airbnb?
That doesn't make their criticisms justified (though here I think they are), but it does mean it's not part of anti-technology backlash.
People will have to cooe with being consumers ALWAYS and producers MAYBE, sometimes.
Instead of having a world-wide federation, we will most probably have a period of dissonance around the nations where people will close more and more inside their borders, until they feel they have the power of their lives in their hands again.
I know you won't like it, but I will blame unregulated capitalism for this one. Media is so sensational, because they know nobody will watch / read anything that has a boring title. Social networks are becoming click-junky. Advertisement is fraudulent on a lot of levels. Globalization, instead of making poorest people not so poor has made rich people richer and so on. And no wonder this tendency is going worse with such a high-priced education.
The question is what can we do about it? How do we rebuild public trust in the institutions (science and education) that should guide the country in the right path even if the people are asleep at the wheel? Trust in experts is at an all time low. Fact checking appears to have failed = "The fact checkers are biased!". And people are retreating into their media bubbles.
I often see the "Pass it on" billboards (http://www.values.com/inspirational-sayings-billboards) - perhaps we need something for science and education? ("Clean air regulations save x lives a year in your community", "Every $1 spent on education saves $x on welfare down the road". I hate billboards but at least they would break through the media bubble many of us live in.
Experts and institutions need to care about the people and stand up against the malign parts of the capitalist establishment.
I think it gave me a good perspective when reading these same kinds of predictions made today. For the most part, they complely missed on the existence, much less the impact, on things like social media.
It was easy to predict the physical nature of small, hand-held computing devices, but their actual impact on how society functions was missed.
Even watching "realistic" contemporary sc-fi like The Expanse, they focus on the physical aspect of how realistic space colonization would work with slow space travel, but completely ignore the role of AI and drones. Will we even need real people to live on an asteroid city, even if Mars is colonized?
Maybe I'm getting too jaded.
None of this will happen by 2076. If someone finds this comment then, I told you so.
I'm not trying to be morbid. That's the one thing about the future that you can be sure of. If your approach for thinking about the future doesn't include that, you're not being very wise.
Will we make democracy work for the average citizen? Will they have control of their data? Do we get to preserve our culture and the rights deriving from it given the continuing mass migration? Will we figure out basic income? If not, what's the job all those people are going to hold? Will we stop concentrating people in a few attractive megacities surrounded by population desert? Will we stop preying on young like we do today? Perhaps when there'll be no young to speak of? What'll happen to religions? To parenting?
Will the illusion of "middle class" finally evaporate? Will it then be a standoff between several equally powerful society sides? Or is it winner takes all, not having to consider any losers anymore?
Here's my take:
- Replicator is unlikely. The machine that makes everything is like the drug that cures everything and the man who knows everything. We already have specialist replicators, specialist drugs, and specialist professors. For the same reason, we won't get a generalist AI, just a bunch of very good specialists.
- James Webb will tell us within a few years whether there's lots of life or none. Some realisation about just how likely life is will happen as we use the JWT to scan various planets.
- Similarly with superconductivity, we'll either find a way to do it, or a reason why it can't be done.
- Economics: the revolution here is how society changes when there's a bunch of old people around, mostly healthy and mostly skilled. I suspect people will want to be able to retrain, and so the old model where there was only time (opportunity cost) to go to school when you were young will change. It probably already has for some people.
- Tech/Econ: society will have thought hard about giving everyone a decent living while the tech people build just about everything.
> The world in 2076: The anti-science backlash has begun
Science is like fashion. We (as a society) might be pro-science in 2025, anti-science in 2040, pro-science again in 2055 and finally begin to recover from anti-science in 2076. In other words, this one might change very very fast. There might be much more options, like "everybody likes science but it grinds to halt" and "science is loudly disapproved but a lot of fruitful private research goes on"
And the claim is based on... which proofs or sources? Or is it "just a fashion" that some people actually want proofs or sources for some claims?
My claim is that, at least in Europe, what we today call "science" was something that wasn't unfashionable at least the last 350 years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3mtDC2fQo&t=22m47s
Around 10 minutes on that subject, that part of the presentation is called the "Naming Rights."
I have a theory that on a long-term universal scale of general intelligence, humans are unbelievably stupid. What is the absolute minimum, basement level of general intelligence necessary to develop a material technology? That's what we have, because we've only just managed it. Seems obvious, doesn't it? Yet why doesn't everybody intuitively realize this? Why did it take me 50 years to work it out? ...Exactly.
At least human predictions about the future are relatively predictable.
