The World in 2076 | Hacker News Reader

The World in 2076

newscientist.com

It's curious how these predictions always turn out to be based on the current technology, pushed to its limits. Kinda like sci-fi from the 1950s predicts advanced space travel but barely any computers in the early 21st century.

This is a great observation. I grew up reading books that said we would be living in torus shaped space stations and shuttling back and forth to the moon. As you pointed out, there was never any emphasis on computers in these predictions, just video conferencing at best.

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.

I'm reading 'The Stainless Steel Rat' to my daughters as bedtime reading right now. They're loving it, but I can't help noticing how dated much of the technology is. I remember even reading it back in the late 80s it was beginning to show it's age a bit, but then it's 5 years older than I am. Truly great story though, lots of fun.

I could have sworn that Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov both had computers in their sci-fi universes, but now that I try to think about it, you're probably right. The closest thing I can think of to a computer is HAL from 2001.

They had computers, but they usually remained gigantic expensive machines. They could forsee supercomputing, but not personal computing.

But you have to hand it to them, they and many of their contemporaries did an amazing job building the tech for their futuristic worlds. You could read Foundation or Childhood's End now and you probably wouldn't notice that they were written in the 50s.

I feel it's unfortunate articles like these don't put more emphasis on climate change, and instead still keep up the narrative that we will innovate ourselves out of the problem. There is not reason to believe we will, and I expect society as a whole to already be heavily impacted by climate change by 2076.

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.

My first thought before reading the link was that the world of 2076 would be one in which we have utterly devastated the Earth's biosphere, and we are using all of our technological resources to sustain a human-survivable planet while simultaneously looking for other homes.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that and we figure this out sooner rather than later.

This is the thing that has me utterly scared. I've got young daughters who may potentially live to 2100 and the state of the world in the years leading up that point has me incredibly worried. I wish I was thinking more positively about their future rather than wondering where will be the best place to grow food given climate change, how will they protect themselves, or where is the best place to shelter in my house if a nuke hits the local city.

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.

Media plays an unforgivable role in convincing people that the world is becoming more unsafe. In fact, cars, equipment and most public places are safer than ever, but the media is able to reach an ever bigger audience with every sensationalist title about an exceptional event.

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".

I'm worried about climate change making food production unviable causing conflict, and the rise of fascism.

Road casualties etc. don't get a look in.

I feel it's unfortunate that comments like this continue to spread the naive idea that anything but innovation will resolve the climate issue. Human nature is what it is. There is plenty of historic evidence to believe that innovation is our way out. Like we innovated ourselves out of material scarcity during the industrial revolution. Like we innovated ourselves out of the coal Industrial era using other carbon fuels. Like we have already started to innovate ourselves out of the hydrocarbon era with other energetic sources which by the way will need to be out-innovated again by our grandchildren because they are not perfect too.

Innovation is not magic; it is the product of investment. The time to innovate was 20 years ago; now it's effectively too late. The climate has already changed and the rate of change is not slowing. We will "innovate", all right, by necessity, and ride it out as best we can; but we can't innovate our way back to the climate we had before.

the "too late" death bell has been ringing since antiquity.

The anti-innovation backlash is the most likely thing to happen.

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.

The anti-innovation backlash is here.

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.

I think your examples are a bit hyper-bolic.

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.

I don't think anyone, besides maybe a few extreme environmentalists, is opposed to technology in the abstract.

All luddism - including the original luddites - are opposed to specific technology that they believe harms them. The original luddites were manual weavers who were opposed to mechanical looms that did their job faster and better than they did. The modern luddites are lazy Marathi auto drivers who are opposed to Uber (or Biharis) outcompeting them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

> All luddism...

All luddism to date. The article and GP are predicting something new -- a generally anti-technology sentiment.

The post I replied to stated that such a sentiment is already here.

I don't think opposition to Uber or AirBnB demonstrates the sort of general anti-technology or anti-innovation sentiment predicted by the article.

It may very well be the case that this general sentiment arises out of a large confederation of people who have become obsolete for various reasons, who become generally anti-technology due to particular technologies ruining their lives. In fact, I grant you that this is the most probable scenario.

But that sort of confederation doesn't exist in today's world, and there's plenty of opposition to Uber/AirBnB that is not motivated by luddism. Lazy Marathi auto drivers may oppose Uber, but they aren't the only critics. In fact, it's not even clear to me that taxi drivers are the most populous critics of Uber.

I wouldn't exactly call Uber a piece of innovation. It's a phone app for hiring taxi drivers from a pool of cheap labor. You want to claim innovation? Let's find the people torching self-driving cars.

Five years ago if I wanted to hire a car to pick me and up and take me somewhere I had to call a taxi company and pray that someone would show up 90 minutes later. Now I hit a button and someone is at my door in ~5 minutes.

Do you think shopping malls are an innovation?

The point is, to be innovative, there should be an innovation. Not just scaling up...

There is a world of difference between "hiring X from a pool of cheap labor" and what Uber does. ODesk is hiring X from a cheap pool of labor. Uber is push a button and you get where you are going.

Fundamentally, Uber is a Walrasian auctioneer that solves the socialist calculation problem within the transportation sector.

I consider that to be innovation.

Go ahead and consider, but it's an accounting innovation, not a technological one.

As throwaway says, lumping in Airbnb with Luddism is unjustified. The criticism there is they're facilitating the illegal conversion of quiet buildings and neighborhoods into loud tourist party zones stocked with transient randos that haven't been onboarded to the local rules ("hey, don't leave your stuff in the halls").

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.

Why does everyone need to work and contribute to society intellectually? Throughout history it has not been the case.

People will have to cooe with being consumers ALWAYS and producers MAYBE, sometimes.

> We will see a growing class of people who are economically useless.

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?

There are two types of economically useless people:

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.

As older as I get ( 30 now ) I feel more and more the world is going to dystopia, rather than utopia.

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 unpleasant truth is that this dystopia isn't coming out of nowhere, it is being built with our own hands. Our everyday desires, decisions, actions and inaction decide what will be built (more apps) and what won't (nextgen cures).

I'm not sure capitalism deserves the entire blame - some of it is just human nature (it's harder to care about something that happens in a distant location or time).

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.

>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.

Experts and institutions need to care about the people and stand up against the malign parts of the capitalist establishment.

Though it's always fun to read/watch such predictions, chaos theory suggests we have absolutely no clue as to what the future will look like. The black swan is a nice book explaining why predictions generally fail.

When I was a middle schooler in the 90s my grandpa would bring over stacks of old Popular Mechanics magazines from the 50s-70s that were predicting what life would be like in future decades.

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?

"...The way our statistical analysis works, the farther into the future you go, the more accurate the projection. It's based on a kind of non-linear dynamics, whereby small fluctuations tend to factor out over time." - Julien Bashir

How long until this feels dated?

Maybe I'm getting too jaded.

You aren't. Look at predictions about the future from 1916. They're the definition of quaint.

I've gotten the opposite impression. There was a set of drawings from 1910 predicting Paris in 2010. There were some obvious whiffs, but it broadly predicted automation, remote audio/video communications, and other things.

> it broadly predicted automation, remote audio/video communications, and other things

It trivially extrapolated technologies it already had: macro-automation and long-range communication (extrapolated from the early telephones to video). Did it predict laptops or smartphones though?

Predicting advances in technology are easy. What's hard is predict is it's impact on society.

How many people in 1950 would have guessed that social media would be a thing?

None of the things listed will happen by 2076. Unfortunately I will be too dead by 2076 to say I told you so, so I have to say it now.

None of this will happen by 2076. If someone finds this comment then, I told you so.

I think this is a very important point. If you want to think wisely about the future, remember this: You're dead.

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.

Right now I'm more concerned about society changes than technology changes.

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?

You'll have to decide what an 'average' citizen is, first.

What's the average citizen will be like? Will we be homogenous on the scale of the world? One contry? One region? Will there be classes? How they will interact? Will they consider themself one society after all? Will there be large groups of outcasts or lowlives?

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?

Well, they have approximately one testicle and one ovary, slightly under ten fingers, and live some hundreds or thousands of miles beneath southeast Asia.

I think the "average" person on earth is 35 year old Indian male.

Or if that's even the right question. Do we have an obligation to raise the minimum standard in our society, so that no decent citizen is starving or in pain, even if that doesn't optimize the average? How much should we count future generations? There's tons of philosophy that must be included in any practical discussion.

Some of these are science predictions, and some are economics predictions.

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.

Link to a page about their special issue, though it does have a TL;DR of each article. Seems that they are almost equally split between utopia (energy is free and we can make everything) and dystopia (everyone is becoming anti-science and oh about that nuclear war...)

One of the best ways to get me to sign up for a magazine I've ever seen! Great tantalizing content list all in one place followed by an article with a paywall a bit beyond the fold.

This one is funny:

> 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"

Countries that turn their back on science will fall behind.

Exactly. "What has happened in these nations to support these discoveries and what has happened when they ended?"

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."

That's an awesome video, I think you should post it separately.

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it. I'm not in an way involved with the videos, I just remembered the talk and searched for it for the post. It's just a part of the talks that happened in Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA, November 5-7, 2006. There is more, but it can possibly disappear from the internet in this form if it gets too much attention. Maybe it's better leaving them in the comments.

Will there still be competition for progress?

It depends if we remain individual nations that chart different courses, or if we are conglomeratized into trans-nation states like the EU.

> Science is like fashion

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science

Every decade brings a technology movement that steers the path of humanity in a certain direction. Nobody would've predicted the rise of social media (yes, including Snapchat, Instagram, Pokemon Go)and how much of the humanity gets consumed by it, thereby derailing us from the track we were on the decade prior to it.

Why did this website want to have notifications enabled for it?

No singularity?

It's always 20 years away.

And will be 20 years away in 2076, like it was in 1976 and (in its previous incarnation as millenialist religious beliefs) 1876 and 76BC

At least human predictions about the future are relatively predictable.

Would be a pretty short and boring prediction. Individual predictions for specific areas are far more interesting.

We don't even have a vague outline of a guiding principle of a theory for what general purpose 'strong' intelligence actually is, let alone a road map to achieving anything like it. So no, probably not.

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.

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