Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 50 years? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 50 years?

81 pointshereiskkb91 comments

In relation to the Technological and Geo-political landscape.

True story: inspired by some dude on the internet, I thought I'd try my hand at "predictions". I made a post with my technology predictions for the next 10 or 15 years (not 50, I'm not THAT naive).

I don't have a personal website, so I placed that post on Google+, to have it for future reference. Boy, do I suck at predictions.

What were they?

Somehow, one involved Google+ staying alive.

Of course I would forget that.. that's kinda' the point of storing it somewhere where I could go back to it, many years later (also I wanted somewhere where it was stored with a verifiable timestamp so that I could share it X years later and make it obvious that it's not something I made up on the spot, but something that I truly predicted years ago)

(I'm pretty sure one of them was around the idea that "data science will be the new 'computer science' in terms of job attractivity", but I honestly forgot the others. There were something like "20 things" or anyway a fixed number of predictions, some that I felt were bolder and some that were "safe bets").

The ecosystem has collapsed, humanity's last holdout - the salesforce.com trailhead Antarctica bunker is lifeless and silent, but hope is not lost - the probe holding Elon Musk's semen journeys onward to alpha proxima.

The war on general purpose computing will arrive, finish quickly and be won by the totalitarians.

Normal computers will not be permitted to produce code. All developers will have to submit passport and dna before being allowed to work. Computers capable of producing code will be accounted for centrally, it will be illegal to own one without a licence.

Cash will be done away with by the following means or similar:

https://blogs.imf.org/2019/02/05/cashing-in-how-to-make-nega...

Significant dislocations of coastal population will cause shifts in demographics and voting. Some regimes will fall because of it, the UN Charter on refugees will be amended.

Resentment against entrenched industry shills and oligarchy will lead to extra judicial acts of revenge. The actors behind this will not coalesce the way religious fundamentalism has, but will be understood as a common root cause much as luddism was.

A new small C conservatism will replace radically economic reductionism of the Chicago school kind, massive public works and Keynesian intervention will predominate. Low tax regimes will find the cost of corporatism in health and lifestyle terms counter productive, extreme wealth taxes and punishments for evasion will be international.

Literacy will not fall, but writing will be uncommon.

Google will be remembered fondly before dismemberment. Facebook will be regarded as an aberation. Religions will compete on TV. Access to intelligent agents (not aware ai but ubiquitous use of ai derived optimisation and machine learning based systems) will be almost a right, where access to data is a right, albeit only if identified. Use of VPN and data hiding will be a first class felony in itself and linked to some kind of precrime with presumption of innocence lost.

> Literacy will not fall, but writing will be uncommon.

I wonder if this is already a reality for some. I can't remember the last time I had to write more than my name.

Think that through one more time. :)

Changing attitudes to advertisements and the upcoming generation's obsession with "authenticity" will push all brands and ads further into "lifestyle"-type presentation. Every furniture store and potato chip company will have social accounts for sharing memes.

Brand loyalty will merge deeper into the human experience, and in the 50-100 year timescale few living humans will be able to conceive of brands and products as separate from their personal identity. Boundaries between socio-economic groups will become more strongly reinforced along product lines (I believe this has already begun - see the Chik-fil-A/Hobby Lobby protests and reaction, or the reaction from both sides to Nike's support of Colin Kaepernick, and other recent corporate "woke" behavior).

Much more of the written words we consume in any form (newspaper, online opinion articles, listicles, etc) will be secretly sponsored, written by and for the benefit of a particular product, brand, or interest group. Even seemingly unrelated things, like local news, will be used to manage global brand visibility at scale as ML's ability to write comprehensibly comes into its own and articles are produced algorithmically.

Similar algorithmic information delivery systems will be used to drive even more granular opinion influence for things like state and county elections. Exploitation of outdated laws and regulations, and things like gerrymandering, will become even worse than we could have imagined as the tools to locate and predict vote probabilities at the individual level becomes even more powerful.

I'm hopeful for a more cooperative human centric future. I think we have the technology to replace old systems and ideas. Things are getting better more then they're getting worse for so many people and I really want to see that pattern accelerate to the point all preventable disease is addressed and access to medical care is universal, there is no risk of famine due to technology advances in food production, there is no war, for obvious reasons. And on the other hand, I worry that human beings will mostly be dead and areas that are currently landlocked will be a costal town for the few remaining rich people who have replaced the need for the lower classes by automation. But mostly the former

At a global level things are undoubtedly getting much better, in terms of human quality of life. Hundreds of millions of people are rising out of poverty, violence is on the way down, women’s and minority rights are expanding in most of the world, and most of this is happening in developing nations that need it the most.

I worth though that we are doing thus by passing the costs down to future generations. Fur a techie analogy, it’s like looking at the balance sheet if Blackberry in 2008. Profits were on the way up, at a raw financial level they were doing better than ever, but there core business was rotting away.

> costal town for the few remaining rich people who have replaced the need for the lower classes by automation

In this scenario there will be no industry left to speak of to support the automation. The remaining people, regardless of their initial wealth, will not be rich.

I don't really think about this in a real way. I think we are going to be ok, but like this is my fever dream

Rather nightmare

Nothing of real significance will happen. I know this for a fact this because in 1967 I wrote about 2017. Nothing become true, Finland does not have Space Forces, cars do not fly, lasers do remove space junk from orbit etcetc.

The Lasering of space junk was part of Finland's 100 year celebration, instead of fireworks the worn-out space-vessel "Kokko" was destroyed with lasers.

You think nothing of real significance happened between 1967 and 2017? The 90's was extreme with both internet and cellphones becoming mainstream, suddenly you no longer needed several bookshelves full of encyclopedias just to look up information and everyone was reachable from anywhere! 2000's and 2010's where pretty lackluster in comparison as they just fleshed out the offerings from the 90's, but we could very well have another decade similar to the 90's again.

I had a personal computer in 1975. And radio amateurs had a pocketable device he could make phone calls everywhere in Finland. The coverage was probably better than cell-phones today, because at 7 Mhz. I also had internet address in 1985: timonoko@nokia.fi.

Nothing much else has happened in last 30 years.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/timonoko/102552851/in/album-72...

You having a computer or your friend having a cellphone didn't change the world, internet and cellphones becoming cheap and mainstream did.

I have instant access to something approaching the sum total of human knowledge, can navigate to anywhere in the world without a map, can be instantly connected via video to any person in the world, but nothing has changed?

Groceries come to my door. I haven't been to a store in months. I can watch a movie in my hand. I can learn things waiting in line at the grocery store that would have taken a day in the library previously.

It’s a little less than 50 years away by now, so the schedule is clearly getting tight, and it is also a huge undertaking, so nothing should be taken for granted, but given current technology, it might actually be possible for a human to walk on the surface of the moon by July 20 2069.

Music(Songs) at-least in English language would be largely, completely machine generated.

Reasoning: songs leading the charts are mostly written by same lyricists, music is largely dependent on auto tunes, repetitive sections, machine learning algorithms for audio processing is growing at a fast rate.

Possibly true for the horrendous muzak-like audial otyughs known as chart music. People will never cease to make artistically meaningful music, though.

- Google will continue to exist, but lose relevance to emerging companies, similar to IBM.

- Virtual reality headsets will replace both smartphones and desktop computers.

- Roe v. Wade will be overturned, but the constitution will be amended to protect abortion rights.

- Brexit will continue being delayed indefinitely.

- San Francisco will start its own Navy.

- White people will become a minority in the United States, but a majority in Japan.

- Cranston, Rhode Island exceed Paris, France in tourists/year, but not in total revenue from tourism.

- A saintly king[1] will take control of France, conquer Greece, and convert the entire world to Catholicism.

- The Higgs Boson particle will remain undiscovered.

- Ohio will become a Marxist-Leninist one-party state.

- The Jewish Messiah will arrive, and construct the 3rd temple. It will be converted into a Walmart due to lack of attendance.

- The Scandinavian language will split into three mutually unintelligible dialects: Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. In Iceland, everyone will just speak English.

- North and South Korea will be re-united, but subsequently re-partitioned into East and West Korea due to partisan violence.

- Harvard and MIT will be combined into a single institution, which will exclusively grant degrees in "Religious Studies," "Computer Engineering," and "Religious Studies And Computer Engineering."

- London, Chicago, and several other major cities will cease to exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Roman_Emperor#Catholic_tr...

More regulations More border between authocratic countries and western More military budgets, less economy grow More brainwashed people More monopolies in hi-tech, although it won't be monopoly but in fact 99% will go to 1-5 companies. More protectonism, less global economic grow Oil will be slowly going down in price. Although not that much for authocratic regime fall, they just become more and more authocratic. But at least it should make them eat themselves. Slowly percentage of retarded people will grow in such countries as money flow from oil decreases. And clever people will immigrate to west.

Elon musk will make some cash on tourists to the moon but nothing revolutional. Maybe they will make some hotel on moon for rich people to have fun.

Authoritarian states win against democracies.

This is clearly the big struggle of today. Will democracies survive in the face of rising authoritarianism?

Real dairy only comes from hobby farms - artificial milk is at least as good, and tuned for it's final use as drinking milk, cream, cheese, etc, and different health needs.

Many juices and even some pulps, flours etc, are also largely made using engineered yeasts and bacteria. Fruit is reserved for eating directly, or adding as an additive to gain a 'made with real fruit' label.

Similarly most real meat is more a speciality food, reserved for steaks, roasts, ribs, etc, anything processed (minced beef, chicken fillets, soups, curries, pies, sausages) is made using artificial meat. Much pasture is reforested.

We might have a cure to most diseases available to all or only a few would be able to afford good healthcare & rest will have shorter lifespans.

Economic inequality would increase manifolds. There will be less poverty but a whole lot of people struggling for basic healthcare & jobs.

Automation, Robots & AI will be an integral part of society.

Virtual worlds might be as important as real ones. Virtual real estate might be worth more than physical real estate.

People will be dumber as no real problems or creative jobs to work on.

E-sports might be more popular than actual sport.

Some cities might be lost due to sea leval rise.

In 50 years time, someone on this list will be mostly (or at least directionally) right in their predictions. If they are still alive, they will be lauded as a savant and sage. The more outlandish the 2019 prediction was, if correct, the more recognition they will receive.

And thus all we will actually learn in 50 years time is that human nature changes very little. We will still retrospectively reward success based on chance alone, not distinctive insight.

In short, statistics will continue to be an underappreciated practice.

I think a lot of applications will be built without the need for developers, significantly reducing the number of professional developers needed.

Also, testing will be fully AI automated, other than some initial configuration there won't be the need to write tests manually.

Anything that can be done by robots and AI will be done by robots and AI. Things like driving, house cleaning and cooking (at least for restaurants) will be fully done by robots.

I’ll take the opposite side of that prediction - driving, cooking, and cleaning will be part of the jobs that people compete to get, as the data entry and middle management jobs get wiped out.

I don’t think anything that involves physical variations (I.e. manual labor in differing environments) will be automated for a long time.

Tech: CRISPR-CAS9 and better bioengineering. It's slow going stuff, but hot damn, is it ever powerful. By definition it plays well with itself. The 'cross products' are tough to deal with, thus the slow going part, but when it does mesh, man oh man!

Geo-Political: Africa's rise. ~2.5 Billion people are going to be born in Africa in the next 50 years. By 2050, the median wage for a family in Africa is going to be ~$65k/yr (in 2010 dollars). Most families will have 2 kids or less there. Africa is transitioning from stage 1-2 into stage 3-4. From walking and bicycles to cars and planes. Those markets and those young people will be very thirsty for better goods, services, education, financial planning, democratic representation, etc. Generally, the center of global trade is going to shift from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean and the people that ring the old monsoon markets. Addis Abba's already has a metro system that serves ~700k people a day. The bullet train from Nairobi to Mombassa is already going ~300km/hr. Kenya already has a ~600MW geothermal power station (~1/3 of Hoover Dam). Nigeria's Eko Atlantic project is ~half done with reclaiming ~200 Manhattan's worth of land area from the Atlantic Ocean. It's 'Great Wall of Africa' is mostly done now and is proofed to the worst climate change can throw at it, due in part to the 8 weather satellites that Nigeria has currently in orbit. Africa is going to be where a young, vibrant, well educated, culturally diverse, middle class is trying to make it's mark and improve the lives of their children. It is most assuredly not a place of 'shit-hole countries', and The Import-Export Bank of China knows this. The West should know to shelve the racism, and fast, for the good of it's geo-political future and it's pocket-book.

1) developers won't be needed anymore (https://medium.com/thron-tech/as-a-service-offering-is-chang...) 2) population decline will be huge, but not for the reasons most ppl talk about. It will be because we will reach a "good enough" sex robot and that will end most physical relationships between sexes 3) there will be just one or two languages in the whole world, with a huge loss in diversity from a culture standpoint 4) we will be augmented with tech and bio implants to enhance our perceptions (better sight and hearing). Genetical imperfection will be only for poor people 5) cars will be disappearing in favor of "transportation pods" that will act as "transport-as-a-service" elements. 6) HUGE wars will arise because of the crisis in capitalims. Work won't be a reason to get a salary anymore, this will lead to the biggest social crisis ever and many more... but i'll stop here :D

Ive long said that a good enough/affordable sex robot is more dangerous to the western civilization than literally any weapon of mass destruction.

I want a scifi novel where those "good enough sex robots" end up being dropped into foreign countries as a weapon of mass depopulation.

> there will be just one or two languages in the whole world

In fifty years? Lots of people currently breathing will be alive in fifty years. Even if, starting tomorrow, every single baby was brought up speaking English or Chinese, there will still be lots of old people speaking other languages fifty ears from now.

For the US:

With lab-grown meat agriculture has mostly collapsed, since most of it was either meat or food for meat production.

Most small cities are essentially dead, at least in terms of opportunities to improve ones life, since there are no jobs for low skilled workers. Those jobs were mostly meat plants or trucking and transport is done with automated trucks. There were other jobs but those where mostly in support of those jobs, or incidental to peoples life.

High Skilled workers have moved to the cities, but most of their income is eaten up by rent. Those who got there earlier and got a reasonably affordable place to live are making a lot of money.

Both suffer a lot less because things have continued to get cheaper -- you don't need to travel the world with good enough 3d glasses, most things we have physically today are available in "phones" (though nobody knows why they are called that anymore, as nobody use them to make old style phone calls). Without meat production, most oil-based transport and most stuff the environment is doing okay. It helps that not too many babies are being born (turns out, 3d porn is just that much nicer).

On an international scene things are looking much better: most of the world has cached up to the standard of living the US had in 1980, with the exception of basket case countries that are essentially still basket cases (North Korea, Eritrea). China has court up with the US and are beginning to face the same problems the US had, though somewhat dampened by the lack of freedom. Despite this, they have had to find make work projects for their people, and have had to grant more and more freedom to stay in power.

In short the world will be a lot freer, a lot more equal, but inside countries there will be a lot less hope and those countries will be much less equal.

Since at least medieval times, civilization as a whole has tended to move towards freer, more democratic societies - almost without any meaningful, lengthy changes. This is particularly true since the industrial revolution. (Correct me if I'm wrong above.)

Given this, I find it hard to believe that future societies would somehow become more oppressive. Rather, I think true democracy will have reached virtually, if not practically, all of the world. Menial tasks have largely become automated. Most people are well fed, secure and have access to education and information. Brick and mortar stores (be they for clothing, groceries or anything else) are largely a thing of luxury.

Speaking of education, most societies do not emphasize a traditional educational path involving 3-5 years at universities like they do now. Higher institutions now play a larger role but the benefits of technology in information diffusion and communication now means we have more meaningful and regarded ways of acquiring knowledge in other places, in other periods of life and at different paces.

> Since at least medieval times, civilization as a whole has tended to move towards freer, more democratic societies - almost without any meaningful, lengthy changes. This is particularly true since the industrial revolution. (Correct me if I'm wrong above.)

This is a very Eurocentric view. In the rest of the world, this mostly wasn't (and still isn't) the case.

Yeah, I realize I'm being rather eurocentric. The setbacks have been longer and more plentiful in Africa and Asia, but I maintain that the trend is also true there.

Where exactly? I'd say that democracies took root only in places (such as India, Japan) which were conquered and then organized by western countries. Other than that, not so much.

I don't know of any African countries where the people's democratic freedoms are much more prevalent today than they were centuries ago.

> true democracy

Can you explain what you mean by this? Are there countries today that qualify as "true democracies"?

Oh, I should have worded that better. I do not have terribly high thresholds for this. I pretty much mean that I'd expect China to evolve into something more akin to a typical western European democracy, rather than into what we have in Russia, which imo is only democratic in name.

  - All transport is electric and self-driving
  - Most meat is made artificially or non-meat substitutes 
  - New world order will be USA-India-Japan-Iran Vs China-Russia-Vietnam. (Europe to stay neutral)
  - Home robots doing chores
  - Lots of jobs have been automated leading to change in work
  - Maximum workweek hours reduced to 4-days or flexible working
  - Trips to the moon as regular as satellite launches and ISS trips are today
  - Underground (and undersea( road tunnels connecting most of the world
  - Advances in tracking and objective measurement of *everything* (Health, happiness etc)
  - World energy needs mostly run off renewable resources (wind, solar, hydro)
  - Borderless travel for most people across most countries
  - Spread and establishment of liberal democracy across most countries
  - World population more stable

I agree on most of the arguments in the book "The Sovereign Individual" on what will most probably happen in the next decades. Summary: https://www.nateliason.com/notes/sovereign-individual

I managed to read the summary. Sounded like blockchain-sovereign citizen crossover fanfic.

the book was written in 1999, far before a blockchain existed

- Demographic projections say that we'll be reaching "peak human" where depopulation starts happening, and the urbanisation of humanity should be just about finished. So that should end real estate as being a valuable investment; it becomes a liability where liveable accommodation goes derelict because there's no-one to live in it.

- If we have fusion power, even if the reactor is the size of a battleship, every country's military will have a space program.

- Transportation continues to become cheaper, faster and more autonomous. There's no point in owning anything any more because you can rent it and have it delivered as quickly as you could get it out of a cupboard. You just pay a flat monthly fee depending on what levels of luxury you want, and that entitles you to whatever you need.

After Second American Civil War of 2025 and the following Drone Wars across the globe, the nation-state system will fall. It'll be replaced by a mix of city-states near the coasts and corporate territories in the hinterlands, with the two existing in an uneasy tension.

Several city-states (notably SFBay, NYC DC, Pearl River, Amsterdam, Venice, Florida, and Houston) will be wiped off the map, either by the Drone Wars or by rising sea levels and increasingly violent storms. Also, regions like the American Midwest, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Bengal/Burma/Myanmar area will be severely depopulated as regional conflicts and border skirmishes lead to the near-extinction of the local populace from drone cleansing efforts. Sub-Saharan Africa (now split between the Corporate States of Alcoa, DeBeers, and BP) will still be populated, but not by Africans. The Corporate State of ExxonMobil in Northern Athabasca will be a rising power, as will be the Corporate States of Monsanto in Canada and Russia. The City States of Barrow, Cambridge Bay, Taloyoak, and Fort Ross will be rising economic powers on the Arctic Ocean, as will be there lesser-populated equivalents in Siberia. The Corporate State of SpaceX will just be establishing the first Mars colony.

Standards of living for the survivors will be high. The near complete destruction of existing infrastructure in the Drone Wars will allow surviving cities to rebuild with more modern technology; in particular, the widespread adoption of robotics in that conflict means that most daily transportation and logistic problems are taken care of by machines. Everything is electrified, powered by renewable solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal sources. The severe depopulation in the Drone Wars means that the survivors are able to bargain for higher wages and better working conditions, and many Corporate States are run as egalitarian worker collectives (albeit at the cost of oppressing or exterminating the native populations they displace). City States face continued inequality, though, as they struggle to care for skill-less refugees that were not killed in the Drone Wars.

Food gets expensive, everything else gets cheap. No jobs. High skilled freelances paying huge amounts of money. Everyone has a bot, and bots are more popular than cars. Cars become just fun. Temporary public service grants minimal food. Almost no crime, everything is tracked. Web become VR and too deep to have a human guide, google VR guide is the most popular. Google and Facebook become gov in some territories. A wide range of variety of electronic devices in sizes and formats, weareable. And.... bots are not that smart yet, not like a money machine. But smart enough to play anything together. PRO CPU/GPUS's only in the cloud for rent.

The best book I've read on this topic is Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. [1]

It really got me thinking about the next 50 years now that famine, disease and war are all manageable. The next 50 years will have super human AI, billions of superfluous people and eternal life for the privileged few. [2]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Homo-Deus-Brief-History-Tomorrow-dp-0...

[2] https://www.getabstract.com/en/summary/homo-deus/28074

The best movie on this topic is “Idiocracy,” a fantastic documentary.

Started as a joke here on HN, there is a series of predictions based on a numerical correspondence between the intervals [1436,+\infty) and [1969,+\infty), where:

- 1436 is the invention of the printing press and

- 1969 is the start of the ARPANET.

Many of them are postdictions (to validate the correspondence) but the funny thing is that the series ends in the year 2024, where there is a sort of singularity, because the interval [1436,1969] maps to [1969,2024].

https://mbuliga.github.io/gutenberg-net.html

50 years seems to medium term predictions, which is near impossible to predict.

For everything else.

https://www.futuretimeline.net/

WRT technology, I expect a technological plateau within our lifetime.

In geo-politics, USA will not be the sole superpower anymore:

* China will continue to regain its historical prominence/prestige

* EU will seek more and more independence from the US

* Turkey will look to form its own union of states in the Eastern Mediterranean (kind of a neo-byzantine/neo-ottoman empire)

* Brazil and India will continue to do well

* Russia and Iran's future not so certain

I think the transition will probably be relatively smooth, but we'll have to wait and see.

- VR will make it, and become commonplace

- Deep fake ai type technology will allow for quasi automatic generation of landscapes, castles and people making creating your own video game or movie a matter of story writing, and letting the computer fill in the details.

- China's growth will slow down drastically as more and more reach the middle class.

- Most middle eastern dictatorships will get into trouble with the loss of oil money.

- South America grows as a market, and becomes more stable

World will get hotter, ice will melt. Sea water conversion to drinking water will become major project.

Air conditioner/purifier business will grow.

Artificial foods will give rise to new diseases. Cancers will rise.

Cars will be detachables.

More loners than ever.

Real estates will boom in VR.

China US cold war at some point of time ? In 5 - 10 years China may become powerful enough to be able to bully all nations bar US to pursue its interests. Economic colonisation of weaker states in Africa and elsewhere (e.g. Pakistan) by China will lead to interesting geopolitical scenarios.

My forecast for near future geopolitics is grim as collateral damages will happen in most countries, first world or not, west or not.

I am also pessimistic about open initiatives (open source, open data, open standards etc) as benefiters will exponentially overweight contributors, to a point contributors will sick of people eating free lunches. It may also become more and more illegal to disclose security risks and software vulnerabilities.

The coming population decline crisis

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/27/what-goes-up-p...

Be careful trying to forecast that far into the future. Historically, most people have ended up very wrong.

I predict human level AI will come about. What comes after I'm not sure but I tend to be optimistic.

I feel the "I, Robot" film became a true

There's a joke about weather forecast: "Kräht der Hahn auf dem Mist wird es morgen schön oder nicht" (If the cock is crowing on the midden weather will be either fine tomorrow or not). In this vein, my prediction:

Humans are mostly extinct or they are on their way to paradise.

Traditional society management via myth will fail (the 3 NYC CD's will be common knowledge).

The 1st and 2nd Amendments will be further adopted outside the United States.

Open, non-DRM 3D printers will be as common as a 2D printer is today in the US.

Personal wayback machines will be standard computing kit.

Cash will still exist.

* SpaceX will land people on Mars and establish a base.

* VR will take off and evolve into some Matrix-like form.

* Electric energy will push out oil from most sectors.

* Gene manipulation will take off big time.

* None of the above will happen because accelerating global warming will cause the 3rd world war.

- The Great Dieoff near the equator. Large parts of India and the Middle East become uninhabitable. Hundreds of millions die. The countries further from the equator do not let them in. World population will be lower than it is now. Most of the dieoff will be older people.

- US loses Miami and New Orleans to sea level rise, but otherwise does OK.

- "Machines should think, people should work" - computers will be doing many management jobs, including direct supervision. Physical robots will still be niche.

- More strongmen. Types like Putin, Netanyahu, Li Keqiang, and Trump will be the new normal.

- Intense surveillance, with behavioral tracking and evaluation, is the new normal. Government and business will cooperate in this.

- Energy will not be a problem. Some materials will be more expensive, but no mined material exhaustion in the next 50 years. Except for water.

- Food will only be a problem where water is a problem.

- Many antibiotics will stop working. There will be alternatives in the developed world, but they will cost more and be more complicated and custom.

> World population will be lower than it is now.

Almost all demographic predictions say this will happen, and that's without any major catastrophe.

-Large parts of India and the Middle East become uninhabitable

Any particular data/research to support this particular assertion?

Certainly not within 50 years, but this is based on projected wet-bulb temperatures around the equator. The limit for human survivability is the equivalent of 35C at 100% humidity.

"A sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F) is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature our bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it. Thus 35 °C (95 °F) is the threshold beyond which the body is no longer able to adequately cool itself. A study by NOAA from 2013 concluded that heat stress will reduce labor capacity considerably under current emissions scenarios.

A 2010 study concluded that under a worst-case scenario for global warming with temperatures 12 °C (22 °F) higher than 2007, the wet-bulb temperature limit for humans could be exceeded around much of the world in future centuries. A 2015 study concluded that parts of the globe could become uninhabitable. An example of the threshold at which the human body is no longer able to cool itself and begins to overheat is a humidity level of 50% and a high heat of 46 °C (115 °F), as this would indicate a wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C (95 °F)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Wet-bulb_...

You'll have a guaranteed next World War considering the current decouplings and many countries exiting from international treaties that provide stabilisation.

I have no idea what will be the the post-war order so impossible to predict.

My Grandma went from riding a horse to town to space travel, the internet, and smart TVs.

I'd love to see that kind of expansion, but I mostly expect to see the end of Trick or Treating.

Many genetic mutations for new born could be predicted even before conceiving and plausible remedial measures could be taken during early development of the fetus.

Massive unrest due to climate change, leading to waves of mass immigration, humanitarian disasters, atrocities, genocide and a rise in authoritarianism.

All because of our greed.

Came to write exactly this. When we start to feel the real effects of climate change in a mass scale, our survival instinct will kick in and the world will be in a chaos. With all the weapons of mass destruction, guns and deteriorating social fabric, entropy might and probably win against our human order. Once the population numbers reduce through war and famine we could recover like the world did after ww2. Who knows.

Our window to escape this future in narrowing. Here in the UK 3 years of Brexit arguments have sucked up all the oxygen. While on the other side of the Atlantic a science denier is squatting in the White House.

Sadly, I agree.

Let me quote https://collapseos.org/why.html here :

“I expect our global supply chain to collapse before we reach 2030. With this collapse, we won't be able to produce most of our electronics because it depends on a very complex supply chain that we won't be able to achieve again for decades (ever?).”

And a related discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21183805

I might disagree with the given date, but I think some sort of industrial collapse will probably happen in the next century, basically because the earth has finite resources, and we have been consuming them at an unprecedented rate in the human history. Added to the climate change, it will lead to a massive unrest that we are not ready to deal with.

Rebuilding computing could really turn out surprisingly difficult: the first time "we" did it, hardware manufacturing was bootstrapped by the type of customer epitomized by "world market for about five computers" and then gently followed the price/demand curve until we reached cheap smartphones. If it had to be repeated, all the potential customers on the beginner-friendly end of said curve will have access to vastly superior legacy hardware. The kind of customer that was amongst the first who could afford computers in the original ramp-up would be the last who could afford increasingly rare remnant hardware after a supply chain collapse (the same problem that makes it impossible to bootstrap a domestic anything industry when you don't already have one, all the deep-pocketed buyers can afford superior imports). Basically "Saddam's PlayStation 2 supercomputer" turned reality.

Euthanasia will become legal worldwide, and legally supported suicide for non-medical reasons will increase suicide rates by a 10x or higher factor.

Self-driving cats

Nothing will change significantly over the next 50 years, despite people constantly predicting otherwise.

My personal take is that we've reached peak humanity. Without some large shock to the global eco-system there will be no significant progress in anything meaningful. The 20th century only resulted in major advances in many fields of research due to two world wars. War is the driver for change.

If you want a better human race, have another war.

We will talk a lot about the weather.

Programming will still exist.

And people will be forecasting the demise of programming, coming soon.

AI, bot or robots these 3 can rule every human.

The Soviets will walk on Mars within 20 years.

No permanent human base beyond leo.

My predictions have a tendency to come true. Consider yourselves privileged to have received this information years in advance

Things that won't happen:

- There will NEVER be a 3rd "World War" with major countries rolling tanks across each others borders and millions dead. There will be lots of conflict though, but never a direct confrontation between major nations like u.s. china, Russia, etc

- There will also never be a nuclear attack on a live target. The worst that could ever happen would be a "test" deterrent on uninhabited land and even that is highly doubtful

- Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will not be adopted by the mainstream on a large scale such that you could use it to buy groceries, pay rent, pay for everyday expenses, etc

- But they will also not disappear. Cryptocurrencies are here to stay

- There won't be any major youth cultural movement such as punks in the 70s, skinheads, hippies, ravers, etc. Big concerts and events will slowly become smaller/fizzle out. These movements of the past were driven by the children of factory workers and working classes. Deindustrialization is causing the decline of youth culture

- Cold fusion

- "Room temperature" superconductors

- Manned Moon landing. Not in 2024, 34, or in our lifetime (sorry)

- Manned Mars landing. This one will ESPECIALLY not happen! And even if it did, nobody is going to believe it

- "Storm Area 51" or any similar such event. Wont happen

- "Aliens" won't come

- Massive decline in national sports. People will not associate themselves with any particular sports team. For similar reasons which made youth music movements disappear, people will also lose interest in soccer, basketball, etc. FIFA, NBA, UEFA and others will be riddled with scandal after scandal

- +11bn. We have only so much planet to go around. Something will give...

Things that will happen:

- Costs of living will continue to rise, driven primarily by housing costs. Both, buying and renting, will continue to go up indefinitely making not just owning a home, but even sleeping inside a building with 4 solid walls increasingly unaffordable for a large majority of the population. First in western countries such as the u.s. and Europe, but also increasingly in places such as Asia and South America and many other places in the world

- As a consequence, cities will become thinly populated by a minority who can still afford to live in them and their servants, while large number of buildings, well maintained on the outside, will deteriorate on the inside.

- Empty luxury towers will be dotting cities all over the world with automatic light switches to make them appear occupied at night

- Van living will become BIG BUSINESS!!

- Major car manufacturers will be too stupid/bureaucratic to pick up (heh) on the opportunity

- People will adopt. Having a nicely fitted van/rv will be the new "middle class"

- If you hope that there will be another "burst" of the housing bubble, good luck. Things in history never happen twice. Maybe its time to get comfortable in your tent!

- Gym memberships will continue to go up

- The US dollar/Euro will continue to rise against most other currencies for quite some time. No hyperinflation any time soon

- Continued decline in fossil fuel production

- "Digital Nomad" places such as Bali, Chiang Mai, etc will become VERY popular. Even more so than they are today

- Many new places like that will arise all around the world. The famous Nomadlist is just an indication of what's to come

- Nation states will disappear. People will be divided into two major groups: Those who can adjust to a world in with the geography of your birth will no longer carry relevance to how you conduct your life. And those who will fail to adjust to a new narrative in which nationality no longer plays a role. This second group will be the Left Behinds. Many of them will become violent against the first and amongst each other. You can already see this happening with the (futile) rise of nationalism around the world. These people can't adopt, and will be wiped out

- Record cold winters

- Extreme heat wave summers

- Collapse of food production in many parts of the world at least during some periods with all the nasty consequences

- Continued decline in birth rates. World wide

- Splintering of the "United" States of America. Numerous groups fighting to claim the title, with others fighting to reject it

- Transition of the U.S and Europe from 1st world to 3rd world

- Save havens will emerge around the world who will accept refugees from the Declining West who were smart enough to foresee these developments in advance. The future won't be bad for those who can see what's coming

I also have some more predictions about the decline of the nations state. These are rather dark and involve things such as alliances between the deep state and street gangs. "Law enforcement" becoming criminals and turning against their own population etc. But that's enough for now, you get the picture...

Detroit:Become Human

Sadly, war.

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