What You'll Need to Know in 2020 That You Don't Know Now (2000) | Hacker News Reader

What You'll Need to Know in 2020 That You Don't Know Now (2000)

discovermagazine.com

168 pointsbehnamoh150 comments

I think it's interesting how one prediction that they made was that 1,000,000,000 would be starving. However, the massive reduction in extreme poverty[1] that the world has made, especially since 2000, is amazing and under-covered. That's one prediction that I am glad they got wrong.

[1]https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

Agreed, although they aren't (necessarily) mutually exclusive - you can reduce the percentage in poverty while still having 1 billion.

An interesting thing with these predictions is that they tend to focus on technology, when a lot of the reasons for problems like poverty aren't a tech issue, they are because we haven't figured out how to build functional institutions yet that overcome mismanagement and corruption, changing incentives to make education more common, ensuring supply chains that go through remote areas are safe.

> when a lot of the reasons for problems like poverty aren't a tech issue, they are because we haven't figured out how to build functional institutions

I would argue that is still mostly a technology issue. Just social technologies, instead of physical technologies. Democracy is a social technology. Gender equality is a social technology. Market economies are a social technology.

And like regular technologies, social technologies are often simple in theory but deceptively difficult to implement well. Over time, we learn the pitfalls and improve the engineering. That lowers the cost, increases the quality, and widens the distribution. Liberal democracy is a 300-year old idea, but the percentage of the world's population living under it has drastically increased in just the past 30 years.

Also over time, we learn which social technologies are dead-ends. Marxist-Leninism is clearly a horrendously destructive social technology.

You're just calling all sorts of things "technology". Yes, you can make that definition fit, somewhat hazharzously: maybe ideas, concepts, ideologies are, in a certain light, "tools" to use to get some result.

But how does that help? You're just throwing away whatever nuance is captured by the existing terminology. Are people more likely to rationally use and improve liberal democracy if you frame it in technological terms? If you believe so go ask emacs users what they like best about vim...

I'd argue framing these things as technologies removes some of the mental blocks we have in them. Capitalism and socialism as ideologies can endlessly be argued about, but as technological solutions to the problem of control of the means of production that are stable and efficient you can evaluate their performance calmly. Moralistic thinking of how "people deserve their own world reward/a fair share" has it's place, but it's not a very tolerant one.

A moral code that has some "higher" purpose is not something you can evaluate and discuss. A tool is evaluated only in the context it's in. This is a more flexible and pragmatic framing

Your "calm" performance metrics will be chosen subjectively, almost certainly on the basis of a moral code which guides your decisions but which you're not objectively aware of - because you consider it so correct it would never occur to you to question it.

In fact we already do this with finance and economics. Neither are even remotely calm, unbiased, or objective.

And if someone says that in fact you can evaluate moral codes on objective criteria - not least long-term species survivability and the dimensions of the collective predictive horizon and strategic IQ - how can you be sure that alternative criteria you might prefer are any better?

> Your "calm" performance metrics will be chosen subjectively, almost certainly on the basis of a moral code which guides your decisions but which you're not objectively aware of - because you consider it so correct it would never occur to you to question it.

This is exactly what makes social and political systems a technology. People choose between different technologies based upon their personal judgments and preferences about acceptable trade-offs. Different people, and even different groups of people, will make different decisions because they have different preferences.

Yeah, but you will have to state them at least. You need to state your goal. "Capitalism/socialism is immoral" is fuzzy and works for both. "Capitalism/socialism ensures maximum efficiency of exploitation of resources" can be checked and doesn't work for both.

"But why do we want to maximally exploit resources" is then a question we need to answer separately, and here your subjective things come into it.

As others have stated you're not really tearing down metrics. Pick any you like, metrics are just tools we use to evaluate tools. You can pick some ones which do get results or ones which don't.

I think this is where the concept of the selfish gene comes to the rescued - metrics, traits, tools, which work best tend to re-inforce each other and 'win'. Say what you will about 'morals', I doubt I will find you making a moral argument for the rights of phages over your own happiness.

So it doesn't really matter which criteria you pick - long-term species suitability might be good, if there are better they will arise.

Liberal democracy is just a technology that has to be adopted as a standard in order to work, like TCP/IP or AC power. Some country might have a mixed-member proportional elected parliament just as another country might have 120V mains power. And in that respect, there are technologies much more widely standardized than any political system.

I think it helps as a reminder that all of these things are human inventions that are intended to solve problems.

Liberal democracy is not "just" a technology, and creating a mixed member proportional elected parliament isn't a guaranteed magic solution to political or social problems.

Politics is hard. Really, really hard. Much harder than technology. Because politics is part social psychology and part evolutionary psychology. And while we understand enough about both to have some idea how to manipulate them, we don't understand them well enough to manipulate them - and ourselves, and each other - wisely.

No technology is a guaranteed magic solution to any problem. That's what makes it technology rather than magic.

Very much agree. The only difference is that physical technologies and social technologies take much longer. There is a book called "law's for a flat world" (or maybe rules for a flat world) that discusses the Social technology of law and how we could drastically increase both the adaptivity and accessibility to this technology

I would buy your first and last paragraph, but I'd quibble with your second.

> And like regular technologies, social technologies are often simple in theory but deceptively difficult to implement well.

I think this is where having the two categories separate is useful. There's a lot behind Hayak's quote "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to man how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." It is true that many more people live under democracy, and that's a great thing. But I think we've also seen over the past 30 years experiments in instituting democracy where they had not previously been that have not been as successful. We've also seen the trappings of democracy usurped by those looking to add legitimacy to their autocratic regime.

> Marxist-Leninism is clearly a horrendously destructive social technology.

I agree fully, but it still seems to be sticking around, and I hear similar rhetoric without people understanding the lessons behind why it was such a failure ("We're not Leninist, we just want to remove the profit motive, limit what people earn to what we think should be enough, and have the central government plan around all the hard problems in society...").

I'm skeptical we can plan for these things the same we do things in engineering, but that doesn't mean when we try to predict the future we shouldn't look at their importance.

> and have the central government plan around all the hard problems in society..."

this is nonsense, consider Walmart, the US military, and nuclear power. Walmart is proof that centralized planning can have extremely successful results. The US military has no publicly known catastrophes in nuclear power. Nuclear power plants are too expensive (both upfront costs and insurance) for private enterprise and even small municipalities.

Consider the Hoover Dam. Panama Canal. Both "capitalist" US and "communist" USSR planned their way through the space race.

Planning is _good_. Everyone who is smart does it. It's how big things happen.

What's important is to keep democracy on top of the plan. Walmart is heavily authoritarian.

Marxist-Leninists believe in extending democracy to include the workplace and the economy.

If you think that's "clearly destructive", I'd have you take a peek at climate change, deforestation, sweatshops, migrant toddler concentration camps, Flint Michigan, Tulsa Massacre, etc.. The USSR might not have been a utopia, or even good, but don't strut around like you're better than them and hand-wave away a rising-in-the-US ideology so frivolously.

It's away from the original point, but I think it's important to highlight the factual inaccuracies from your claims. This is meant charitably, I hope you will take it as such.

1. "Walmart is proof that centralized planning can have extremely successful results" - "Central planning" means something specific, and does not mean "having a plan," even a potentially large plan. It doesn't just mean planning by a rather large entity. From https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/glossary/central-planning..., "a Centrally planned economy can overcome market failure and achieve equality of distribution." Walmart is therefore not an example of this since it does not fit the definition, and makes use of a competitive market for labor, real estate, and the goods it sells. The US had a plan for Apollo, but it still had to deal with a free market for the newly invented integrated circuits that made up its electronics - the government couldn't simply dictate that the desired number were produced.

2. "Nuclear power plants are too expensive (both upfront costs and insurance) for private enterprise" - A list of US Nuclear power plants (https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-plant-ow...) shows several owned by private enterprises. According to https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr..., the world's first large scale nuclear power plant was owned by a government, but was built and operated by a private company.

3. "Planning is _good_... It's how big things happen." There are lots of things that happen without central planning. No one does a survey of how many computers the US needs and then tells Intel to make a certain amount of processors. Likewise for food, clothing, pencils, or whatever other goods we may need. Plans often make assumptions that prove unrealistic, and centrally planned governments have often proven unable to adjust, leading to famine unheard of in capitalist countries.

4. "Marxist-Leninists believe in extending democracy to include the workplace and the economy." In a Marxist economy, a bureaucrat figures out how much of a thing is needed, and tells people when they need to work to produce that thing, and how much of that thing they can get. There is no input from "the people," except for nominally the person who figures this out for everyone represents the people. Compare this to a capitalist economy, which may be imperfect, but allows everyone to vote on what's important for society to provide through spending preferences.

5. "don't strut around like you're better than them" - the claim was not that capitalist countries are perfect, but rather communist countries were/are a failure. The only one that has seen any lasting success in China, and that was only after it started adopting capitalist practices in some areas. The implication is also not that anyone is better than anyone else. In many locations in Eastern Europe, the same people with the same resources had vastly different qualities of life depending on whether they were on the west or east side of the Captialist-Communist border. The implication is only that communism is a terrible system and was a failure everywhere it was attempted.

Yeah, a lot of the predictions gave me classic “I was promised flying cars!” feeling but that’s far more important.

> Globally, there are 821.6 million people that are considered undernourished or starving.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269924/countries-most-af...

Sorry to be a killjoy.

Undernourished != starving, and 821.6 million != 1 billion. While there is plenty of work to do left, theres a lot of progress that has been made so far and its important to recognize that.

Feel free to mentally substitute “has access to anything less than enough food” and round up slightly, but I don’t see much of a difference.

"round up slightly" by >100 million humans?

You don't see a difference?

The point being made is that human civilization is making leaps and bounds globally because that number isn't a billion, and most importantly it has a strong, predictable trajectory downwards, towards zero.

"I don't see a difference" is like saying "we were going 80 mph towards the wall, and we braked, but now we're going 50, and I don't see much difference, it's practically 80 if you just round up." Are you not interested in the fact that we're continuing to brake?

thing is, you won't see much of a difference if you hit a wall with 80 or 50 (mph/kmph)

You absolutely will. In a modern car, at 50kmph you'll be largely ok. At 80kmph (50mph), not so much, but maybe you'll survive. At 80mph, you won't survive.

Figure 3.3 in [1] suggests that a belted driver has a 40% chance of survival in a full frontal crash at 50 mph. At 80 mph the survival changes are close to zero.

[1] https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...

This entire sub-thread should be deleted. But to those replying "there is a difference between crashes at 50 and 80!", while that may be true, please just realize that the casual parent comment was simply not being very articulate in what they were trying to say.

Using the actual numbers from the discussion we would create an analogy of crashing at 100 or crashing at 83, in which case there actually would be very little difference in the distribution of outcomes.

I really wish HN would take a moment to try to be more intellectually honest in our commenting. sigh

Bad analogy. the difference between 800m and 1b is 20%. The difference in energy between 50 and 80 is 156% (kinetic energy is relative to velocity squared).

I think the point is that the gains are largely irrelevant. Sure, its great 100 mil less people are hungry, but if you look at the trend, we've gone almost nowhere. Not helped by the fact that, there seems to be a variability of about 50 mil. Why? Are we under-reporting? Are we not addressing the right problem?

If you have variability of 50 mil and only 100 mil gains, its really hard to make the case that you qualitatively improved anything, it could be nothing more than a statistical anomaly (maybe there was more rainfall or less competition from local wildlife), and whatever you're doing is not working at all - assuming you are doing anything.

This is pretty different from 50 mph vs 80 mph - that's a ~40% improvement, and we can point at something to show the improvement.

We have added quite a few billion since 2000, so there's an argument to be made that we are making more food, but the ~1 bil number staying fairly stable to me points to a systemic issue, not merely a problem with food distribution.

FWIW, I see the difference. I agree that rounding up by 180 million is not rounding up but changing the numbers. I also agree that "undernourished or starving" is not the same as "starving".

But I do agree that perhaps it isn't an as strong victory as aripickar claimed.

The global population has gone from 4-and-a-half to almost 8 billion humans within my lifetime. No, I don't see a difference :)

All the more reason to be impressed that less people starve today then in 2000 and that the trajectory continues to move downward. Also, the world does not have an overpopulation problem. It has a (in most ways highly political) access to adequate resources that are actually available problem for marginalized populations. The overpopulation and population control narrative is not only based on bad assumptions, it's also implicitly racist in favor of western, prosperous societies because, guess which parts of the world have the higher child birth rates for the time being? (and those dropping too by the way).

Are those words actually weighted with the assumption you are making, or are you just trying to feel better about 800 million people going hungry? The nuance between English words aren’t really apparent in poverty statistics. Because I doubt there was a survey where they all agreed it wasn’t enough, but just enough that aripickar doesn’t feel as bad about 800 million going hungry.

I meant that there was a group of people the size of the population of brazil that were expected to be hungry, but are not. That should be celebrated. Its easy to lose the sheer size of the difference between 800 million and 1 billion, but in reality thats a huge difference.

Again, its very easy to cherry-pick statistics, and point at a big number and say "oh this is great we helped people". True, but if you didn't actually fix the root cause it doesn't mean much. Contextually for ~30 years the number has stayed pretty stable, despite 2 billion in growth. So we clearly are capable of producing tons of new food, but we're pretty bad at managing that growth - or by the numbers the extra 1.9 billion we managed to feed would have more than covered the billion gap, no?

Central African Replublic being number one on that list for hunger says much more but how much we've not progressed in some ways. It's one of the most resource rich countries on Earth and yet has the most hunger, hmmm, makes you wonder why.

It's not surprising. There's a theory which says that having resources that can be extracted from the ground makes it less likely that a country will develop on any axis - economically, in education, health, democracy etc.

There are many theories about why this happens [1] but the one that I agree with the most is the one found in the book The Dictator's Handbook - it's simply not in the interest of the ruler of such a place to develop the country. Here's a trailer of that book by CGPGrey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

So why do countries like Canada, the U.S.A or Norway have persistent long-term prosperity? Furthermore why do many other middle-income countries have natural resources but still manage to incrementally see their overall quality of life improve?

We pay the dictators, they give us raw materials and our fair share of the surplus value from their slave's labor. The dictators enjoy glorious wealthy lifestyle and we get goods manufactured cheaply. Everybody wins.

I specifically mentioned three countries that are just what the comment above described, resource rich nations that gained a significant portion of their initial or long term wealth creation from the materials they extracted from their own soil, but somehow managed to remain relatively well administered, fairly free and mostly democratic. Your criticism has it's valid aspects but it's secondary to the point I was making.

We do a really good job of outsourcing slavery to colony nations.

FWIW, I'm getting a paywall on that site.

Also, the issues of global abject poverty are complex.

Some data indicate that abject poverty is falling: https://borgenproject.org/wp-content/uploads/ourworldindata_...

While others indicate that even collecting such data is fraught with difficulty: https://www.econtalk.org/jerven-on-measuring-african-poverty... (its long, yes, but a great start into the data on Africa and the troubles getting it)

Other indicators of poverty show that global poverty is waning: https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles ( go ahead and play with some data yourself, its kinda fun)

In general, it seems that global poverty is falling and that life is getting better for most people. Again, it's a complex issue.

And 200 million added because of lockdowns. So it's 1 billion now.

Just give it a few months; 2020 ain't over yet.

I think looking at the specific numbers in that prediction misses the bigger point. The first world countries would never altruistically provide their advanced technology to the third world, and so most of the technological breakthroughs envisioned in the piece remain inaccessible to huge portions of the world's population.

> For Lanier, the most heartbreaking scenario is festering in the third world, where, he believes, the current generation of children— lacking food, lacking skills, lacking aid, lacking education— will be lost in the next techno-revolution.

The author of this article wrote this in a Jan 2020 blog [0]:

> Am I a genius prognosticator and futurist? Hardly. I was just a reporter who interviewed a bunch of really smart people. As I recall, when the editors of the magazine hired me to write the story, they already had the title in mind but weren’t 100 percent sure that it would bear fruit. My editor and I drew up a list of scientists the magazine had worked with or had interviewed in the recent past, and set me free to contact as many as I could and ask them how they saw the future shaping up.

> At the time I thought some of the predictions were off the wall. The one about cleaning up our digital reputations, for example, seemed nutty to me. ...

[0] https://www.josephdagnese.com/blog/2020/1/20/that-time-i-pre...

Even in 2020 you will always need to know if the facts you've dredged up are accurate and truthful.

You've always needed to do this. The internet just drives that point home hard. Because when I was growing up 50 years ago, I just assumed that all the good things said about Christopher Columbus (to pick an easy example) must have been true because they wouldn't print it in a book if it weren't, right?

Years later, thanks to that same lie-spewing internet Discovery Magazine warns me about, I find out that Columbus guy was a real prick. That, and an idiot who thought he was the first to cook up this "round Earth" theory (only to be beaten by 2000 years by, eh, the Greeks was it?), and got it massively wrong at that.

The article overall, though, is surprisingly even-handed, lacking in ridiculous hyperbole so rife in such articles, and amazingly spot on.

I find out that Columbus guy was a real prick

Interestingly, if you read contemporary accounts from the time of Columbus and shortly after, you discover that the allegations of his atrocities were actually mostly made up by his former first mate who had him dragged into court on made-up abuse charges in order to get control of his ship. This is the reason the history books of the last century didn't paint him as a horrible person.

But political correctness isn't about finding the whole truth. It's about finding the easiest, most profitable truth.

So, I see you're being downvoted and I fundamentally don't know if you are spouting well know misinformation or simply telling a slightly different truth.

I don't know what the %'s of certainty of either version is, I just know that someone on the internet thinks you're wrong.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that in two comments I've established that it really is hard to read things on the internet and make any judgement without spending 30 minutes doing some research.

I don't know what the %'s of certainty of either version is, I just know that someone on the internet thinks you're wrong.

I'm OK with people thinking I'm wrong. I based my statement on an English translation of a book from the 1800's that I personally read. I'm not just repeating a talking point I saw someone spout on the internet or the television, so I'm comfortable with my assertion.

Could I be wrong? Sure. But on certain topics, I trust older sources more than newer sources.

Why would age of the source be relevant here? (Beyond the obvious "it's a literal first person account"?)

The closer to the source the reference it would generally have a less chance of suffering from the "game of telephone" which most history suffers from...

It's literally 300 years after the event. Would another hundred years or so make a huge difference?

Here, you can check out this guy:

http://origins.osu.edu/milestones/july-2015-bartolom-de-las-...

And read his book:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20321

Since it was written in the 1500s by an eyewitness, I trust you will find it satisfactory. For those who don't feel like clicking through, de las Casas describes a great deal of roasting people alive, chopping off their hands, noses and other body parts, all for the purpose of extracting the most gold from the New World in the least amount of time.

Written by an eyewitness to the Spanish abuse of the natives, true. But an eyewitness of abuses by Columbus, or by those who came after him? (The only mention of Columbus in the article is an address in Ohio.)

Don't blame Columbus for the sins of all of Spain.

How do you know you're not repeating a talking point from the 1800s? Taking history from one source is drawing a line through one point.

I fundamentally don't know if you are spouting well know misinformation or simply telling a slightly different truth.

It doesn't take 30 minutes of research to realize when someone is making shifty claims without giving any sources and using said dubious claims to conclude a non-sequitur about "political correctness".

The writing of his own hand made Columbus out to be a prick. I'm sure his journal, or excerpts of, can easily be found online.

But political correctness isn't about finding the whole truth.

Ah, blow it off as political correctness. But your version is the truth, I take it, and unsullied by the need for popularity? See? Discovery Magazine was right.

Regardless, Columbus still couldn't do the math taken for granted by 12 year olds.

Regardless, Columbus still couldn't do the math taken for granted by 12 year olds.

I read once that the quantity of knowledge of the average person in the mid-1700's was equivalent to the content of one Sunday New York Times.

Was that average person going around asking for the use of three very expensive ships?

The story I've heard is that Columbus botched unit conversion, in that he translated degrees to miles using a formula that recorded Arabic miles and assumed it used Roman miles instead (neither of which is particularly close to the statute mile used in the US today).

do you have a reference for this? not arguing, just curious.

Exactly - those 50-book encyclopedia sets your parent owned had a surprising number of factual errors, and still required cross-checking to verify their facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Errors_in_the_Encycl...

  Even today the english wikipedia has articles that are full of lies, like for example the Gamergate article.

> an idiot who thought he was the first to cook up this "round Earth" theory

If this is an actual claim (as opposed to just an example of the erroneous things the internet can tell you), do you have a source? AFAIK Columbus never claimed he came up with the idea of a round Earth; the sphericity of the Earth was common knowledge at the time. Where he went greatly wrong was in underestimating the size of the Earth (and then got lucky by running into the Americas instead of his intended target of east Asia).

Apologies, confusion between childhood books and fact. According to the books, Columbus thought the earth was round in sea of unbelievers who took it as almost religious fact that God made the earth flat. Or summat.

Anyway, as you point out, everyone who gave it much thought knew the Earth to be round. Columbus' error was being bad at math.

Not just childhood books, this is actually what I was taught in elementary school.

The contemporary Behaim globe had a rather narrow ocean, too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdapfel

Perhaps the prediction must be seen in the context of people predicting that the internet would give people easy access to all the information there is. I guess both predictions were true in some sense.

I found all of that remarkably prescient except for this:

>To reach that age you'll need to know enough to make more complicated medical choices: Do I want to jettison a limb and wait five years to regrow another? Shall I allow a phalanx of nanobots to scrape the plaque out of my arteries or opt to replace the vessels altogether?

Why do we always seem to wildly overestimate progress in medicine?

> Why do we always seem to wildly overestimate progress in medicine?

Because we dismiss the role the FDA regulations have in greatly retarding innovation.

Or maybe it's because the human body is an incredibly complex mechanism and our analysis skills for determining the impact of making changes to that mechanism are yet to reach the levels we need.

Or maybe it's the regulations. See "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Sam Peltzman.

The FDA is not the enforcer of the laws of physics preventing the invention of medical nanites.

If it was the FDA's fault, you'd see scientists regrowing limbs and testing nano-bots in rats. The FDA actually has a great system of emergency and compassionate use authorizations that allow early testing of experimental drugs and devices. These systems came into place because of a long history of medical disasters: see thalidomide, Elixir sulfanilamide, and so many more.

I'm not arguing the reason for the regulations. I'm pointing out that the regulations greatly slow down and increase the cost of medical innovations.

True, but it isn't the case that we know how to repair blood vessels or regrow limbs in other vertebrates. Medical regulations haven't retarded basic research, it's just that biology is fundamentally very complex and most medical progress amounts to diligent iteration of inspired guesswork and observation.

People are not likely to invest in research and development without a corresponding probability of making money off of it. The regulations make that very difficult.

That’s why the government provides drug research grants and 20-year drug monopolies (aka patents)

Nowhere near enough to compensate for the costs and delays of the regulations, unless it is a blockbuster drug.

Government research grants are doled out by a bureaucratic committee unwilling to take risks - so the grants are for safe, incremental, conservative, political gains. (After all, the committee has to answer to whoever their oversight bureaucrats are.) This is not where game-changing innovation comes from.

It's pretty hard to know the path not taken. I used to work at the FDA, and let me tell you, they're basic reason for existence is to slow down innovation. Many think it's worth it, but I personally believe that their risk aversion has hurt much more people than it has helped. But from a political perspective, it's the right move because no one is going to blame you for hypothetically preventing some life-saving wonder drug from existing; they're going to blame you for approving some drug that kills a bunch of people. In the first case, the harm is almost impossible to quantify or even reason about, in the second case the harm is direct and known.

That's exactly what's researched in the book:

"Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Sam Peltzman

> If it was the FDA's fault, you'd see scientists regrowing limbs and testing nano-bots in rats.

Can't do that either, the IRB says it's not allowed under research ethics unless the rats have given informed consent.

Unfortunately, now that we have a “smart” printer, we need the printers consent before we can print the informed consent papers

Do you want to go back to the days of snake oil salesmen or what alternative do you propose to a regulating body for medicine?

I propose that legally consenting adults can get whatever treatment they want, provided they are willing to sign a clear contract that the treatment has not been approved by the FDA.

Approval by the FDA would also come with legal immunity from lawsuits if the treatment is later found to be defective.

Those who are fearful of snake oil can choose to stick with only FDA approved treatments.

> More than 200,000 centenarians will inhabit the United States in 2020— why shouldn't you be one of them?

Because I wasn't 80 when you wrote that?

People are optimistic that those problems can be solved. They also fear death.

The technical predictions are hit and miss (as such things tend to be), but this bit is prescient:

> On the one hand, your workload will multiply as you bat away each glitch resulting from the increased number of gadgets in your life. On the other, you will be forced to take on moral questions no human has ever faced. When will you find time to do that? How will you contemplate when everything is speeding up and time for reflection is practically nonexistent?

> By 2020 you'll need to know how to clean up that electronic trail day in and day out. "Say you were searching for information on hats," theorizes Jaron Lanier, computer scientist, musical composer, and virtual reality pioneer, "and you saw a link about hats, but when you got to it, it was actually a weird pornography site about hat fetishes. Then it turns out there's a record that you visited this site, and now you're getting bombarded with offers from people with hat fetishes. Furthermore, your friends are being contacted in case they have hat fetishes. All of a sudden you're the hat fetish person in your social circle, and you have to go in and undo it."

Well, this happened, but it's simultaneously more pervasive and more silent than we would have suspected. The ad networks know everything about your online behavior, not just hat fetishes.

I mean do they? Isn't it just as simple as installing Ghostery? Anyone who cares already doesn't see ads and already isn't being tracked. If you don't spend a minute of your time installing a free extension in order to protect your privacy, than the logical conclusion is that you don't really care (which is fine, you do you).

Ad tracking is a lot more pervasive of a problem than can be solved by a browser extension.

Anyone want to make predictions for 2040?

Here's a start:

Self-driving cars will be the norm. Humans will not be allowed to drive.

Extreme weather will make many parts of the planet unlivable.

Manufacturing will return to America, where robots will do the manufacturing.

Universal Basic Income will become a thing.

Humans will work fewer hours, fewer humans will work, and fewer workers will work from work.

Wealth and power will be concentrated among fewer people.

There will be no retail industry.

Sports will be the only reason to leave the house.

After watching the self-driving car hype crash and burn (so to speak) over the past 5 years, I wouldn't bet on having fully-autonomous vehicles in the next 20. In fact I don't think we'll have them until they no longer have to coexist with human drivers, which could be a chicken-and-egg scenario.

From Tesla's earnings report:

"We enabled stop sign and traffic light recognition and braking for our Early Access Program users at the end of Q1 and to the wider public in April 2020. As we have done with previous releases of major new features, drivers will be required to confirm their attention in order to continue. Once enough real-world data is collected, the system will become more capable and our vehicles will continue driving through intersections without a confirmation."

Source: https://ir.tesla.com/static-files/c1723af4-ffda-4881-ae12-b6...

Sounds like great progress to me!

People have been claiming it's six months away for half a decade. I'll believe it when I see it.

One very real effect of all of this research, though, is that if we did end up with an autonomous-only environment (dedicated lanes?), we wouldn't need special infrastructure - as some have suggested in the past - or a new software protocol to get all the different brands to coordinate. Probably even the ones we have today could just follow the normal rules and be sane drivers and would do perfectly. Human drivers are the only problem we can't solve.

My town has never fixed a stop sign that’s angled toward the wrong road. Humans just assume it’s for the smaller road. I’m not sure how a self driving car will ever figure it out.

People had similar concerns when motorcars first became available. i.e., my horse can jump over obstacles that motorcars never will, and so on. Eventually humans made roads specifically for motorcars.

That's exactly my point: we'll have self-driving cars when they have their own space. Not before, even given 20 years of progress. Maybe we'll get that dedicated space before then, maybe not. It's a much bigger socioeconomic hurdle and may or may not actually be worth it financially.

Maybe there's a partial solution though: drive your car manually to the next onramp from where on it drives automatically until you arrive in the vicinity of your workplace from where on you'll have to drive manually again for a bit. So sort of like the dedicated bus lanes we already have nowadays. If your car doesn't have autopilot, you're not allowed to use them. If your car has autopilot and detects a car without it in front of it, your car falls back to manual mode...

great question - I assume a set of local knowledge will be added by curators or lawsuits over time... Large tech companies have a lot more pull with government than individual drivers, they might even get that stop sign fixed!

Well, if the roads would be optimized for autonomous cars then any signs on them would be used as a fallback. Autonomous cars would mostly rely on something like road databases, active "stop beacons" or passive "stop markers" (like reading a passive RFID tag)

Sometimes even human drivers can't figure out what gesturing police and paramedics and construction workers want us to do. They will need a way to mass override "follow the normal rules", or owner or mturk takeover.

most of those situations are there because of human drivers in the first place.

Why would there be gesturing police and paramedics on the road if there are no accidents? And construction is easy. You just update the road database that every car uses to drive.

All self driving cars that communicate with each other would dramatically increase the throughput of our roads. In a perfect system, the number of cars that can travel the speed limit is limited only by the number of cars that can fit on a roadway. With humans, we got nowhere near full capacity before a ripple effect causes traffic behind to slow to a crawl. Self driving not only helps the traffic problem, drafting at distances which would be unsafe for humans would also increase efficiency.

All of these "self driving cars" come with a big disclaimer: the self-driving functionality is a convenience feature and only intended to be used with close supervision in clear driving conditions.

When they work, they're amazing. When they don't, you still need a licensed driver behind the wheel. There's a big gap between the Tesla Autopilot and taxis without a person in them.

They're still using a whitelist of locations where the radar input is ignored. Not exactly confidence inspiring.

It's like listening to a project manager working on an impossible task telling you "everything is going great" when you ask him about progress but ask for a deadline increase every 6 months. After 3 years it's obvious to everyone that the end goal won't be reached.

Looking back at articles from 2014-15-16 truly is magical:

"General Motors president Dan Ammann in 2014 said he would be surprised if his company wasn’t shipping self-driving cars by 2020.

Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn doubled down on a 2020 dedline this past fall

Apple, according to the Wall Street Journal, has set a shipping date of 2019 for its own electric vehicle, though the Journal also reported that the first version of the car might not be driverless.

Google’s Sergey Brin gave the most rosy prediction of anyone in 2012, when he suggested: “You can count on one hand the number of years it will take before ordinary people can experience this.”

Oh, and a 26-year-old hacker’s startup, Comma.ai, plans to start selling autonomous conversion kits for Honda and Acura vehicles this year." [0]

Waymo's CEO recently admitted they will "never" be able to have self driving cars [1], apple still hasn't released anything, GM president must indeed be surprised as he recently stated "Our work is far from done" [2] and Ghosn is an international criminal.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/02/self-driv...

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-kra...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51171398

Electric bicycles will outpace electric car sales as they are cheaper and more accessible for the entire non American world

You forgot about education falling apart, except perhaps for the Ivy League where it's more about connections than learning.

I see the lower ends of education almost completely being disrupted into commodity online learning programs and people abandoning the school systems to get ahead by focusing and learning only what they actually need for certain jobs/careers.

On the world stage:

• America will still be a strong player, but not completely dominant anymore.

• China will successfully assert itself in East Asia, OR force Japan, Taiwan, Phillipines, Vietnam, etc into a strong anti-China alliance.

• India and Europe will act more and more independently of the US.

• Turkey will seek to assert itself in former Ottoman territories, possibly leading to a period of peace in the Middle East if successful.

Technologically:

• Nothing groundbreaking in computer hardware.

• Still no self driving cars or compelling voice interfaces.

• Electric cars gain ground, but other forms of electric transportation become wildly popular.

• Having a driving license will become less common. Driving may become something left to the professionals, with more stringent tests and requirements.

• Meat alternatives become mainstream. People start to look down upon eating real meat.

Socially/economically:

• Continued urbanisation of the population.

• Continued slowing the the birth rate.

• Dwelling places keep getting smaller.

• Long term monogamous relationships become more uncommon.

• Wage stagnation

• Retail shopping almost dies out

• Entertainment is mostly online

Politically:

• Prison abolition movement will become stronger.

• Primitivist movement will get much bigger. They will seek to return to the country and a more independent, primitive way of life. When laws and social circumstances don't allow this they will turn to terrorism.

> • America will still be a strong player, but not completely dominant anymore.

I suspect we'll still be the only dominant global power in 2040.

> • China will successfully assert itself in East Asia, OR force Japan, Taiwan, Phillipines, Vietnam, etc into a strong anti-China alliance.

The largest trading partner of every nation you listed is China. The idea of an Japan, Tawian, Philippines, Vietnam, etc forming an anti-China alliance is as absurd as mexico and canada forming an anti-US alliance. It makes no economic, political or historical sense. But anything can happen. It's more likely they'll form an anti-US alliance considering Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam, etc was invaded by the US at one point or another. But the likelihood of that is 0.

> • India and Europe will act more and more independently of the US.

India has always acted independently of the US. They were one of the major non-aligned nations during the cold war.

> • Turkey will seek to assert itself in former Ottoman territories, possibly leading to a period of peace in the Middle East if successful.

What? You think Turkey will be able to push out the US/EU/Russia/etc from the middle east? Even if the US/EU/Russia/etc left, you think Turkey will be able to challenge Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc for dominance in the middle east?

I couldn't disagree with you more on the geopolitics. As for your technology predictions, I unfortunately disagree with you on everything. We'll have self-driving cars, there will be groudbreaking developments in computer hardware technology ( quantum computers, VR, GPU, memory, etc ) and real meat consumption will rise as more of the underdeveloped nations get wealthy enough to afford real meat.

I have no issues with the rest of your predictions as they seem more likely than your previous predictions.

I don't know why you've been downvoted. The US still commands a healthy lead, and there is a lot of political will to extricate China from our supply chain. The US isn't the only country that wants to do this.

I suspect that China lags in military and economic development, that Covid-19 is an inflection point in their growth, and that they will have too many domestic issues to solve before reasserting themselves on the world's stage. Meanwhile the US is going to steal "One Belt One Road" and do it ourselves.

> Prison abolition movement will become stronger.

I really want this to happen. In the past decade, we saw the first mass pardons of people in the U.S. imprisoned for drug charges. This would have been unimaginable during the height of the "War on Drugs." This gives me hope that the imprisonment rate will continue to decline.

Unless crimes are actually going down I don't see how lower imprisonment rate is good. Just sounds like criminals getting away with it to me.

So basically: imprison more people -> cost goes up -> crime does not go down -> imprison more people -> cost goes up -> crime does not go down -> imprison more people ->....

Does not sound too clever in my book.

Maybe time to try something else?

What are the alternatives? For me, punishing criminals is more important than rehabilitating them.

I think the goal should be to prevent crime.

There are lots of alternatives. Prison was not that common until recently.

Why is punishing people more important than preventing recidivism?

I want criminals to be punished for their crimes. That's justice for me. Can't explain why I feel that way but I do.

I (and I suspect victims of crime) sympathise with this POV. However, I'd encourage you to also think about it from a larger perspective, like a government: what would be the most advantageous path for a society to take in dealing with crime? If you take such a larger perspective you'll see that individual justice is only one of several important factors. I don't have time to explain further. But one analogy could that nobody likes to pay taxes themselves, but many accept that taxes in general (if well-spent) can be a net positive for a society/country.

Exactly. It’s hard to feel emotionally that prison abolition is right in the face of an individual case. You want justice! But if you look at the system as a whole you have to conclude that, on average, justice isn’t really being served. The tax burden is unjust to the tax payer. Poor conditions and long sentences are unjust to incarcerated people. Strange sentencing rules and prosecutory practices (people can get more time for petty theft than rape) are unjust to people who want justice.

Google “US prison conditions” and you will see article after article about violence, sexual abuse, and forced labour for private companies. Criminals getting away with it is better than people being kept in inhumane conditions, especially when, between non-violent offenders and pretrial detainees, most have not been convicted of a violent crime.

I agree with you regarding non-violent crimes but for violence crimes I think punishment and justice trump humane conditions.

So if someone commits a violent crime, they lose their right to humane conditions? This isn’t an abstract question. Incarcerated people in America are actually forced to work for no pay. They are right now held in solitary confinement. They are every day subjected to beatings and rape from guards.

I have no pity for people committing violent crimes, sorry.

I think you should give the podcast "Ear Hustle" a listen. It's produced from inside San Quentin prison. I think once you hear these people, you'll see that it's a really nuanced issue. And, even if it doesn't change your opinion, it's full of fascinating stories. https://www.earhustlesq.com/

You know, it was only two years ago when I first sat down to have a conversation with a formerly incarcerated person. This was a guy who been imprisoned for over fifty years for triple murder, two of which were in self defense and one of which he didn't commit. He was only released because it came to light that the judge who ran his trial didn't inform the jury of the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of evidence. In fact, the judge did this whenever a Black defendant was being tried, which lead to dozens of Black people being wrongly convicted. When I heard first hand what he had been subjected to while in prison, I realized just how unfair this system is. After fifty years of torture for a crime he should never have been convicted of, he was thrown out on the street with neither an apology nor any resources. No system is infallible enough to judge who has committed a crime when the consequences for making a mistake are so severe.

> America will still be a strong player, but not completely dominant anymore.

What is the objective evaluation criteria for this prediction? I think this is true today.

> • China will successfully assert itself in East Asia, OR force Japan, Taiwan, Phillipines, Vietnam, etc into a strong anti-China alliance.

Honestly, I'd probably guess the second one. China is already distrusted by a lot of countries/governments in the region.

> Retail shopping almost dies out

I don't see this happening to be honest. Online purchases will definitely increase for the foreseeable future, but there are always going to be a decent amount of offline shops and restaurants too, simply because not everyone wants to wait for products, not everyone wants to socialise online and some kinds of products are simply easier/better bought there.

It will be interesting to see which types of shops die out though. I doubt supermarkets are going anywhere, but media/entertainment shops like Gamestop/GAME/HMV might as well as start preparing for their inevitable bankruptcy.

> Entertainment is mostly online

Also question this, though it depends what you mean by online here. Buying a game/movie/TV show/music album/book online and having it delivered then enjoyed offline? Or just digital downloads?

I wonder why everyone predicts the world is going to be so radically different in just 20 years? What will drive that, and why hasn't it happened in the last 20 years? Politically, economically, socially, things change very slowly. The status quo is one of the most powerful forces in the world, and it will continue to stay powerful. My prediction for 2040: The world will be pretty close to what it is in 2020, which is also pretty close to what it was in 2000. Really the only major difference between my life now and my life in 2000 is that there are mobile phones all over the place, and people are glued to them.

>There will be no retail industry.

This is a vast overstatement. Drug stores aren't going anywhere. Grocery stores aren't going anywhere. Specialty retailers will always be a thing. When I want to buy a new fishing pole, I'm not reading a bunch of reviews online and going with what sounds right; I'm walking into a Bass Pro Shop and testing out a few dozen of them in my hands. Amazon has done a great job of obliviating the need for big box places like Walmart, but as long as there are humans and teleportation doesn't exist, retail will be a thing. It will simply have to adapt.

You're in minority and won't be enough to sustain retail. It will be gone much sooner than you think.

The grandparent post is probably half right. Drugstores were a terrible example, because they're in the top 10 places many/most shoppers will avoid if possible. ("Yes, I'll be happy to sign all of these forms with the same pen that was just used by someone with the herpes coronavirus flu to sign for their Phenergan prescription.")

But a store like Bass Pro Shops or Cabela's is something of a destination attraction in itself. Hunters and outdoor sportspeople will always want a place where they can go and check out the bows/guns/fishing poles/whatever that they plan to order online.

Oops, I think I refuted my own argument...

Drug stores aren't going anywhere.

They already have. We've been getting our prescriptions delivered for months now, even before the COVID-19 outbreak.

> We've been getting our prescriptions delivered for months now

"We" as in who ? I feel like vast majority of the world isn't included your "we"

> Manufacturing will return to America, where robots will do the manufacturing.

I think this is a really interesting prediction. As opposed to the 20th century trend of industries centralizing to take advantage of economies of scale, the 21st century may see a trend of industries, enabled by robots capable of manufacturing many different products, decentralizing by manufacturing closer to the point-of-sale.

This would be particularly interesting for sectors like clothing, where a small variety of input materials can produce a huge array of output products. Instead of carrying a large stock of clothing in a variety of sizes, each piece could be custom-tailored.

I don't really see this happening. Chinese industry would still be a lot more cheaper both when it comes to needed machinery (like robots) and the cost of the needed space for the factories.

> Sports will be the only reason to leave the house.

What does this even mean?

Perhaps, a more productive conversation will be around trying to define a 2040 we want and what it will take to achieve that?

> Self-driving cars will be the norm. Humans will not be allowed to drive.

> Humans will work fewer hours, fewer humans will work, and fewer workers will work from work.

I think these two things have been predicted every few years for the last 60 years and we're nowhere close to getting them. I'd say it's even the opposite for working hours, people are working more, paid less and retire later than in the recent past. If you added AI to the list you'd have a wonky predictions bingo.

https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-kra...

Kind of eerie how much of that was spot-on. Except for the medicine bits, all of those things came true.

>By the year 2020, for example, you will need to know how to talk to your house. Today your home contains dozens of appliances, each working independently. >The lights will flicker on, the air conditioner will have kicked in, the refrigerator will clamor to enumerate all the meals you can assemble with the groceries cached inside.

It's amusing that this is sort of true, however every voice assistant I've ever used kinda suck. The most they really can do is tell the weather and set reminders. Add in the fact that a smart fridge might not use the same AI platform as a smart speaker and that dream is shattered.

> "Say you were searching for information on hats," theorizes Jaron Lanier, computer scientist, musical composer, and virtual reality pioneer, "and you saw a link about hats, but when you got to it, it was actually a weird pornography site about hat fetishes. Then it turns out there's a record that you visited this site, and now you're getting bombarded with offers from people with hat fetishes. Furthermore, your friends are being contacted in case they have hat fetishes. All of a sudden you're the hat fetish person in your social circle, and you have to go in and undo it."

This is charmingly naive. He thought you could undo targeting and social networking snafus!

If only we could replace all the Internet propagandists and seo content shovelers with hat fetish people.

That would be objectively better, right? I don’t even really like hats, but I’d be OK with it.

That's a bit unfair to Jaron. He didn't make a hole-in-one but he hit the green in one stroke (I'm sure there's a golf name for that, but know nothing about golf metaphors). What he said was pretty astonishing for 2000. Google didn't even introduce ads until...checking...oh! three weeks later, and the privacy concerns that he's depicting have basically become the water in which we all swim.

In America you can't undo much about social networking issues, but in Europe they have this "right to be forgotten" thing...

But then again there is also things like the Five Eyes surveillance network, and companies that track every credit card purchase, etc...

If I had to make a call on it, I think it was a good prediction, but a lot of the details are still being worked out. So I'd put it in the "success" column.

As a prediction, what's the alternative? I mean, how useful is a prediction like "extensive social tracking, but with a ton of exceptions"? He got the biggest part right - that people will be much more concerned with various aspects of social tracking.

Well, some of this list was surprisingly prescient, like the stuff about online tracking and home assistants. The points about online misinformation and fact checking were pretty ominous too, though the internet of the early 00s had the exact same problems.

The medical predictions however were way off (it'll probably be a while until nanotechnology as mentioned in the article becomes that ubiquous or limbs can be regrown), and the self driving car ones sounded like something people would write today in their list of future predictions.

And for the moral quandries? Well, it seems the human response to those has been what it always has; ignore everything that's happening outside their tribe/local area/country. That's probably never going to change, since any creature that lives its life constantly thinking about everyone else's moral struggles is going to be living its life on the constant verge of a mental breakdown.

Remarkably accurate aside from the healthcare stuff

You'll need to know how to build a website that loads its ads before the reader has finished skimming the article.

It would have been so hard to predict Twitter.

> Tomorrow's Kaczynskis will be able to concoct harmful viruses and insinuate them into the food supply, or perhaps release pathogens in public places. You'll need to be ready for them.

TK was heavily in the news back then so it's no surprise they predicted more people like him may be causing mayhem at a far bigger scale. I don't think this kind of terror is likely though since people rather commit suicide before going down TK's path.

They mentioned TK but didn't go into what drove him to criminal insanity: environmental destruction due to systems thinking (TK got heavily influenced by Jacques Ellul's "La Technique" and references him throughout his writings).

Difference from 2000 I see today which I wouldn't have imagined in my worst nightmare is environmental destruction. The places where I went diving in the 90ies: like Great Barrier Reef, Gulf of Thailand, Indonesia's "ring of fire", that were full of life back then, they are now underwater wastelands. The primal forests / jungle I trekked in North Sumatra are nearly burnt down and forests of Borneo under threat from total destruction thanks to the new capitol they want to buid there. Apes such as Orang-Utans (Malaysian for "forest-man") nearly extinct. The beaches where I hung out in my early 20ies are now full of plastic and need to be cleared daily otherwise tourism there wouldn't be possible at all.

I'm not TK but I do wish humanity wouldn't be "making leaps and bounds globally" because we destroy our own home and therefore ourselves for no reason other than pure greed.

When the human race makes leaps and bounds it also leaps further towards its own demise. And I wonder if this is unique to humans or if other species given enough time would also race towards their own destruction in such fashion. And if capable of language would they describe their leaping as progress or would they be smarter and see it for what it is?

We need to think of ways to reduce our population back down to size for the planet to recover and in correct proportion to our surrounding. Because thinking that we can just use smarter-Tech or geo-engineering will destroy us. The only way to get there is less of us. I already had kids so it's too late for me. But I hope I won't be a grandparent, and I hope other people also stop reproducing. I also cheer for this virus to wipe out as many as it can, even it means I or my loved ones die. Not because I'm a lunatic but because it's the only fair way (without a human deciding who is removed from the gene-pool). I also hope people will voluntarily opt not to have children but I think that's just a fantasy and example of dangerous systems thinking (who would enforce such insanity?).

https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah

amazingly prescient

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