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flowerlad

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.

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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.

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

>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"

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.

> 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...

> 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?

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

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

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