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jl6

> what today will sound absurd in the future?

Mark my words:

1. Eating meat

2. Valorizing excess

3. Bonfires and fireworks

4. Anonymity

5. Air, noise, and light pollution

6. Having more than 2 kids

7. Proof of work

8. Buying new stuff all the time

9. Suits, ties and other western formalwear

10. Non-synthetic pornography

11. Academic papers

12. Golf

13. Body modification and tattoos

14. Lawns

15. Running unaudited code

16. Non-tailored medicine

17. Tribal politics

18. Daylight savings time

19. Circumcision

20. Burial

21. Men standing to pee

22. Treating 18-year-olds as full adults

23. Tipping

24. Advertizing

25. Imperial units

26. Coffee fetishization

27. Changing your name when marrying

28. Work-or-starve as the two primary options

29. Cosmetic products

30. Gender

31. Automotive fatalities

32. Demarcation between Movies and TV

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With this list, you're guaranteed to be right about at least one thing. I'm pretty sure you'll be wrong about more than that though.

Unless of course, you're hinting that humanity will go extinct.

Given long enough, he'll be right on all accounts.

Given long enough, it won't matter, because there won't be anyone around to consider those things "absurd"

And at that point, all 0 people will agree on the absurdity of the list

A decent chunk of those appeal to fundamental desires that (for better or worse) are a part of the human condition and I can't imagine them disappearing any time soon.

I really do hope we move away from an economy that relies on advertising to produce consumer demand at an unhealthy scale, though.

You are obviously talking about point 15, running unaudited code. Who knows, the future can be surprising.

The only thing I disagree is "Body modification and tattoos". If any they will pick up a lot from here, with implantable technology. We will want to break free from our meat hardware, and body modifications is a step towards that.

Not to mention body modification has a rich, long history in humanity that's not going away anytime soon.

As do most other things on that list

I think we'll break the association between sex and gender, and we'll create contexts of more-than-two human genders, but types are too popular a feature in programming languages for me to believe that genders will ever find their way out of human languages--they both provide useful ways to reduce uncertainty while making concise references.

If everybody is a "they" then pronouns become less useful. Maybe we'll go through a stage like that while we rebel against binary-only gendered thinking, but eventually we'll want useful pronouns again and we'll reinvent gender.

Mark my words, at least 60% of your list is BS.

Which 20 items do you think will never sound absurd?

If having more than 2 kids is absurd, there won't be much of a future, since the population will eventually decline to 0.

I'm not sure you're aware of the future we're facing right now.

Continued unchecked growth coupled with increasing consumption is heading us towards an ecological catastrophe that quite seriously threatens the possibility of extinction, and at the very least looks like complete collapse of industrial civilization.

There is nothing worse you can do for the environment than bring another life into the world, especially if you live in the developed world.

Go over to The Long Now and place some bets on those. I think you will be wrong on almost all of these.

I seriously doubt many of your predictions.

2. Valorizing excess

Not sure what exactly you mean by this, but having more than you need and showing off is basic human behavior, and I don't see a reason that will change.

3. Bonfires and fireworks

Bonfires are fun and so are fireworks. They have some downsides, but not more than many other fun things we allow.

4. Anonymity

There will always be places where you can act anonymously or pseudo anonymously. See 4chan and bitcoin for example.

5. Air, noise, and light pollution

There will always be the next kind of not-yet-illegal pollution, and the person to profit from inflicting it upon the rest of us.

6. Having more than 2 kids

Most people will have 1-3 kids, some will have more. Nothing absurd about reproducing.

8. Buying new stuff all the time

See 1

12. Golf

Might be less popular, but why absurd?

13. Body modification and tattoos

Basic human desire to control your body and what you look like. If anything it will be more popular as technology improves.

15. Running unaudited code

With the halting problem on one hand (making automatic auditing impossible) and the high value of software on the other, I don't see any way around this anytime soon. Maybe some AI based solution.

16. Non-tailored medicine

One prediction I fully agree with! Especially many invasive examinations we consider standard today.

17. Tribal politics

Human nature...

20. Burial

Also human nature. Not the American style burial with the huge casket and embalming and whatnot. But some kind of burial will always be the norm.

21. Men standing to pee

???

23. Tipping 24. Advertizing

Human nature...

31. Automotive fatalities

Maybe on the road. But what about space fatalities?

I agree with some (especially meat) but many of these seem like personal moralization.

OMG - what a coincidence is the timing of this thread as I happen to re-watch Demolition Man last night. Fun movie from 1993 that touches on the absurdity of both things we allow and things we don't allow.

> 13. Body modification and tattoos

Why do you say that? People have been doing it for hundreds of years and in the west it has become completely acceptable.

> 22. Treating 18-year-olds as full adults

In the US this isn't absurd even now!

Re body modification, I’m sure you’ll appreciate that people have been doing all manner of terrible things for centuries and many of those remain acceptable, even increasingly so. The pendulum may yet swing the other way. I’m betting on this one becoming viewed the same way we view testing in production.

"centuries" undershoots the persistence of tattooing by several millennia. Direct evidence of humans having tattoos dates back to ~3200 BC with the remains of Ötzi "the Iceman".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Skeletal_details_and...

I would love to live in this world.

Most of those do not apply in lots of Europe:

At least 2, 14, 19, 23 and 25.

21 is highly dubious and therefore 30 is too.

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