The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020 (1997) | Hacker News Reader

The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020 (1997)

wired.com

80 pointssolomonb50 comments

It’s always interesting to compare to see how and why some of the hits and misses happen.

The optimism is exaggerated, but overall there has been a sustained global boom. The thing is the benefits have disproportionately accrued to modernising economies in the developing world. China, and much of East Asia has seen an incredible transformation. Catching up is always much easier than forging ahead.

Genetic computing is obviously not a thing, genes are long terms storage, not processing. On the other hand while we don't compute biologically, all the latest advances in AI are based on neural networks, inspired by biological neurons.

We’re not on Mars, and thinking back to 1998 I don’t see where that optimism came from. There was no indication of the technology or appetite for a project like that. It’s only with the advent of reusable rockets that it’s becoming viable.

Nanotechnology was the big buzz back then, but it isn’t pushed that much in the article. Other futurists were making absurd claims of what would be possible in 5 years. Impressive restraint.

China on the road to democracy, and a Russia modernising? Oh well. Both are on the list of major risks though.

As a Brit it’s conflicting to see the optimism for us leading the way in Europe in the main article, and the fact that we basically opted for 10 on the risks list instead.

> Genetic computing is obviously not a thing, genes are long terms storage, not processing.

That's like saying the tape in Turing's machine is not computing. But if you include the RNA transcription and protein interactions and utilize the complementary base pairs, you can do processing. I recall seeing a paper where solving an NPC problem like Traveling Salesperson could be done with DNA chains being mixed and matched. There was a lot of excitement about this in the 90s and that was before we'd invented microchannels for faster codon analysis.

But, to be clear, I don't think it's a computing area worth further investigation, I think the hype being built up during the development of the Human Genome Project, especially as they were building a lot of new tech and managed to finish sequencing two years ahead of schedule, got a lot of other industries excited. They were still years from completion in '97 but the biological process seemed like massively parallel compute that could scale faster than an effort to build the equivalent data centers..

EDIT: dug up an article in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/news000113-10 "DNA computer helps traveling salesman" in January 2000.

Liu,Q., Wang, L., Frutos, A.G., Condon, A.E., Corn, R.M. & Smith, L.M. DNA computing on surfaces Nature 403, 175 2000.

I thought re-visiting The Long Boom would be interesting given the a16z manifesto.

In addition to simply being better written, I find The Long Boom to be far more consistent of a vision and far less self serving.

Haven't read the manifesto but the article did get quite a few things right. If anything they underestimated a few things and were overly optimistic on the politics side. For example, the US hasn't really moved on health care. China seems to be stagnating.

One topic that was woefully underestimated is that of alternative energy and batteries. The article talks about Toyota and hybrids and basically parrots their version of the future as of 25 years ago. Which of course half happened and then stopped happening entirely. Because another thing happened that the article missed: lithium ion batteries. Those were invented in the early nineties. By 2008, Tesla had its roadster on the roads. And by now batteries can power everything with wheels from heavy mining vehicles, Australian 200 tonne road trains, heavy trucks, vans, cars, muscle cars, super cars, bikes, scooters, etc. You name it and there probably already is a company doing a battery electric version of it.

The bigger topic with energy is that clean energy also means cheap energy. And this is creating the next boom. A lot of stuff in our economy is bottle necked on energy being expensive and dirty. Renewable energy solves both problems: it's clean and cheap. And that's starting to unlock a whole lot of new growth that looks like it might define the rest of this century.

I like how there's a list of 10 things that could ruin his prediction and basically all of them happened

It's amazing that he got so much right including how he's wrong

Agreed. This is one of the most well informed, across a vast spectrum of info, articles I've ever read. And.. in Wired? Unsurprisingly it seems this was a segment/paraphrasing from a book he wrote. Here [1] is his Wiki page, which includes published works and the like.

All that said, I think there's one big miss he made, and did not consider. While so much of what he said came true, I think many people would love to reset society back to 1997. And I don't think it's just because of the misses. It simply seems that economic prosperity is not increasing personal contentedness, which seems a much more meaningful metric than 'happiness'.

If anything contentedness and prosperity seem to run into conflict, beyond a certain point. Obviously an area in Africa with a genuinely high food insecurity rate needs more prosperity. But going from relatively rich, in terms of economy, as we were in 1997, to absurdly rich as we are today, does not seem to have brought the corresponding changes one would have expected. If anything, it seems that more prosperity just drives people to want even more, with all notions of contentedness collapsing.

---

Yeah, in searching on this topic I bumped into this. [2] Apparently $75k (2011) is peak 'happiness', though again what a myopic metric contrasted against contentedness. The odd thing is that it was $75k period. Whether in Bodunk where $75k means you're rich, or NYC where $75k means you're living far from comfortably. It was just $75k. There were no meaningful gains in measures of happiness beyond that magic number.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schwartz_(futurist)

[2] - https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/150671/Happiness-Is-...

>...It was just $75k. There were no meaningful gains in measures of happiness beyond that magic number.

That was contradicted by later research:

>...But in 2021, Killingsworth, a happiness researcher and senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, found that happiness does not plateau after $75,000, and that “experienced well-being” can continue to rise with income well beyond $200,000.

Killingsworth than worked with Kahneman to do a more complete survey:

>...The study reached two big conclusions: First, that “happiness continues to rise with income even in the high range of incomes” for the majority of people, showing that for many of us, on average having more money can make us increasingly happier.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/03/08/money-wea...

It should also vary a lot with age. $75K would make me a very happy late teen, but wouldn’t pay my bills now, and that’s not because of inflation - it’s because now I have a family, a mortgage, and a lot of sizeable expenses.

The first thing I tend to do when finding a study reporting in a way that seems counter-intuitive, to say nothing of one that contradicts previous findings, is to go to their methods. There are quite frequently some pretty glaring differences, and that's certainly the case here [1].

The original study was carried out by directly surveying people, and measuring their subjective perspectives. Their answers were then contrasted against their income. The later study was carried out with a smartphone app, which participants opted into at their discretion, asked at a frequency completely up to the participants, and then asked them about their experiences just prior to the notification. I'm not really sure what that's measuring, but it seems fairly safe to say that it's something quite different.

For instance ask a grossly obese man how he feels at any given point in time and it's probably pretty good. He's likely relaxing, eating, and otherwise engaging in various forms of self indulgent behavior. But gauge him on his overall life satisfaction and it's likely to be abysmal. Vice versa, query a mother who's raising 4 young children and, at any given point in time, and they're often not going to be having the best of times. Yet, nonetheless their overall life satisfaction is likely to be quite high.

Basically look at any poll on various forms of contentedness, Gallup carries out an annual one here. [2] And you'll find the results are nothing like what you'd expect, even more so if one thinks money can provide anything beyond what one can buy. The 'most positive' places are in Latin America - Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala, Columbia, Mexico, etc. The 'least negative' places are in Eastern Europe and Asia: China, Kyrgyzstan, Vietnam, Estonia, Poland, Kazakhstan, etc. These results don't leave much room for money doing anything beyond ensuring ones base needs can be comfortably met.

[1] - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120#sec-3

[2] - https://www.gallup.com/analytics/349280/gallup-global-emotio...

I always considered it of utmost importance for the rich to ensure the belief that money does not aid in happiness beyond the most basic needs, that it is in fact a burden beyond that.

Even if you want to take this sort of world view, I think going the other direction makes more sense. Trying to sell the idea that you can be happy if you just earn a few more dollars, or buy this product, or take this drug, is an amazing incentive for trying to ensure people keep spinning in a endless hamster wheel, and creating artificial demand for basically anything and everything imaginable. If people actually stopped to introspect, or stopped believing that money was like a drug for the ails of their life, our entire economic system would come to a screeching halt, to say nothing of absolutely wrecking the profits of near to every major corporation in existence.

There's actually even historical precedent for this. One of the hypothesized factors for the fall of Rome was the rise of Christianity. You went from a nation massively dedicated to product in pursuit of glorification of the Gods, alongside an emperor holding a pseudo-deistic role, to one where you have 'the meek shall inherit the Earth', 'it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God', and so on. It was probably just a minor factor but it almost certainly played at least some real role.

Having a lot of money is indeed something that isolates against a lot of problems as you can just get people to solve them/don't need to care for unexpected costs. If you are not afflicted by some bad diseases or certain personal problems, a lot of money brings a lot of freedom to pursue whatever you fancy.

That said, a few more dollars are indeed irrelevant to happiness beyond a certain level, but orders of magnitude might not be.

Hahah, you know - I think you might have just explained that magic $75k number. In thinking about your post some of the most obvious examples of this would be things like your car breaking down, or needing to take a week off work, and other such things. $75k (a decade ago) is that point where you can cover these costs, whether in NYC or Bodunk, with a pretty minimal amount of discomfort. Get down into that $50k range and you're doing pretty okay (especially in Bodunk), but that's still at an income point where something like a car failure is going to be really pretty stressful.

"This is only a scenario of the future, by no means an outright prediction of what is to come. We can be reasonably confident of the continuation of certain trends. Much of the long boom's technology is already in motion and almost inevitably will appear within that span. Asia is ascendant whether we like it or not. Barring some bizarre catastrophe, that large portion of the world will continue to boom. But there are many unknowns, all kinds of critical uncertainties. Will Europe summon the political will to make the transition to the new economy? Will Russia avoid a nationalist retrenchment and establish a healthy market economy - let alone democracy? Will China fully embrace capitalism and avoid causing a new cold - or hot - war? Will a rise in terrorism cause the world to pull back in constant fear? It's not technology or economics that pose the biggest challenges to the long boom. It's political factors, the ones dependent on strong leadership."

If only the pandemic hadn't happened in early 2020, we'd have probably gotten those four astronauts to mars by the end of that year...

> We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy...

1997.

https://archive.ph/hWKgL

Gave up after several attempts to pass the captcha

Somewhat ironic that a scraper is worried about scrapers.

What we have with the old Wired / Kevin Kelly article (which was ridiculous at the time and I and others lambasted it at publication BTW), and also with the recent Andreesen thing is textbook ideology: I insist that what makes my livelihood possible and makes me prosperous and powerful is what is true and universal and natural for everyone.

It's not surprising or anything that people would think this in these patterns, but it betrays a lack of critical conscience.

It's a class of people mostly centered around California, who have strong interests economically and politically and who benefit directly by promulgating that vision to the whole world. Whether the rest of the world benefits is always a matter of dispute -- some will, some won't. Both this and Andreesen's recent screed lack any subtlety on this matter.

I commented elsewhere about how that era was by no means some neo-liberal utopia. There was war all over the world and there's clearly in retrospect nothing prophetically smart about declaring a "long boom" right on the cusp of the insane .com crash and the 2008 blow-up right after (arguably part of a contiguous economic crisis.)

It's no different than climate change denial by people working in the energy sector.

I agree 100%. Its the California Ideology through and through. I just wish more high profile leaders today had a bit of historical perspective.

Hah I was going to name-drop The California Ideology article, but figured that has gotten enough discussion here over the year, and would only muddy the waters.

Timely since I just found out that the publisher Usborne has reprinted their Book of the Future, which first came out in 1979.

https://usborne.com/gb/book-of-the-future-9781803709543

I've bought 7 copies to give to friends that I have been going on about this book for most of my life.

The idea that Russia or China would magically become democratic utopias without violent social upheaval is extraordinarily naive. In addition to the US just deciding to "solve seemingly intractable social problems, like drug addiction" - human-made problems caused by the same human-made systems that the article is praising.

The only thing I really feel they got close was all 10 of the "Scenario Spoilers". If they wrote an article just focusing on those instead I think all of our minds would have been truly blown. But I suppose this article was written at a particularly optimistic point in time.

In retrospect 1997-2000 was probably the most optimistic time in the entire history of mankind so far.

I’m 43 and in my heart I don’t honestly believe we will see another such era of relative peace and global alignment during my lifetime. It’s somewhat depressing. (Not for myself, but more about the prospects for my children who statistically have a 50% chance of being alive in the year 2120. The world of climate change we’re leaving doesn’t look like a happy one.)

For some people. I grew up in the country and sort of straddled two worlds.

The world of rural family farms was in the full out death spiral. The family farm worked for in rural NY had been in continuous operation since the 1600s, turned into a hobby farm circa 2001. All of the supporting ecosystem died as well. Walmart killed retail. The dying farms killed the equipment and tractor dealers, etc.

Then I went to college and it’s the land of the long boom.

It’s funny I wrote a paper in high school sort of predicting unrest etc in the 2020 timeframe. NAFTA, consolidation of industries and offshoring.

I had forgotten about it until recently, but found it and while some of the details were long, our current path wasn’t totally a surprise to a reasonably intelligent and observant 16 year old in the 90s!

Personally, I don’t share that dark vision. I think that while you’ll see strategic realignments that may have profound impact, life goes on.

Are you forgetting about the Kosovo war? How about the second Chechyan war? What about the Second Intifada? I could come up with a dozen other examples. It was not an era of peace.

That peace only looked like that for Americans? In their little corner of the world? Because their dominance at the time was basically unchallenged for a short period of time.

As for prosperity, yes, it was so for our industry. But it was a bubble. A really bad one. And for most other people it was actually an era of wage/income stagnation. And then a lot of people lost a lot of money in the .com crash.

It’s all relative. There was conflict. But the Cold War was over and 9/11 hadn’t happened yet.

It was a very optimistic time.

Again, for North Americans on the whole. Maybe western Europeans if they didn't look too far over their shoulders.

I remember it as a very mixed time. Culturally optimistic here in North America, certainly. But I could certainly see the stormclouds.

When you say relative, you need to postfix that with "... to me."

> When you say relative, you need to postfix that with "... to me."

That’s what relative means, right? Adding “to me” doesn’t add much value to the meaning.

I’m not sure your point anyway. As even Western Europe and the entire world no longer feared nuclear Armageddon from the Cold War. There were other problems, of course, but that period for most of the world was more peaceful than the immediately preceding or following period. If you were in North America or Asia or Africa or anywhere.

Personally I'm highly optimistic about the post-war period of ~2035. Wars usually bring about extremely rapid development and adoption of new technologies. I suspect that my kids, if they survive, will enter a world I can only dream about. Plus, killing off several billion people will alleviate resource pressures on the planet, and likely reverse global warming through nuclear winter. And world wars usually bring about the downfall of governments and major institutions, which have been major blockers to the adoption of technology on a societal level and development of a social structure that fits the world of today rather than the world of 1945.

It's going to be a pretty grim 10-15 years in the near future. I think a 50% chance of them being alive in 2120 is pretty darn optimistic; I'm figuring they have a 20-30% chance of surviving to adulthood. But if they make it, life after a population bottleneck is usually pretty good for the survivors.

> life after a population bottleneck is usually pretty good for the survivors

One example of a population bottleneck I can think of is the plague (black death) in 14C Europe [0]. This contributed to the collapse of serfdom and wage rises, along with significant social change, which was arguably a good thing. But a big difference compared with today is that 'infrastructure' wasn't itself destroyed and existing technologies and raw materials remained available. Food was grown locally, and most industry, such as it was, could continue as before (except where labour wasn't available). A modern war on the scale you are suggesting, killing off several billion people (!!!), would entirely disrupt our globalised society. Reconstruction to pre-war levels of technology and health would be extremely hard if not impossible.

> likely reverse global warming through nuclear winter

Hardly. Nuclear winter wouldn't magically remove carbon from the biosphere, and the disruption of ecosystems and agriculture would be massive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...

Right. Other examples of a population bottleneck include Communist China's Great Famine + Cultural Revolution (killed ~5% overall, up to 18% in some provinces), and WW2 (~3.5% overall, 15-18% in some regions like Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union). In WW2 the infrastructure was destroyed, and that led to the post-WW2 boom (even in losing countries!) as it was rebuilt with modern technology.

WW3 will result in the collapse of globalization, but it's very unlikely that it'll affect all regions equally, just like how the U.S. ended up as the big winner because it was all fought on foreign soil. Whichever regions manage to stay out of WW3 will likely enjoy the economic fruits of increased technology + being the engine of rebuilding for the remnants of the rest of the world.

> In WW2 the infrastructure was destroyed

But it was rebuilt partly using massive Marshall plan investment which wouldn't exist in a world where several billion people have just died.

Why wouldn't a similar Marshall plan exist in a post-WW3 world? Wars don't affect all areas equally, and don't kill everybody. Even if you assume that 50% of humanity dies (way worse than WW2, and worse than every known war in history), that still leaves a population of 4 billion, which is what it was in 1975, 30 years after the Marshall plan.

> Why wouldn't a similar Marshall plan exist in a post-WW3 world? Wars don't affect all areas equally, and don't kill everybody.

Agree, but the Marshall plan only worked because it's provider (the US) was essentially unaffected by the war and had money to burn. I can't see that a war that killed billions wouldn't damage the superpowers, who would be the primary providers of post-war aid.

The U.S. wasn't a (geopolitical) superpower before WW2, although it was definitely a strong rising economic power. Britain was considered the world's superpower, with other major Great Powers being the U.S, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan. The U.S. became a geopolitical superpower by virtue of being the most undamaged of the Great Powers after the war.

Similarly, it's likely that whichever industrialized high-tech region that's unaffected by WW3 would take on the role of the post-war superpower. I can't tell what that be - it could be a country like Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Kenya, or a region of an existing superpower like California, Ireland, or the Pearl River Delta - but it's likely that there will be some portion of the globe that is not destroyed and yet still retains enough technical knowledge and capital base to rebuild the rest of the world.

Yours is a grim vision and I hope it doesn’t come to that.

I can’t disagree more on this point:

”governments and major institutions, which have been major blockers to the adoption of technology on a societal level”

After all we’re having this conversation on a global network originally created by government grants, not on AOL or some other commercial alternative.

Re: 50% of being alive in 2120, it does seem optimistic. It’s actually an official projection by the National Statistics Institute of Finland taking into account birth year and gender.

This network may have been created on a government grant but one need only review the broadband tax placed upon us 30 years ago versus broadband paid for by the tax to understand what is happening.

So what are you doing to fix the problem aside from lament?

Making everybody else aware of the problem, of course

you mean, making everybody else aware of how smart the poster is

> The idea that Russia or China would magically become democratic utopias without violent social upheaval is extraordinarily naive.

It happened to South Korea and Taiwan. And almost happened to Russia. I really don't think it's naive, even if it's wrong.

Everything seems obvious in hindsight.

The end of WWII led to Germany, Japan and Italy becoming (or returning to) democracies. As well as your later examples of South Korea and Taiwan, it's understandable that it seemed like the end of the cold war could also lead to some similar results. Maybe by 97 that optimism had faded, but for a while Russia looked like it was heading towards democracy.

On the "Scenario Spoilers", it looks like we got (at least in part) 1, 3 (both options), 4, 6 and 9. Pretty impressive.

The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020. (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37605795 - Sept 2023 (1 comment)

The Long Boom (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26734647 - April 2021 (37 comments)

The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 – 2020 (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705439 - Dec 2015 (1 comment)

The Long Boom: A History of the Future (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505143 - April 2013 (4 comments)

Peak end of history era.

Yeah, and a couple years later the US was bombing Afghanistan, invading Iraq, international borders became far more intensely hostile, surveillance state intensified, and the entire economy blew up in 2008, and only held on by its nails with zero interest rates and QE.

Long "boom" indeed.

FWIW my eyes rolled completely back into my head when this essay first came out.

Heh. I also am old enough to remember when this first came out (back when you could read Wired online without captcha or paywall). I was also cynical, though not nearly as cynical as you...

Awesome read. Anything like this updated for the present, or do I have to ask chatGPT?

“Tasks like handwriting recognition become a breeze… By 2015, reliable simultaneous language translation has been cracked—with immediate consequences for the multilingual world.”

Hey, that just happened this year. Looking forward to the benefits!

Several things struck me: first no real presaging of social media, but instead a view of personalised and interactive "media". Maybe this is what we are now transitioning to with the apparent collapse of twitter and facebook? I think that the change in "community" that the last 40 years has brought is one of the most shocking things. So many of the mechanisms of connection that I vaguely remember from my childhood and youth seem to have been transformed or destroyed. Local bars are either not there, or just not places that you can go and hang out. There are no clubs, no associations. We don't go to church or join community groups.

The article sees some of the geographic drivers that have brought change but misses at least one obvious and huge one - the one child policy in China. This is now (I think) probably the most plangent fact of the 21st Century.

The article sees a path forward into the future, but in fact from then to now has been a series of discontinuities. Maybe history is more like the sea coming in and going out with waves crashing and receeding. I wonder which way it's really going.

Of note I think that the scenario spoilers in the article have largely materialised. Perhaps there's a lesson for futurists there - the things that you see as contingencies are more likely to be real than the things that you write in the main narrative because the main narrative is what you are hoping to happen; that's where your bias is.

>>>>

10 Scenario Spoilers

The long boom is a scenario, one possible future. It’s built upon the convergence of many big forces and even more little pieces falling into place—all of them with a positive twist. The future of course, could turn out to be very different—particularly if a few of those big pieces go haywire. Here are 10 things that could cut short the long boom.

1. Tensions between China and the US escalate into a new Cold War—bordering on a hot one.

<<<

well, we're getting there on this

>>> 2. New technologies turn out to be a bust. They simply don’t bring the expected productivity increases or the big economic boosts. <<<

I think that this is both completely true and completely false. We haven't seen measurable gains, but I think everyone is very suspicious that this is because we are not measuring properly. We are missing something about this.

>>>

3. Russia devolves into a kleptocracy run by a mafia or retreats into quasicommunist nationalism that threatens Europe. <<<

yup

>>> 4. Europe’s integration process grinds to a halt. Eastern and western Europe can’t finesse a reunification, and even the European Union process breaks down. <<<

It nearly broke, but it didn't and I think that there is growing reason to think that Europe can strengthen itself again. The wild card is the German economy. For the last 20 years Germany has dominated the union and distorted everything around itself with a booming labour market and capital flow from the periphery to the core. Now cheap energy is gone it could be that these trends reverse. This will strengthen (at least relatively) the periphery of the eurozone. I wonder if German politics will be able to adapt to this and whether the German economy can transition to a new stable state successfully and relatively painlessly? I don't see the concerted investments and reorientation that I think that Germany needs to do, and if it doesn't come soon it may be too late and not possible.

>>>

5. Major ecological crisis causes a global climate change that, among other things, disrupts the food supply—causing big price increases everywhere and sporadic famines. <<<

scary close

>>>

6. Major rise in crime and terrorism forces the world to pull back in fear. People who constantly feel they could be blown up or ripped off are not in the mood to reach out and open up. <<<

yup 9/11 and beyond.

>>>

7. The cumulative escalation in pollution causes a dramatic increase in cancer, which overwhelms the ill-prepared health system. <<<

It's in the stats - cancer is on the rise in the young. Is it due to pollution? Possibly. Is it overwhelming the health system - maybe. Old people are probably a bigger issue.

>>>

8. Energy prices go through the roof. Convulsions in the Middle East disrupt the oil supply, and the alternative energy sources fail to materialize.

<<<

we rode this wave for a long time. The energy system is getting more diverse, we have permian oil and gas in quantities that were not forseen in 1997. We have wind and solar at a higher level than anticipated, but in reality we are still vulnerable to this one.

>>>

9. An uncontrollable plague—a modern-day influenza epidemic or its equivalent—takes off like wildfire, killing upward of 200 million people. <<<

"only" 7 million or so died of Covid. I had imagined that the number was much higher than that, but I think global societies response was pretty good. Of course we got lucky in a way, we were able to manage it - another virus might have done much more damage. Maybe we will see the advances in vaccines that we took advantage of during Covid as a way that we stop this sort of disaster in the future. I hope I don't live to see that proposition tested though.

>>>

10. A social and cultural backlash stops progress dead in its tracks. Human beings need to choose to move forward. They just may not … <<<

Well, I read facebook and Twitter and I wonder about this.

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